LIS Online Career Fair–Jan 12, 9 am Phx Time

Are you a new library school graduate – or mid-career and looking for a change? Are you wondering how to improve your career skills or ready to try a certificate program?  Looking to refresh your resume?  Alliance Library System and TAP Information Services invite you to join us for the first annual LIS Online Career Fair.  Join us online in OPAL on Tuesday January 12, 2010 for an exciting day of learning how to start or to rejuvenate your library career in tough times!  The day will kick off at 10 am central time/11 am Eastern/8 am Pacific and run through 4:30 pm central/5:30 pm Eastern. You will have your choice of a variety of informational and interactive programs which will assist you with your career no matter where you are.

The conference keynote speaker is Rachel Singer Gordon, webmaster of LISjobs.com, the largest library career site  and job database, and consulting editor at Information Today Inc., Books Division.  Rachel’s talk, “Career Building in a Down Economy,” will help librarians focus on what they can do to keep themselves moving forward professionally in a down economy.  While professional literature discusses what librarians can do to help their communities and patrons, it does not give much information as to what librarians can do to help themselves.  Rachel will address the ways in which the economy affects librarians professionally, how to control reactions and frustration, how to deal proactively with current events, and how to move forward effectively in tough economic times.

Other speakers include:  Christi Confetti Higgins, Sun Microsystems; Cindy Hill, Hill Information Consulting; Morgan Cadwalader, Alliance Library System; Kitty Pope, Alliance Library System; Barbara McFadden Allen, Career on Institutional Cooperation; Meredith Farkas, Norwich University; Rose Chenoweth, Alliance Library System; Jim Rettig, University of Richmond; Marianne Steadley, University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science and more!

For more information on this conference, check out http://liscareerfair.org .   Thecost of the one day online event is $29 for graduate library students;  $39 for librarians, and for a group, the price is $79.

For more information, please contact Lori Bell at ALS at lbell@alliancelibrarysystem.com<mailto:lbell@alliancelibrarysystem.com> or Tom Peters at TAP Information Services at tapinformation@yahoo.com<mailto:tapinformation@yahoo.com>.

Name game — A librarian should run the library (from Tulsa, OK)

By World’s Editorial Writers  Published: 11/23/2009  2:28 AM  Last Modified: 11/23/2009  9:20 AM

The Tulsa City-County Library System continues to hunt for a new chief executive officer.Former CEO Linda Saferite announced Aug. 4 that she would be on extended medical leave until she retires in March.

 

The library board met last week to talk about what its looking for in a new library boss, who will be earning $130,000 to $150,000 a year.

The responsibilities include fundraising, strategic direction and policies, long-range planning and community relations.

Those are important jobs, and we don’t begrudge the planned salary, but the title CEO bothers us.

There’s a name for the chief executive officer of a library — head librarian.

Titles are important. They reflect assumptions and duties to the public.

Chief executive officer is a good title for the bosses of business and industry.

Library bosses are different. The the top person might be the chief, and might be an executive, but the public needs to know the person running the libraries as a librarian. It reflects the traditional elements of what the institution is about.

Interestingly, state law requires that Tulsa’s library director have at least a master’s degree in library science. Not a master’s degree in business administration. There’s a reason for that.

If one of the new CEO’s jobs is indeed community relations, we suggest one of that person’s first actions be a decision to re-brand the job. We don’t want a corporate bigwig running our libraries. We want

a librarian….read entire article here: http://www.tulsaworld.com/opinion/article.aspx?subjectid=61&articleid=20091123_61_A9_Patron511358

Social Networking Changes Blogging–from Michelle Kraft

Those of you on Facebook or Twitter can attest that many of us are now sharing links to news and blogs and commenting on them to our own “friends” on Facebook and Twitter.  conducted a study and found something interesting, most of the blog post awareness and commenting is now happening “off site,” (not on the blog itself).  People are increasingly being driven to blog posts by social networking, according to their study Facebook, Twitter and Digg were the top 3 traffic drivers to blogs.

Since 2007 PostRank has been looking at the top 1000 most engaging feeds and found they experienced a 30% growth in engagement, despite onsite engagement (commenting on the blogsite) falling by 50%.  Previously people followed a blog post through RSS feeds on their feed reader and through links (trackbacks) sent to them by other people or within body of another blog post.  PostRank’s study found that engagement from trackbacks has fallen from 19% to 3%.  So how are people finding blog posts?  Referrals from Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and other sites have gone up from 1% to over 29%.

