Marketing/Demonstrating Value – Libraries are competing with myriad other places and services for the attention of users. How do we promote using the library to our patrons? Libraries offer a lot of great services and resources for free, but how do we let users know about them in a way that doesn’t get drowned out? It is necessary for us to differentiate ourselves from others and show our unique value in order to compete in this information rich world. In addition to promoting ourselves we also need to demonstrate what value we bring to our communities and institutions. The ACRL Value of Academic Libraries Report could be a great text for this class as well as Made to Stick and probably something by Seth Godin.

Graphic Design for Libraries – I saw this idea for a class from a great post about User Experience in LIS education by Aaron Schmidt and Michael Stephens, and I think it is spot on. I find myself regularly needing to create signage for the library or promotional materials either for print or the web, and I pretty much have to stumble through it. It would be useful in a lot of situations to be be able to make some sign or image that is beautiful or inspiring instead of a Word document with some clip art.

photo by Gwen River City Images on Flickr

Entrepreneurship/Innovation – This is a key issue for libraries to be talking about, and specific reading and coursework on this topic would have been immensely helpful to me. We are constantly talking about changing and adapting in libraries awhile at the same time complaining about how slowly it happens. Courses in LIS education about this topic would be useful in developing grads with an entrepreneurial spirit and who would be key in revitalizing and revolutionizing libraries. Hopefully this class would teach mindsets like the willingness to take risk and fail as well as being tolerant of uncertainty. In addition, it would also teach processes for innovation and turning new ideas into reality. Steven Bell talks and writes about these processes in terms of design thinking. I also saw a great paper presentation about innovation processes at ACRL in March by David Dahl. Being able to thoughtfully and successfully create change is one of the most necessary skills for librarians today.

These are the classes I wished I could have taken (and hope that some places offer or start offering). What classes do you wish that you would have seen in library school? What classes would have been really beneficial for the work you are doing now?

“Eighty percent of success is just showing up”   – Woody Allen

I’ve found the above quote to have a lot of truth in my career so far, but I’m not talking about just showing up at work. It’s easy to simply spend all your time in your office. You have a lot of work to do. It’s comfortable there. It’s safe. But I’m not sure that just showing up at your office is going to bring success.

What I’m talking about is just showing up in other places, especially outside the library. Go to faculty senate meetings. Go to community gatherings. Attend board or town hall meetings. Join committees. Go to conferences or informal gatherings of librarians. Go to social events or holiday parties. The benefits of just showing up at events or meetings quickly become clear. You begin developing relationships with others. People remember your face, know who you are, and know that you are from the library. By just showing up you become an ambassador of the library. You’re getting out of the library and spreading your message of information and helpfulness in multiple places. If you go where the action is, good things just start to happen.

You may be able to help someone on a project that they have been thinking about for a while. You may have a great suggestion at a meeting that utilizes library resources. You may find a colleague or faculty member to collaborate with on a shared interest. Informal conversations with community members, faculty, staff, or students outside the library can and do lead to much bigger things. But these things won’t happen if you are sitting in your office all day. The first step is to just show up.

Change starts with you

Sitting around and waiting for inspiration to strike or the perfect moment is not going to bring about change. These are outside circumstances that you have no control over. What you can can control is yourself and your own decisions. This is the starting place, and having this mindset is the most important part of being an agent for positive change. One of the biggest mistakes that librarians can make is getting discouraged or giving up because of colleagues who actively resist change, an administration or board that is stuck in the past, or an institution that is seemingly calcified. You cannot control these things (but you can influence them). What you can control is your response. If you direct your anger and energy at the board or your “backwards” colleague or your inflexible institution, you will only reap frustration.

In chatting with librarians who are frustrated, I hear a lot people say things like “we can’t have drinks in the library because x,” or “if only x would retire, then we could enact change.” But this is giving up control. You still can respond. Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (I’m getting hooked on this book) talks about using proactive language instead of using reactive language. Instead of using phrases like “I can’t” you can say “I choose.” Instead of saying “there’s nothing I can do,” say “let’s look at our alternatives.” By understanding that you have the control over your choices and the decisions you make, you empower yourself.

I’ve seen other librarians talking about this same idea. There was recently a great post by the folks at In the Library with the Lead Pipe on the theme of the Occupy Movement. One of the sections was about occupying yourself and they discussed this idea of owning your own power and not giving it away to others. In the post they give a great model for a positive communication technique to bring about change without sounding like you’re attacking.

