librarianship =

Here are my notes from day 2 of the conference. I had a great time. Because the topic doesn’t quite fit with my usual interests, I probably wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t had a professional connection. But I’m glad I did. It was helpful to hear speakers talk about librarianship in terms of entrepreneurship. I would probably just call it innovation and innovative thinking, but the idea is to celebrate the rethinking of our work and the way we do our everyday practices.

Katina Strauch: from an unentrepreneur, or the creator of the Charleston Conference

• They don’t do any marketing for conference; entirely word of a mouth
• Stages of entrepreneurship:
  • Conviction: young and stupid
  • Idea: create your own conference
  • Concept:
    • the conference captured mood of serials and acquisitions crowd
    • exhibits are held before conference and not during
    • focus on ideas and not products
  • Venture: both conference and journal are limited liability corporations
  • Business:
    • the functioning of the business
    • she talked about the things to avoid and memories of the conference
  • Building a sustainable business:
    • Katina wants the conference to continue on as long as possible.
    • She recommended book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
    • They don’t want the conference to get too big, but how to do you control the size?

Running an Information-Services Business Within a Large Global Corporation with Mark Pandick, IBM Market Insights

• Manages an research services unit within a company (IBM)
• Challenge for company is having to move into new markets — how get reliable information for workers in developing countries
• His knowledge services focus includes self-help tools and a knowledge center
• No physical library – everything they do is virtual
• Knowledge center has over 20,000 requests a year
• Relationship managers – helping clients with projects (either topical areas or parts of the business);
• Each year they start from premise they have no budget – they have to be self funding unit

Open Mic: Using Students to Crowdsource Marketing and Outreach During a Library Renovation with Dean Sullivan and Anne C. Barnhart

• University of West Georgia
• Try to get student buy-in with major library renovations
• Did a “count the computers” contest: Had students count number of current computers and then compare with how many more would be provided by renovation. The put their number in a basket for a drawing.
• They had fun signs about the renovation
• Poetry wall
  • A temporary construction wall
  • For national poetry month told students they could write poetry on the wall
  • A lot of the poetry were Bible verses and then became graffiti

• On another wall they told student orgs they could decorate parts of the wall. Went well except did have some controversial signs
• How to survive the library renovation project:
  • Asked students to design posters and videos for a contest;
  • Grand prize was two $25 gift certificates to restaurants
  • Didn’t get many entries and not quality they were expecting

• Lessons learned
  • Students had already given up on the library?
  • Sidewalk chalking might be another approach
  • Someone suggested the book, My Freshman Year, an anthropological study of freshman life

Tim Spalding, LibraryThing: I was eating lunch during his great talk, so no notes.

• Basically he talked about what start-up is and his journey through the process of creating a start-up company.
• He was pretty harsh about opacs and library vendors and our subservient relationships with them. He is right.

Lightning Rounds!

I gave a lightning round on our in-house librarian project. It went well (I think) and I had fun giving the talk. I was surprised by the number of people who a) seemed cynical about training an undergraduate student to be a first responder to library questions, and b) thought that a project like this would cause the downfall of the library. Or maybe it was just me.

I have to admit that stopped taking notes after my lightning talk, but here is what I did jot down.

Tim Rogers:

• Talked about NC SeAL, the NC shared eaudio library project

Ingrid Ruffin:

• Talked about not wanting to be a librarian in a library
• What are the transferable skills?
• Creating information products for nonprofit organizations to help them isolate information about the groups they want to support

Angela Swiezy and Mary Gaylord from Eli Lilly:

• The company needed to become more outcomes-based
• Their research group did a workshop called “find the entrepreneur in you”
• Created an interactive website with a bibliography
  • Whole new mind by Daniel Pink
• Created an idea board on which employees could post ideas from workshops
• Entrepreneurs aren’t just risk takers; they are also collaborative and creative workers

Everyone did a great job! It is a good format for delivering ideas and keeping the interest levels high. The lightning rounds were a good challenge for me. I’m accustomed to presenting, but usually I don’t plan out quite as much. The lightning talk goes quickly and it is best to be prepared if you want to get your information out there (and make it entertaining). It is the first time in a while that I’ve written out my presentation and practiced the delivery.

The Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians is a joint effort of Wake Forest University and my own UNCG. I didn’t get a chance to attend many sessions last time it was held (in 2009), but I’m really glad I attended today. The sessions were solid and I love getting to talk with new and old friends.

Below are some rough notes.

Mary Ellen Bates: If you haven’t heard of her (I hadn’t), Bates is a self-employed information services professional (I had never thought about this as a career!). While her session was focused on becoming an entrepreneur (mostly self-employed), most of her points were relevant to anyone who wants to create innovative practice in the library.