You would think that with everybody sharing stories on social networking sites would cause an cause engagement in stories to increase and make it even more necessary to have timely posts.  Yet according to PostRank’s study there is a steady increase in the lifespan of a story.  In 2007 PostRank observed that the over 94% of all engagement occurred within the first day publishing and 98% of that all occurred within the first hour.  In 2008 and 2009 a story’s lifespan increased.  In 2008, engagement with in the first hour was 83% and in 2009 it was 64%.

Of course all of this information from this study comes from PostRanks, a company that has a dog in the fight with its own “social engagement” analytical software.  So I can understand why one might initially question the data.  Those of us in the medical world are trained to scruitinize data from drug companies and their products….read the whole story here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/?p=290

Heard on NPR: Robert Darnton: “The Case for Books” The future of books in a digital age

The future of books in a digital age. How the digital revolution and electronic books will affect the marketplace of ideas.

Robert Darnton, Author, Librarian at Harvard and founder of the Gutenberg-e program. A former professor of European History at Princeton University, Darnton is also a regular contributor to the “New York Review of Books.”

Listen to the interview at http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/11/23.php#29154 (The Diane Rehm Show)

For more info about Professor Darnton, see http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/darnton.php

Also–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Darnton

Read his  The Library in the New Age in The New Yorker at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514

The cult of the faceless boss-from the Economist

Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Too many chief executives are instantly forgettable. It’s the flamboyant, visionary bosses who change the world

THE European Union is not the only institution that prefers faceless technocrats to people with star power. The corporate world is increasingly rejecting imperial chief executives in favour of anonymous managers—bland and boring men and women who can hardly get themselves noticed at cocktail parties, let alone stop the traffic in Moscow and Beijing.

Some of the world’s most powerful bosses are striking mainly for their blandness: Sam Palmisano at IBM, Tony Hayward at BP, Terry Leahy at Tesco, Vittorio Colao at Vodafone. These men are at the head of a vast army of even more forgettable bosses. Watch the parade of chief executives who appear on CNBC every day, or drop in to a high-powered conference, and you begin to wonder whether cloning is more advanced than scientists are letting on.

It is true that there are a few more women and members of ethnic minorities at the top of companies than there used to be. But physical diversity has not translated into cultural diversity or intellectual vitality. Almost without exception, today’s bosses spout the same tired old management clichés—about the merits of doing well by doing right, the importance of valuing your workers, the virtues of sustainability and so forth.

The women who were profiled in a recent article in the Financial Times about the “top 50 women in world business” were every bit as adept with the cliché as their male colleagues. Indra Nooyi, the boss of PepsiCo, proclaimed that she spends her weekends “doing everything that normal people do”. Andrea Jung, the boss of Avon, said her biggest inspiration came from “Avon’s six million sales representatives worldwide”.

The fashion for faceless chief executives is part of an understandable reaction against yesterday’s imperial bosses, many of whom were vivid characters, capable of holding their own in a cocktail party with Tony Blair, but who collectively brought opprobrium on the system that let them shine. Some, such as Jeff Skilling of Enron and Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, broke the law and helped inspire a dramatic tightening of government regulation, in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Others, such as Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli and Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina, paid themselves like superstars but delivered dismal results.

The turbulent business climate is another factor that encourages today’s chief executives to keep their heads down. Their average tenure has declined from ten years in the 1970s to six years today, and boards are becoming ever more likely to sack bosses if they get out of line, particularly in Europe. The financial crisis has also produced a wave of popular fury about over-paid executives and their unaccountable ways. In this sort of climate it is not just the paranoid, but the faceless, who survive….Read entire article here: http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14844995

Finding Our Little Black Dress in the Online World–by Michelle Kraft

November 19th, 2009

Monday was spent attending the New England Journal of Medicine’s Library Advisory Board meeting.  This is only my first full year on the board and my second meeting but I have to say I have learned a lot about things that impact the publishing world and the medical library world.  As different as our two groups are, there are also quite a lot of similarities.

Of course we talked about the economy and its impact on libraries and publishing in general.  We also talked about what we saw in the future for libraries (everything from online expansion, smaller physical spaces, different librarian roles and services) and the future for STM publishers (enhanced online articles, different roles for the publishers, and licensing issues).

