The Agile Librarian's Guide to Thriving in Any Organization

Great program by an LSU prof who has a lot of field experience and has written a book by that title.

She has condensed her book (and what had been a day long seminar) into just less than 2 hours.

Here are the topics she covers (and titles of the chapters):

1. Know your value to your organization
2. Delight your clients
3. Expand your political influence
4. Please your boss
5. Impress decision makers
6. Choose an instantly credible professional image
7. Ensure positive communication
8. Marketing, advertising[,] and public relations
9. Gathering and using evidence to support decisions
10. Behaving ethically
11. Sustaining your green and growing career

She covered each topic and had some good examples for each one (and sometimes some very interesting war stories...)

One of her strong points was about building relationships. When she sees cuts, she asks, "what was their relationship with 'their' librarian. Is that what caused the attitude?"

Her final slide was a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. (bold added for emphasis):

Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our charted course. We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinte hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment.

Great program.

LLA Opening General Session

The program began with remarks by Melanie Sims (LLA President). She thanked the sponsors and those who produced the conference. She introduced Jim Lorenz, Chief Administrative Officer for East Baton Rouge Parish and representative of Mayor-President Kip Holden. He made the usual comments about libraries and having a special place in his heart growing up in Alexandria. He ended by talking about our attendance at the conference with a joke, “keep spending your money here, we need the sales tax revenue.” He then read the proclamation declaring March 8-12 Louisiana Library Association Week.

Melanie the introduced board and mentioned the display in the lobby in memory of Sallie Farrell. ALA Chapter Councilor Stephanie Braunstein read the ALA Memorial Resolution.

Melanie then introduced Camila Alire (ALA President). [Disclosure, I have known Camila for about 15 years. We began on ALA Council as Chapter Councilors at the same time.]

Camila started by noting that she has eaten all over the world, but she had her best meal at Juban’s in Baton Rouge. She also noted that the ALA Annual Conference will be in New Orleans in 2011. As ALA President she has two initiatives, the one she talked about today is the main one. There was a great all day workshop yesterday with good attendance and covering the advocacy topic in detail. Below are some notes based on her talk and slides.

Advocacy from the front lines.

What is advocacy – active support of a cause or course of action (or supporting a group or person).

Traditional types of advocacy: legislative where library administrators, trustees, friends, and general public (library users primarily). Spokane Moms for school libraries in Washington state. Frontline advocacy includes librarians and library support staff (not administrators).
Two simple concepts: be able to articulate the value of our libraries [story about talking with NMLA members who had two reactions: “deer in headlights” not my job; my director will not allow that]; value as library employees. i.e. what can the library do for you.

Need staff to serve as connectors and talk with everyday users. Talk about what the library has. These new users will become the grassroots folks who will speak to support the needs of the library.

Camila used as an example, the University of New Mexico Library's quest to increase their base budget for library materials. They were successful, ultimately, by enlisting staff to advocate with their user groups.

Should everyone be involved in frontline advocacy? Yes, as long as the staff are working at their own comfort level. Level I: Based on title/responsibilities; Level II: other librarians and library staff.
Build a team: determine the extent of frontline staff involvement; involve librarians and library staff in brainstorming/messaging.
Empowering staff: match message with venues and delivery methods; provide scripts and/or “cheat sheets” (i.e. talking points or visuals); work with staff for input on process and delivery; staff members deliver the message; meet to assess outcomes.

Library Advocacy? It’s everybody’s job!

At the end, she said “Anyone who thinks they are too small to be effective….has never been in bed with a mosquito!”

ALA web site with tool kits

Finally she answered two questions. The first was about the timing and remaining work on the ALA strategic plan. The second was about what she what to do if school principal will not release funds for books and magazines what to do… The latter was an interesting situational discussion. The first will be covered in a separate post.

The opening general session ended with two book cart drill teams. The first was the Ouachita Girls whose theme involved the Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints. The second performance by East Baton Rouge Dewey Deci-Belles with a theme which promotes the Big Read book (this year, The Great Gatsby).

YouTube videos have been posted:

1. Ouachita
2. East Baton Rouge
   

Ideas from the business world that libraries need to think about

A while back, I started getting emails from Booz-Hamilton and their web publication Strategy + Business. I suppose I have always kept my finger a little pulse on this part of the world because of my graduate degree in business, and my start as a business specialist in public libraries.

There were two posts/articles recently that had me thinking about what they mean for the library world. That is why they are rating a whole separate post.

The first is about a topic near and dear to my heart, the health industry. Readers know that I have had my issues with health insurance carriers. And certainly there is the current national debate on health care. (Well, nominally it is about "health care" when in reality it is about how we will pay for health care.)

This article has much broader implications. First its title: When Disruptive Integration Comes to Health Care. In a way it is talking about how a "mature" industry changes and deals with changes. Besides the obvious (to me) links about how health care funding affects libraries (in our budgets if nowhere else), there is a much broader picture presented.

They talk about disruptive innovators. Let me paste the important paragraph which describes this concept and what is happening in health care.

Disruptive innovators are low-margin, experimental upstart entrepreneurs in an established market, who take advantage of untapped and emergent customer groups and other unfilled opportunities to build new types of business and ultimately reshape the industry. Established incumbents, tied to their existing customers and practices, have a great built-in incentive to overlook the potential impact of these new competitors. Therefore, they ignore them until the upstarts grow large and powerful enough to displace them. It has happened in a variety of industries, including computer components, steel, and media.