Know what change you want to see

In bringing about change it’s also necessary to be strategic. One person can’t change everything; they just don’t have the time. So you have to clearly understand what it is you want to change. You also need to be able to prioritize and recognize when a service or resource needs to be dropped. We can’t be everything to everyone in libraries, so we have to play to our strengths. Jenica Rogers talks a lot about this and she recently did a presentation for the LIANZA conference entitled Reality-based Librarianship for Passionate Librarians. In it she discusses identifying goals, but also this idea of picking your battles. Not everything can be changed, or it may not be worth the time, effort, and effects on your sanity to change something. Change doesn’t come easily, but have a road map for how to get there makes things simpler.

You’re not alone

My favorite part about library conferences is meeting with other librarians and hearing what they are working on and what they are passionate about. It’s easy to get caught up in the very narrow view from your own institution, but when you talk with others, you realize there are a lot of different ways to bring about change. By talking with others outside of your own institution you can begin to see other perspectives and different approaches to problems you are trying to solve. It is also a way to invigorate yourself and gain new energy. If you feel that no one at your institution wants change or has the same interests as you, find others who share your passion and collaborate with them.

You have to take care of yourself as a librarian. Burnout is real, and if your passion and creativity continually gets stifled at your institution, try to collaborate with other passionate librarians at different institutions. There is no shortage of passionate librarians. Go to conferences. Go to local meet-ups of librarians. Connect with folks via social networking. And if there aren’t many networking opportunities in your area, start some. There are likely others who want to connect and share ideas and are looking for a venue.

What strategies are most helpful to you in bringing about change at your library?

One book I’ve begun reading is Stephen Covey’s classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I originally picked it up because I remembered (and highly agree with) habit 5 “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” I think this one is key to getting along with colleagues, managers, doing reference, etc.

But now that I am actually reading the book, what I have been thinking a lot about is the third habit: “Put first things first.” Most librarians I talk to are generally very busy people. We have a lot of ideas, initiatives, and commitments. I know I wish that I had more time, and I really want to work on managing my time better. Covey puts forth a simple framework for thinking about time and projects that was really illuminating for me. He breaks activities down into a matrix of urgent/not urgent and important/not-important:

Covey says that the most impact comes when you focus on Quadrant II (important and not-urgent). These are things that you know are important and you know that they would make a big difference, but you “just don’t have the time.” In reality this is the work we should be focusing on and it would do the most to improve our work and our libraries. Clearly working on things like long-term planning, redesigning the website, or figuring out a coherent approach to ebooks, would be much more beneficial than, say cleaning up email or another meeting.

Of course meetings and email are necessary, but it’s easy to get caught up thinking that you have to go to every meeting or that all the emails in your inbox demand your attention. By carving out time specifically for Quadrant II tasks, those important things that keep getting kicked down the road actually start coming to fruition. This type of work is also much more fulfilling. It feels great to finish that article you keep putting off or finally get that annual report done.

Time management is something that I know I need work on and this framework is really helpful to me. Do other people find this helpful or have other useful ways of thinking about managing their time?

Photo cc by gregwake of Flickr

One of my favorite aspects of being a librarian is the variety of the work. I am never doing the same thing day in and day out, and I’m constantly challenged in new ways. This may be because I work at a small institution with a fairly small number of librarians, so we all have to do a bit of everything. But I think in general, as librarians, we often have to wear so many different hats.

We are teachers. We experiment with new pedagogical methods and attempt to design effective, engaging curriculum. We are scholars. We publish research and present at conferences about the interesting things we’re doing. We are technologists. We experiment with and implement new tools in order to improve the delivery of services to users. We are detectives. We are able to solve mysteries and pull together a case from a mishmash of clues. We are oracles. We are able to give thorough and satisfying answers to questions that at first glance seem impossible and stultifying (it only seems like magic).

We are marketers. We to promote our resources and events and sell the idea of “the library” by being vocal advocates in our community. We are analysts. We attempt to improve our services by assessing learning and collecting data on things like reference interactions, classes taught, and usage of our resources. We are managers. We are either directors, department heads or simply leaders in meetings or committees, trying to help others reach their full potential. We are customer service representatives. We try to provide the best experience possible for our users and get them exactly what they need to ensure they come back and tell their friends. We are event planners. We plan great programs that pack the library and bring the community together.