I found our discussion on social applications in medicine, libraries, and publishers to be extremely interesting (naturally).  When we met in the Spring, this topic was hardly discussed, but now 8 months later social media has exploded all over the Internet for the medical community.  Funny, we talked about what the future held for libraries and publishers at that Spring meeting, but honestly I don’t think anybody mentioned Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or any other social platform.   Yet it is now the must have PR and marketing tool. I think it is the little black dress, of the healthcare world.

A year ago if you asked me about hospitals getting on Twitter or Facebook I would have laughed.  Hospital IT networks are notorious for locking things tight, I still know of hospitals where the network is so closed the medical professionals can’t use the clinical workstations to access MedlinePlus to give consumer health information to  patients.  So to have hospitals actively using something as “frivolous” as Twitter in public relations, marketing and consumer health information, is quite a departure from the tradition and honestly completely unexpected to me.

But change is constant and we are not where we were 8 months ago and everybody in the medical world is hitting the social networking world big time.  Just like women searching for that perfect little black dress, hospitals, libraries, publishers, societies are all hitting the Internet looking for the social media application that is the right fit and style for them.  Just because they are little and black does not mean that all little black dresses are the same, au contraire.  One dress maybe too frilly and over the top to work for one woman, but it may just the right length and style for another who finds a simple sheath too plain.  The same can be said for social media applications.  Facebook might work for one organization but may not yield good results with another.

So it was interesting to learn how in just the 8 short months the folks over at NEJM have also been trying on their little black dresses of social networking.  Many things were discussed but the  things that stuck in my head were NEJM’s H1N1 site, health care reform Twitter feed,  Facebook page, Interactive Medical Cases, and CardioExchange.

The  H1N1 site was established by The New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Journal Watch to help monitor the outbreak.  The site contains research reports, commentary, news, updates, and a map of H1N1 cases through out the world.  Also included are articles from NEJM’s Archive about the epidemics in 1837, 1918, and 1976 as well as review articles on the management of seasonal influenza.

The H1N1 site is a great flu resource, but what I found most interesting is the neat way NEJM used blogging software to host the site.  Most people still think of using blogging software to run blogs such as the Krafty Librarian.  NEJM’s site while technically a blog offers so much more than just a regular old blog.

NEJM’s Twitter account is link to their Health Care Reform site.  You can find the feed if you search Twitter for NEJM or go directly to the Health Care Reform site ( link to the feed is located on the left side toward the bottom).  The NEJM Twitter account just focuses on information and stories pertaining to issues of health care reform in the United States.

Important to note the content on both the H1N1 site and the Health Care Reform site is free.

The New England Journal of Medicine’s Facebook page is aimed at a different set of users than their Twitter feed.  The Facebook site has over 25,000 fans many of which are from the United States and Asia.  Most of their fans are very interested in NEJM’s Image of the Week  and their Interactive Medical Cases.  Both of these things as well as other topics are posted on their wall for people to read and comment on.

NEJM’s Interactive Medical Cases site is new and offers CME.  To mistake it as another CME site would be an unfortunate error.  Each case is presented in a way where the patients’ history and information evolves and the doctor taking the Interactive Medical Cases is presented with a series of questions and exercises to test their skills.  Through the use of video, animation, and other interactive content, doctors are given immediate feedback on their answers and treatment choices.  At the end of the case doctors are given the opportunity to compare their final scores with their peers. It still is in a limited time pilot phase and is currently free.

Last but not least is CardioExchange which was just unveiled last week at the 2009 AHA Scientific Sessions.   It is an online community for medical professionals dedicated to improving cardiac patient care.  Just from the brief view I got of it on Monday the design is way more professional than Facebook and more robust than LinkedIn.  It has the look and professional feel of LinkedIn but it is way more interactive than LinkedIn’s glorified rolodex feel.  There a slew of online communities vying for medical professionals to populate their virtual spaces, Sermo just being one of the many.  Unlike Sermo, CardioExchange is for medical professionals engaged in the delivery of cardiac patient care, it is not limited to physicians.  It is limited to subject matter not specifically job description.  (Personally I like this, physicians do not practice in a void, but within a health care team. So it makes sense that it would be open to the members involved in the cardiac patient care team, not just doctors.)  Unlike many online communities, members profiles are their real names, they are NOT anonymous and members are expected to be forthright about potential conflicts of interest.  Unlike Sermo, personal information is not shared with third parties.  (I think this is also important.  I have always been a little disconcerted by Sermo’s ties with drug and medical device industry.)  As I mentioned there are a lot of professional communities out there, it will be interesting to see how CardioExchange evolves and whether it is successful, it is too early to tell right now but it looks like it is on the right track.

