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Professional Development
Librarians as agents of social change
Oct 29th
Speaking at ILI2011 about the role of libraries in a post conflict society, Fedja Kulenovic told his audience that “war is the opposite of libraries”.
This seemingly extraordinary statement makes absolute sense when you consider that times of conflict bring disinformation, loss of trust, cessation of conversations and, sometimes, destruction of physical resources (two million titles were lost in the conflict in Bosnia and Herzogovina and the national library was destroyed).
There is so much potential for librarians to make a real difference in ‘turbulent times’. Feda outlined the role of librarians in providing inspiration, creative spaces, and creating opportunities for healthy and positive dialogues between different populations. They can rebuild the information landscape too, helping society move away from misinformation to clarity and balance. There is scope to educate people in the information skills that can contribute to economic growth and prosperity.
This theme of supporting the development of information and media literacy skills, (in this case against the background of the Arab Spring), was also discussed by Kayo Chang. In such circumstances, students need to understand a range of information issues, including maintaining online reputations, analysing information and working within the law.
Speaking at the same session, Maria Cotera reminded the audience that there are many people in the world who are information poor. Maria volunteers for a charity that seeks to bring library services, and literacy support, to prisoners in Africa. Such services can be completely transformational to disenfranchised populations.
Key lesson – librarians really can contribute to transformation – of individuals and society.
Maria Cotera, Kayo Chang and Fedja Kulenovic were speaking at Internet Librarian International 2011.
Adopt a humble position – a lesson for facilitators
Oct 6th
Manavodaya is an organisation that has been working with the poorest communities in Uttar Pradesh in India for 20 years. Its work takes place in villages, many of them remote, where it is not uncommon for villagers to be living on the equivalent of 20p per day – well below the poverty line. These people are the most marginalised and disenfranchised in their communities.
The Manavodaya approach is simple. A facilitator goes to the village and opens up a ‘human-level dialogue’ with villagers. There may be several meetings with villagers before any discussions about ‘change’ even begin. The key is that the facilitator’s role is a ‘quiet and humble one’. The villagers are the experts in the life that they are living – not the facilitator. There are no pre-conceived agendas, targets or solutions. The philosophy is as far away from the co-dependency of ‘solutions delivery’ as it is possible to be.
At first, villagers are, at least, agreed in the need for change. Through collective visioning, ways to deliver real change can emerge – very often from the smallest of beginnings.
The Manavodaya philosophy was explained in a lunchtime lecture at the RSA. Many members of the audience were there to explore whether lessons could be integrated into social programmes in the UK. Certainly the focus on user- or community-centric development struck a chord with many.
Yet elements of the philosophy have wider implications. The approach calls for quiet self and group reflection. It focuses on enabling others, not encouraging them to depend on us. It acknowledges the expertise of others. It urges us not to have pre-conceived ideas. Most of all, it recognises the importance of delivering change through our own behaviour and attitudes.
All in all, a humbling lesson.
What ‘good’ looks like
Sep 22nd
Some years ago, when he was working at BP, Chris Collison and his colleagues developed a deceptively simple methodology that helped transform the way that knowledge and expertise was identified and shared. This ‘river’ diagram remains an astonishingly powerful tool that is used by organisations of all types, size and sectors, from global telecommunications businesses to third sector organisations.
At the latest NetIKX event, Chris guided members through a river exercise that sought to identify the supply and demand for knowledge expertise within the room.
The process involves:
- Bringing stakeholders together to agree ‘what good looks like’
- Enabling teams to self-assess their performance levels
- Encouraging teams to set targets for improvement
- ‘Matchmaking’ those with a supply of expertise and experience with those who want to improve
As with any great consulting methodology there is as much to be gained from participating in the process itself as there is from the actual outputs. The conversations that take place to discuss what constitutes ‘basic’, ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ can help stakeholders to develop a shared organisational language. The process helps organisations identify, capture and share good practice. The longevity of the river diagram approach also shows the power of effective visualisation – and of a great metaphor.
In our session, two café conversations took place, bringing together those who self-assessed high on knowledge strategy and organisational learning and those seeking to learn from them.
The amount and level of animated knowledge sharing at our workshop demonstrates just how healthy the NetIKX knowledge marketplace is. It also shows how committed the members are, not only to their own learning, but also to the ongoing development of peers and the future success of knowledge and information management.