• Three skill sets of info-entrepreneurs: business, professional, and entrepreneurship skills
• Entrepreneurship is more of a mindset and not as easy to learn, but characteristics are:
  • tolerance for risk and ambiguity
  • 100% client focused; have to constantly learn what clients want now; figuring how services can be geared for your client’s needs (and not what you want to offer)
  • move out of employee mindset – or you are doing this because someone else told you to or a force is compelling you to
  • strategic perspective
  • self-confidence and self-discipline
  • self-starting
• business skills
  • need to view self as business
    • conference attendance is part of the budget of  your prof development – think about spending money as part of the business
  • be able to close a sale
  • comfort with talking about money
  • think five years out – have a name for your company that is timeless, do not look like a start up
• professional expertise
  • hone research skills
  • nurture your network of colleagues
  • invest in professional development
  • identify opportunities for adding value to your work (and don’t just do what is required)
• learn to love uncertainty – embrace ambiguity; being 100% client focused means being open to anything
• self-management – time management; never go over budget; “perfection is the enemy of good (enough)”
• cash flow insights – watch your money and don’t use credit; price yourself accordingly
• keep marketing self; don’t only work for one client
• form an advisory board – mentors who can and will give feedback
• marketing plan
  • have tangible goals (eg, I will be invited to so many presentations)
  • do simultaneous efforts (twitter and facebook and linkedin)
  • evaluate marketing plan monthly
  • fully test approaches (don’t just try) – In other words if you want to do something new, go 100% with and fully test the effort to see if it is worth your time. Even if the test is a failure, you at least will have data to know why it was a failure.
• marketing for introverts: blogging, social media, speak in front of your clients (you gain authority in public speaking), seeing yourself as a brand
• imposter syndrome
  • take criticism gently
  • look at self as third party
  • learn self appreciation
  • let go of knowing it all
  • don’t talk yourself into thinking everyone is thinking negatively of you
  • fake it until you make it

More information and her slides are available at http://batesinfo.com/extras/

The Library as Partner: Sustaining Relevance in a Collaborative, Student-Focused Technology Center with Heather Lambert, and Christy Groves: Great session. Very interesting and entertaining. I learned a lot not just about the Digital Media Studio, but also some project management ideas. Plus check out the No log (below). Pretty awesome idea!

• From Middle Tennessee State University
• Created a Digital Media Studio
• Space includes a collaborative area with a table and white boards; roving technology assistance and research assistance; technology and research coach appointments
• They installed open source software on half of the computers
• Students get to vote on new open source additions
• In the promotions they don’t talk about specific software but break it down by tasks (movie making, etc)
• Planning process
  • Got someone from every department to be on committee
  • Communicated to entire library throughout planning process – committees would send out regular updates
  • They used a Gantt chart for timing
• Training toolkit
  • Created a time when any staff member in library could come and practice making four projects (short 30 min sessions);
  • They put tutorials online and got a site subscription to lynda.com
• Marketing
  • Had an amazing race with QR codes for the students
  • Also had a fall kickoff with tour of the digital media studio built in (included bowling!)
• Studio Scribbles: their blog: students write posts with tips on using tools
• They survey students and librarians regularly. When get feedback, they do a focus group and then change their policies or procedures within four weeks!
• No log: whenever students have to say no to a patron, they log it in a google spreadsheet. The spreadsheet also includes the follow-up activity to deal with that No!

Business Librarians and Entrepreneurship: Innovative Trends and Characteristics with Elisabeth Leonard and Betsy Clementson: Always fun to see a former professor! Elisabeth Leonard taught my information literacy and library instruction class in grad school. She really set the foundation for my current interest in teaching.

• They surveyed business librarians in the schools with the top ten entrepreneurship programs.
• Nine schools participated and 20 librarians answered their survey.
• They surveyed them to see how they fall within the self-identified categories of innovation adoption: innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, laggards. I won’t go into the specifics of the categories as I will link to their presentation once it is up. It does a great job.
• Most of the respondents characterized themselves as innovators or early adopters, which is different from the way general librarians characterized themselves in a previous study (in that one most were the late majority).
• It is a small sample but an interesting first study. Would be great to have it expanded to more business librarians or compare across subject areas.
• Organizations need to have people spanning the  categories especially with more people in the first three groups. This encourages technology adoption.
• Managers can influence or dampen risk-taking and innovation; they need to provide time and resources to take risks.
• Managers need to think about the message they are sending when they talk about new changes in organizations. They also need to think about the message they are receiving from employees (are you really hear what they are saying?)

Great first day! Tomorrow is a bit jam-packed with Katina Strauch speaking at 8:15 am. Plus Tim Spalding is the lunch speaker. And I give my first lightning talk. Must go practice!