The New England Journal of Medicine is not the only publisher or medically related company to be hitting the racks of little black dresses in the social networking mall, nor will they be the last.  What is interesting is that they are trying on their dresses just like the rest of us.  They are evaluating what is too frilly what is too plain and what works best for each occasion.  As you or your library starts to peruse the racks as well, remember to have a critical eye in the dressing room, because not everything works for every body type.  What works well in one library and institution may not work at another.  It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it out, it just means that when you are trying things out be prepared to evaluate it to see how it is being used, who is using it, and its usage statistics (if possible).  For example there are a lot of applications and sites that help you monitor your Twitter account, Facebook’s Fan Page provides lots statistical information as well.  Most importantly if it isn’t working don’t be afraid to try something different that matches your needs.  That might mean a different social networking tool, it also might be mean something entirely different and not related to social networking.

Library Leader in Era of Change to Step Down

By PATRICIA COHEN   Published: November 18, 2009

After 16 years at the helm of one of the world’s largest library systems, Paul LeClerc announced on Wednesday that he would step down as president of the New York Public Library in the summer of 2011 to give the institution plenty of time to search for a replacement.

Mr. LeClerc, 68, a scholar of French literature and the former president of Hunter College, has presided over the sprawling library system during a revolutionary period of change, as the world has shifted to the digital era. When he first came to the position in December 1993, the library did not even have a Web site.

The advent of search engines like Google and Yahoo rivals “the impact of Gutenberg,” the developer of the first printing press, Mr. LeClerc said this week as he sat in his office opposite a portrait of Benjamin Franklin at the library’s headquarters, at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

The combination of a vast research collection — more than 50 million items and the world’s largest online catalog — and an extensive network of lending libraries throughout the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island makes the New York system unique, Mr. LeClerc said. (Queens and Brooklyn have separate library systems.) “Historically it’s a staggering level of ambition and generosity that no other library system in the world has,” he said.

Although previous presidents have been scholars, Catherine Marron, chairwoman of the library’s board, said that the new leader could come from any number of fields — academics, technology, the nonprofit sector. “What Paul has represented is intellectual leadership,” she said, which is particularly important to the library to maintain its worldwide reputation for scholarship and to provide vision. She and Vice Chairman Joshua L. Steiner will lead a search committee and hire a firm to help them find a successor. Mr. LeClerc made clear that he intended to steer clear of the entire process.

In the current economic crisis the library has seen greater use of its resources than ever, at the same time its financial resources have been strained. Visits to branches increased by 11 percent, to 18 million, in the past year, while Internet visits hit 26 million. In the spring Job Search Central opened at the Science, Industry and Business Library at Madison Avenue and 34th Street; a specialist in job searches is stationed at every branch to help visitors write résumés and look for jobs.

“The financial situation has been tough on everybody,” Ms. Marron said, adding that she nonetheless felt the library was in “solid financial shape.” The library’s annual budget of $254 million is comprised of money from its endowment, contributions from the city, private donations and earned income.

During Mr. LeClerc’s tenure — longer than any of his predecessors’ — the library started digitizing its collection, and entered partnerships with companies like Google and Apple to expand access to materials. It also provided free wireless and undertook $500 million in capital projects. The redesigned Web site, nypl.org, using free open-source software will be available in January. The library has also acquired a number of archival collections from Jerome Robbins, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Malcolm X and The New York Times. The Voltaire collection, which is Mr. LeClerc’s specialty and is now on display, has also grown.

Mr. LeClerc said his basic approach boiled down to a simple formula: “find out what people want and give it to them.” Libraries are now open for longer hours than at any time in its history, he added.

Although long-term questions about print versus digital are unresolved, Mr. LeClerc is confident that for the foreseeable future both print and digital resources will be in demand. Libraries have had the same function for 5,000 years, Mr. LeClerc explained, as “storehouses of exceptionally important written documents.” The New York Public Library’s fundamental responsibility to acquire materials, keep them and let people look at them, he said, remains the same.

Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell–NY Times

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: November 16, 2009

If you have torn yourself away from the virtual library that is the Internet long enough to visit a real library, you know that the smell of old books — musty, slightly acidic, even grassy — is instantly recognizable. But is it quantifiable? And if so, might old-book odor prove useful to librarians and conservators charged with preserving collections?

Matija Strlic, a researcher with the Center for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, thinks it might. With colleagues in Slovenia and with the assistance of the National Archives of the Netherlands, he has published proof-of-concept research that shows that it is possible to understand both the composition and condition of old paper by analyzing the volatile organic compounds they emit.

Dr. Strlic said he got the idea one day at a library when he saw a conservator sniffing an old piece of paper, trying to determine what it was made of. “I thought, certainly a technique could be developed to do that more accurately,” he said. The approach is similar to breath analysis used to diagnose illness, he added.

He and his colleagues analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly. Their findings were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

Portable devices that can detect volatile compounds already exist, Dr. Strlic noted. So with further research, he said, it may be possible to develop one for use in libraries and other places. Such an electronic nose would sniff the air around old books to find those that are so fragile they should not be lent out, for example, or are otherwise in need of preservation.

See entire post here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/science/17obbook.html

Finding and Using WiFi While Traveling-Suggestions and Cautions

Happy holidays!  If you are going to be traveling, here are some ways to connect to the Internet while on the road or in the air:

Airports:

http://www.travelpost.com/airport-wireless-internet.aspx

Phoenix and Tucson Int’l Airports have free WiFi for your laptop; no registration or credit card required.

Google is providing free WiFi at 50 airports: http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/ Most airports have some free wifi.

Cities – coffee shops and public libraries http://www.wififreespot.com/

SECURITY

Free wifi tends to have poor security – traffic can be scanned and the logs can be read by employees.  To keep your passwords and other personal data safe, install the UA VPN and _use it_ with free wifi spots:

https://sitelicense.arizona.edu/vpn/

Rogue spots: especially a problem in airports.  Naughty people set up fake wifi spots and request personal data – such as credit card numbers – to let you login.  Find out the offical airport wifi system name and select it, instead of taking a random choice of wifi networks.

Mari Stoddard, MLIS – stoddard@ahsl.arizona.edu Arizona Health Sciences Library  – 520/626-2925, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Leadership & Management Section of MLA Studies “25 Counterintuitive Principles of Leadership”

This blog is being used for research purposes. The title of the study is : “25 Counterintuitive Principles of Leadership: Medical Library Association Member Perceptions.” Your participation in the study is voluntary. The Principle Investigator, Andrew Rucks, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, e-mail arucks@uab.edu and telephone number 205-985-8967, welcomes any questions and comments you may have about the study.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Institutional Review Board for Human Use (IRB) has assigned Protocol Number E090707007 to the study. If you have questions about your rights as a research participant, or concerns or complaints about the research, you may contact Ms. Sheila Moore. Ms. Moore is the Director of the Office of the Institutional Review Board for Human Use (OIRB) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Ms. Moore may be reached at (205) 934-3789 or 1-800-822-8816.

If calling the toll -free number, press the option for “all other calls” or for an operator/attendant and ask for extension 4-3789. Regular hours for the Office of the IRB are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CT, Monday through Friday. You may also call this number in the event the research staff cannot be reached or you wish to talk to someone else.

Effective leaders do two things very well – establish direction and create a culture. Establishing direction for an organization involves developing a vision for the future and reaching consensus around strategies to move the organization toward that vision. Creating a culture involves shaping the organization’s habits, customs, and conventions.

We spend a great deal of time thinking about and discussing visioning and establishing direction for organizations and far too little time on creating culture. Yet, it may that culture ultimately determines strategic success and, importantly, whether people are happy and productive.

We believe that how we lead does more to shape habits and customs, as well as individual’s motivation and attitudes, than anything else. For more than a century prescriptions for successful management have remained essentially unchanged. Command and control, unity of the command structure, hierarchy, and standardization of policies, practices, and rules have become universally accepted principles. However, often such approaches have resulted in organizational cultures that discourage innovation, fun at work, collegiality, and ultimately productivity. Traditional management principles have often “turned people off” to work….

Visit the site to read and learn more here: http://www.lhl.uab.edu/lmsmla/?page_id=338