There are plenty of other hats and they’re not all positive (copy machine repairman, janitor), but the wide variety of the work that we do is one of the things that really makes me love this job.

What hats do you wear?

view from the library balcony

We have a new position opening at our library! We have a great team already, but we need someone else to help with our teaching and technology related projects. If that sounds like you or someone you know, you can find out more and apply here.

Burlington is a really awesome city and Champlain is a great place to work. The two words I would use to describe Champlain are community and innovation. We are a fast moving institution and if you have an idea, you are able to run with it. And ideas can come from anyone, not just senior administrators or people who have been here for a while. There is a mutual respect and a lot of collegiality among both faculty and staff.

And to top it all off, our library has one of the best views in the city of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks.

photo by Express Monorail on Flickr

The staff at our library recently had a meeting in which we were brainstorming new ideas. The question that the director asked to guide our brainstorming was “if time was not a factor, what would you really like to work on or do?” We could think as big or small as we wanted and we came up with some really interesting ideas. One theme I kept seeing in people’s answers was having the chance to look at things from another perspective and being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Cross-pollination is a way to get fresh ideas and break free of a certain way of thinking. It’s important in libraries to not constantly be focused on ourselves and “the way things have always been done.” Sharing and exchanging ideas improves relationships and makes everyone stronger. There are few ways we can do this in libraries:

Conferences

This is one of the most common ways to cross-pollinate in librarianship. At conferences you can talk to hundreds of other library professionals and hear what they are doing. You can watch and participate in presentations that expose you to new ideas. You can take ideas that you find at conferences, tweak them, and implement them at your own institution. Getting together with a lot of different librarians is almost always a recipe for fresh ideas.

Non-Library Reading

I read a lot of librarian blogs (and if you’re reading this, you likely do too), but I also try to read outside the field as well. I read marketing blogs, education blogs, business blogs, tech blogs. It is from these blogs that I get a lot of new ideas. I learn things about higher ed in general or try to find creative ways to use marketing ideas to promote the library.

Visit Other Libraries

Whenever I am in a new city I like to try to see a library or two. Whenever I attend a conference or event at a library I like to explore their building. Visiting other libraries helps you to envision your own library differently. Perhaps a library you visit has great signage or perhaps they set up their public areas in a very interesting way. You can get a plethora of ideas for how to arrange your library by examining what others are doing. Anyway, libraries are just fun places to hang out in general.

Business Field Trips

No, libraries are not businesses, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t learn anything from them. Some businesses have almost unbelievable models of service (like the Nordstrom employee who refunded a customer returning snow tires even though they did not sell that product). Some businesses have really cool ways of approaching problems. You don’t have to always go very far either. I’ve posted in the past about places locally that have provided a wonderful user experience. You could attend a place like this as a staff and then debrief about what you’d like to imitate.

Observe Professors or Teachers

Librarians are (or very much should be) educators. Why then do we not learn more from our educational peers. My good friend Gary Scudder just won the Vermont Professor of the year. I think it would be very enlightening to attend one of his classes or see how other folks approach teaching. Not only could we learn teaching and classroom management techniques, but we could also see what students are learning and understand the questions their struggling with. In addition, we could observe our fellow librarians in their classes. Seeing how other people approach teaching is immensely helpful to me.

Job Switching

One of the reference librarians here at Champlain College has mentioned this idea multiple times and I think it is a really cool one. Instead of constantly being in public services perhaps you could spend a semester cataloging or working on collection development. Or instead of doing only cataloging, maybe you want to volunteer for a couple of hours a week at the desk. This might not be feasible everywhere, but putting yourself in another librarians shoes for a little while can help you appreciate their perspective and what they do.

Librarian Exchange

I’m not sure if any libraries are doing this, but wouldn’t it be fun to spend a semester or a few months as a librarian at another institution (locally or internationally)? Both librarians would learn a lot and gain a lot more experience. They would also bring fresh perspectives to their host institution. They’re not bogged down by seeing the same things everyday which would allow them to try different approaches to problems.

These are just a few suggestions for how to cross-pollinate yourself and your staff. What are some other ways to spread new ideas hither and yon?