So what does this mean for libraries? Well is SkyRiver a disruptive innovator? I have seen a number of articles about how they are trying to provide a lower cost alternative to cataloging using OCLC.

Are there places out there which are offering alternative library services? What about the pay-to-get-an-answer-on-your-cell-phone service so poorly named KGB? (I talk about my opinion here.

As librarians we need to pay attention and to think outside the box.

The second article continues that line of thinking. It is Six Industries in Search of Survival. The industry which most sounded like a library to me was retail banking. I checked out the longer article (pdf) which was noted in the longer piece. Here are a couple of important quotes:

... the focus of banks will shift from acquiring new customers to building deeper relationships with existing ones. Banks must surgically identify and capture growth opportunities within their customer base. To do that, banks must significantly revamp their capabilities and evolve their organizations to: target the most attractive customer segments; harmonize the roles of segments, products, and channels; better align corporate strategy and risk; and pursue sustainable cost reduction, such as rationalizing the branch network.

By 2014, Gen Y will comprise the largest segment of the U.S. workforce and by 2025 will account for 60 percent to 70 percent of the employed population. Given its size, connecting with this generation is a must for banks. To do so, they will need to better integrate their channels and interact with customers through each customer’s channel of choice. More than any previous generation, Gen Y is shaped by the Internet and ubiquitous connectivity.

No matter which customer segment a bank targets, it must reorganize around that customer. ... Most banks remain siloed, with limited cross-product or cross-channel integration.

And then the big conclusion:

Booz & Company research shows that mass market customers prefer to conduct their banking at branches, accounting for 70 percent of traffic and resource consumption, yet they are half as profitable as mass affluent customers. The rise of Gen Y will only put further pressure on the traditional bank branch network, which banks may soon be unable to afford. Indeed, we expect that a major rationalization of the branch network will emphasize electronic channels and alternate formats. In the future, for example, branches may cater to specific customer segments, becoming “wealth” branches or “small business” branches, with fewer generic branches open to all.

Now, I don't see libraries ever failing to serve "all," I could conceive of a network of smaller branches spread across a community.

Some interesting thoughts.

Links, again (late posting)

There is an interesting post by Barbara Fister (whose writing I have come to admire) which challenges the current academic model. It is in Library Journal, and certainly deserves a great deal of thought.

The recent storms in the East Coast have certainly challenged people's travel. There is an interesting article on how some folks managed to stay in touch. Parts of it remind me of the stories I hear about post-Katrina, and more recently, post-Gustav, and how library workers stayed in touch with each other.

In the ebook saga (I decided to go away from any pugilistic or other violent metaphor), it seems that the cost of ebooks, and how much the author gets, may soon shift. The Financial Times (a reliable source) has an article on how one publisher is wielding its influence and control of the rights (DRM) to increase the publisher and author share.

Who owns Koha?

Jessamyn points to what users want and a synopsis of the longer article.

Links - Feb/March and LLA warning

Well, it is that time of year again, LLA (Louisiana Library Association) Annual Conference. Look for blog posts on Thursday and Friday.

You have to love this title: Data, data everywhere as a special report from the Economist.

I forget where I picked this up (probably Dorothea Salvo) about Open Access. I am only part way through reading it, but the opening analogy/story sure caught my attention.

Iris does a great job at Pegasus Librarian, and since this is "statistics time of year" for me (parish libraries are submitting their annual statistics, due, by law, by April 1), the title How Big is My Library caught my eye.

WebJunction is hosting a wiki and discussion on the future of libraries. Now I just need to find the time to read it!

Now, I don't do cataloging, and it has been a long time since I did any. I also have not followed the development of FRBR and RDA, except in a very broad way. Jennifer Bowen (of the University of Rochester [NY]) has, and has written a pretty clear article on metadata, libraries and the cataloging principles for ALA TechSource.

Eric Hellman had the opportunity to attend the Google settlement hearing and wrote a nice summary (which has links to other summaries).

I recently updated my"ALA 101" posts to reflect name changes in divisions. April Bunn, Media Specialist, has written in Library Garden about the fact that AASL is going back to calling themselves librarians! [My favorite job title was when I was "City Librarian!"]

Peter Bromberg has an interesting take on privacy (also in Library Garden).

Jenny Levine (the tech maven on staff at ALA) has a great post on Library 2.0 including some of the recent discussions. (Like Andy Woodworth's "Deconstructing Library 2.0.")

Starr Hoffman, in geeky artist librarian, has a long (for her) post on the academic library mission. Maybe it is the work I have been doing on MPOW's planning that is keeping me so in tune with this topic, but there are some good thoughts here.

Two web items from AARP (yes, I am that old!). Both relate to changes in the workforce:

1. Communication styles vary between generations; and
2. The demographics of the workforce are changing.
   

One of the themes I used to hear from NextGen librarians was about their insecurity in feeling like they don't really know what they are doing. Most of us will admit that there have been times when each of us has felt that way (no matter which "Gen" you fall into!). Steve Schwartz has written an interesting post on this theme.

This probably falls into the category of folks not completely thinking through all of the implications of a name: iMaxi: Finally, the iPad Gets the Protection it Deserves

One of my college buddies has co-written a very long, thoughtful post about the health care conversation. I am not sure I agree with it all, but it is important to pay attention to the thoughtful items!

This piece talks about how to find things inside slide presentations posted on the 'net. It would seem to be a useful resource.

Dorothea Salvo did something that I should probably do, but won't until after the weekend. She expicitly talks about the shift in focus of her blog, and even edited the tag line. [Stay tuned, folks!]