Top management articles 2011
Aug 25th
Emerald’s Management Review is 50 years old this year. This database contains over 280,000 abstracts of articles published in the world’s top 300 management publications. For the last 15 years, Emerald has run its Citation of Excellence Awards, announcing the most cited and influential articles of this enormous mass of content.
This year’s list has been compiled using Professor Anne-Wil Harzing’s ‘Publish or perish’ software program which maps citation data from the last three years. The 2011 top 50 articles feature articles originally published in 2007. This longlist of articles was sifted by an Editorial judging panel – their final choices are listed in full here.
The list includes an article written by KM guru Dave Snowden and originally published in HBR. Also featuring are this article about a KM success model and this about knowledge governance models. Also of interest is this article about ‘social sources of information’ for entrepreneurs.
By far the most intriguing title is this one ‘It’s all about me: narcissistic chief executive officers and their effects on company strategy and performance’. Emerald comments that this article adds to the ‘limited research’ in this area.
Information professionals – unsung ‘good fairies’?
Aug 4th
This week’s Sue Hill breakfast meeting provided a compelling snapshot of what is exercising information professionals across a wide range of sectors (health, law, property and more were represented).
Several delegates reported that their organisations are working to develop new strategies and models to reflect the changing business landscape. Collaboration, both internally, but increasingly externally, is seen as a strategy for success – or at least survival. Organisational websites are no longer static ‘repositories’ but are being opened up to collaborative content creation – with all the challenges that this might generate. Colleagues must learn to work more openly and in new matrix structures. There are opportunities for knowledge and information people to act as role models when it comes to collaborative working. It may not come as easily to others as it does to our profession.
But it’s not just our customers with whom we need to collaborate. There is also work to be done educating, informing, and exerting influence on those who seek to regulate and measure our business. We can assist in raising the profile, not just of our profession, but of our organisations and the sectors in which we work. We can help share success stories, internally and externally and have a role to play in helping our colleagues interpret, and maximise, internally generated knowledge. We can help our organisations mitigate information risk and maximise information value.
Even against the backdrop of a challenging business landscape, the conversation was positive and energised. In hard times, we are the ‘good fairies’ of our organisations – our good deeds bring business benefits!
Suzanne from Sue Hill Recruitment has also blogged about this event. Click here for her review.
What next for training and learning?
Jun 8th
CILIP, the UK-based professional body for library and information professionals, has announced the suspension of its public access training programme.
These are difficult economic times, and information roles in all sectors are under threat. Organisations in straitened circumstances have to make difficult decisions and it is unhappily true that staff development is very often considered a ‘nice to have’ rather than critical to organisational success. CILIP had to make a pragmatic decision based on the fact that not enough people were booking training courses.
In a more positive light, a key thread of the LinkedIn discussions initiated by the announcement is the key role played by CILIP’s 27 Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in providing at cost/low cost training and professional support. These events can often be developed and delivered quickly as a direct response to the needs of members.
‘Informal’ or networked learning and training will almost certainly become more important to the profession. We have already witnessed the development of librarians’ TeachMeets; the attendance of conferences ‘by proxy’; keeping up-to date and challenged via trusted Twitterfeeds and blogs; the development of ‘unconferences’ (self organised gatherings with no structured programming. The truth of the matter is that we will need to manage our own professional development even more proactively, and do so very often with a zero budget.
CILIP meanwhile will continue to deliver in-house training and, of course, national conferences. The discussions about the role of CILIP in providing professional development will no doubt continue in Hatfield in July!
The information profession – fragmented or diverse?
Jun 2nd
The defragmentation debate began when Mark Field first expressed his heartfelt concern about the state of ‘the information professions’.
The key question he posed was this – why, despite the fact that we are living in the ‘information/ knowledge/ internet age’, do the information professions continue to lack influence within government and business? And, by extension, what can we do about it? His initial posting created quite a stir.
This debate about the information professions, and the role of the professional bodies that support them, continued this week at the first ‘open’ (and oversubscribed) defragmentation meeting, held at the headquarters of the British Computer Society in London. At round tables a series of key questions were discussed, including some fundamentals – what exactly are the information professions and what is their value to society? Has our profession fragmented because it lost sight of its true ‘core competences’ or is it simply a broad and diverse church?