Photo by Carissa GoodNCrazy on Flickr

In getting my MLIS, there are things I’m glad that I did, and there are also things that I wish that I had done differently. To get a library job there are some important skills you need. If I had to do it over again I would make sure that I had all of these things checked off my list:

Real World Experience

You can’t expect to get hired out of library school unless you have some real experience to point to. The degree is important, but what really sets you apart is what you’ve done. There are plenty of ways to get experience. Get an assistantship, internship or graduate position at a library where you’re actually doing the job. Volunteer at a public, academic, or even jail library. Do a practicum as a part of a class. This doesn’t need to be full time professional experience, but you should show that you have something hands on that you can point to in your resume.

Some Technology Skills

Libraries and technology are integrally tied together. You have to make it a priority to develop some technology chops. I’m not going to enumerate specific skills you need (though I think some HTML is critical). You need to be comfortable with technology and the speed at which it changes. If your program doesn’t offer technology classes, do some outside work. Try something similar to the 23 things project. Start a tech in libraries club or get involved with the LITA chapter at school. You’re never done learning technology, so you have to learn how to play and evaluate technology and how/if it fits into your needs.

Professional Engagement

You need to show that you care about the profession and want to give back.  Join a professional organization like the ALA. Student memberships are often highly discounted. Besides an association there are tons of ways to be professionally engaged: publish an article or opinion piece, attend conferences, join a library club at school, volunteer at a library, give a presentation, join a professional committee. People like to see job-seekers who are passionate, engaged, and thoughtful about what they do.

Make Connections

Build and maintain connections with students, professors, and other professionals you meet. The library world is a pretty small one, and every connection is important. Make friendships with students and maintain them via social media. Connections that you make in library school can be lifelong and may be very helpful down the road, even if you don’t see it now. Besides librarians are some of the most fun people to hang out with anyway.

Get a Website

The benefits of getting a website is twofold. It helps you play with and learn technology, and it also is a place to show off things that may not come through in a paper resume. If you constructed a video tutorial you could highlight it on your website. If you gave an interesting presentation or Prezi you can embed it. It doesn’t need to be super flashy. You could just get a WordPress blog or create one in a couple hours using Weebly or Google sites.

Teaching Experience

This one I found very helpful personally. If you know for sure you never will be teaching this one might be optional, but this skill makes you so much more marketable. Volunteer to do workshops. If offered, take an instruction class. I took a practicum and it helped me immensely. Librarians are in the business of learning and information and that often means we need to be educators.

Today marks my second full year as a librarian and I’m still in love with this profession. My job is to assist people who are curious like me, people who want to learn, and I get paid for it! There have been a fair amount of changes around here recently, like the fact that we’re getting a new librarian, but it keeps things fresh. I posted at this time last year a few reflections and am still learning things, so I wanted to post some lessons I’ve learned this year.

• Go with the flow – Sometimes things are going really great. You sometimes come across one of those moments that make it all worth it. Other times everything seems to get fouled up, or everything hits your desk at once and you get overwhelmed. This is true in any career and in life. Don’t dwell on failures because they’ll soon turn around. You’ll learn from your mistakes and be successful. On the flip side, don’t get too caught up with your successes or start boasting when things are going well. You don’t stay on top forever. There are lots of highs and lows in your career. Enjoy the good times and learn from the bad ones.
• Give back – If you want your job to exist in 5, 10, or 20 years give back to the profession. This doesn’t mean you have to go out and join an ALA committee (though that’s an option). It does mean to give back in a way that’s meaningful and works for you. I helped organize a virtual version of the ACRL New England Chapter conference for Vermont librarians who couldn’t make the actual one. It was a great learning experience for me, benefited other librarians and the organization, and was a lot of fun. Giving back could mean presenting at conferences cool ideas your library has tried, it could mean mentoring a younger librarian or MLIS student, or it could mean volunteering with your local library association. With our actions we’re creating the future of librarianship; make sure you have a say in that future.
• You can’t do everything – This one is especially hard for me to remember since my interests are really varied and I love trying new things. But sometimes you have to drop things. This goes for libraries in general as well as each of us in our personal careers. You can’t serve on every committee, take on every interesting project, write every paper, or teach every class. The same goes with libraries. They can’t try to be all things to all people. Once you start getting overwhelmed and stretched thin you have to think about what you can drop. Take time to reflect on what’s important to you and your career and concentrate on that.

I’m still a new librarian and am constantly learning. But I don’t think I can get away with saying, “Oh sorry, I didn’t know, I’m new,” anymore. This year’s been a good one personally and professionally. Now I have to look forward to year number three.