During a plenary session, attempts were made to identify some practical next steps (and willing volunteers!). These actions focus on improving advocacy and demonstrating value.
Several professional bodies and networking groups have been involved in the debate, including Cilip, NetIKX and the BCS. Is there are need for a new, umbrella organisation that can work to improve the fortunes of the profession for the benefit of society or can a ‘sexy commune’ of the bodies be created through better collaboration?
James Mullan and Nicola Franklin have blogged about the event and the ‘defrag wiki’ has more information on the debate and possible ways forward.
Seth Godin and Sue Hill for breakfast
May 19th
How do you facilitate a really successful round-table conversation that flows seamlessly for 90 minutes and generates ideas and stories from everyone present? Easy – you seat 11 information professionals around a table and limit them to two words each!
If that sounds rather non-sensical, let me explain. At the latest Sue Hill Recruitment breakfast networking meeting, after the serious business of introductions and breakfast ordering had been taken care of, Sue Hill asked all those present to summarise in just two words, what is making the biggest impact on their work. The responses demonstrate the astonishing breadth and depth of our profession – taking in politics (with and without a capital P), digitisation, bureaucracy, budget restrictions, change programmes, paywalls, firewalls and personal information management.
This week the marketing guru Seth Godin has blogged about what can best be described as legacy models of [public] libraries. Over breakfast we too discussed a ‘legacy model’ – the one in which a universe of infinite knowledge was available to all for free. We are still waiting for the B2B information market to settle down in terms of paywalls, paypoints, quality vs quantity, universal access or closed communities, professional and formal vs informal and community created. New, disruptive models are emerging all the time.
And if the external information provider market isn’t challenging enough there are the conflicting demands of our own organisations to contend with. They need our advice to stay compliant and legal but we can also help them be creative and navigate change programmes. While our organisations may want to manage information, data and knowledge effectively, some individuals or teams may actually scupper all our efforts through protectionism, inertia and policies that stifle information use and flow. Information is a great servant, but is only as good as the master it serves!
Seth Godin may have challenged existing library models but he concluded his blog by saying “we need librarians more than we ever did”). Our role is to bring insight, to support decision making and add real value to our organisations.
You can read more about Sue’s breakfast events, and more, on her blog. Now in their fourth year, Sue’s breakfast networking meetings have raised more than £6000 for a number of charities.
What’s the narrative?
May 9th
Rubicon, currently being broadcast by the BBC in the UK and in France via Orange Cine Max, is a complex conspiracy drama, set in the world of intelligence analysis. It’s the type of programme you have to sit and watch with full attention – the plot twists are rather challenging to say the least.
The intelligence agents’ job is to take diverse, seemingly unconnected, elements of data and information (or mis-information) and to recognise patterns and recommend action – some of it literally life and death decision-making. It’s the information professional’s perfect TV programme!
In this week’s episode, one character summarises the challenge of the job…
…[we must]… find the dots, connect the dots then understand the dots… The dots are in the world or in the bits and pieces of information, thousands of signs and symbols we can pull out of raw data. What’s the connection? What’s the narrative?
Personal archiving for literary greats
Apr 28th
How will the literary researchers of the future be able to understand the thought processes of great authors? With handwritten manuscripts, the authors notations, edits and revisions are captured on the page, which can themselves be captured digitally. A page of Jane Austen’s mansucript for Persuasion for example, shows how she worked to refine the language and tone of her work.
The sale to the British Library of the archive the poet Wendy Cope included personal items such as school reports and 40,000 emails. The poet had ‘displayed an archival consciousness’ and her wide ranging and rich archive will be catalogued and made available to researchers.
Meanwhile, BBC Radio 4 this week broadcast Tales from the Digital Archive, featuring an interview with the British Library’s first Curator of Digital Mansuscripts. The programme explores how technology, far from cutting researchers off from the creative process, can actually become part of the archive itself. At Emory University in the US, the computers on which Salman Rushdie wrote his bestsellers are held in an archive where they are as valued as highly as any leather-bound hand-written manuscript.
Perhaps there are career opportunities for information and archive specialists to work alongside great authors and help them to maintain their creative archives!
And as a postscript, the marvellous website Letters of Note publishes a covering letter from 14-year old Stephen King who sent one of his stories for consideration by Spaceman Magazine in 1961. The story was rejected…
