From LJ-Library prospects may appear bleak right now, but don’t give up

By Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief — Library Journal, 10/15/2009

Just half a year before June 2008 graduates flipped the tassels on their caps from one side to the other, the recession officially began. They walked out into a job market where, as one fall 2008 University of South Florida grad put it in a letter to LJ, “What does it take to get a public library job? I know the economy is bad and that budgets are tight. I am so afraid if I don’t get a job soon, some of the valuable knowledge I learned in school will slip away” (Feedback, p. 10).

In the same Feedback section, however, Jennifer Forgit, another 2008 grad, wrote in praise of Steven Hoover’s “Surviving Your First Job Search” (bit.ly/o0Y2l). She reported that she started her search early, and it “took 20 applications over two years” for her to get the public library job—and geographic location—she wanted, but she advised new grads not to despair. “The jobs are still out there; you just have to look a little harder to find them.”

For 2008 Indiana University, Bloomington, IS grad Kristin Centanni, on the cover of the October 15 LJ, the job search was rigorous but successful. She interviewed at about ten firms with about ten people at each. With a dual degree in IS and Public Affairs, she, too, started her search early and landed a lucrative job at a technology management consultancy in Chicago. She thinks that those who started looking later had a harder road (see “Change Agent,” p. 25).

The personal stories vary, but the numbers tell a more consistent tale. According to Stephanie Maatta’s 2009 Placements & Salaries Survey (“Jobs and Pay Take a Hit,” p. 21–29), starting salaries dipped slightly overall, dropping 1.8% (to $41,579) after 18 years of growth. While the number of grads reporting any employment was relatively level at 87.2%, part-time employment rose to 18.3% (from 16.3%) after remaining steady for two years. In public libraries, full-time jobs were even scarcer, 12.5% fewer than in 2007. Those looking for academic library posts fared better; full-time jobs increased by 13.4%, though academic institutions have begun to feel the budget heat….Read entire article here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6700346.html

LJ’s annual placements & salaries survey shows graduates having hard time in job market, with some successes and satisfaction

From LJ

Fewer Full-Time Jobs | Pockets of Good News

“It’s a recession, baby!” was the common refrain among the LIS graduates of 2008. This was a record year for the number of graduates participating in the annual survey, with 2,089 respondents, representing approximately 31.7% of the approximate 6500 LIS graduates. They had stories to tell, providing evidence of both hard times in the job market, and some successes and satisfaction.

Even before the bloodletting of 2009, 2008 graduates were hit hard. Job searches averaged almost five months, and unemployment postgraduation rose to 5.9% in 2008, compared to 4.7% in 2007. Average starting salaries dipped slightly overall, dropping 1.8% to $41,579, after 18 years of increases, while placements in part-time and nonprofessional positions rose. Part-time placements increased from 16.3% of the placements in 2007 to 18.3% of 1,817 grads reporting jobs in 2008, after holding steady for two years. Likewise, 13.5% of the 2008 graduates either remained in or found non-professional positions compared to 11.3% in 2007.

The decreasing salaries, declining number of full-time positions overall, and the increase in part-time jobs and unemployment in 2008 appear to be the precursor to what will undoubtedly be a seriously depressed job market for graduates in 2009, with widespread hiring freezes and budget cuts across all types of libraries and information agencies.

Fewer Full-Time Jobs

While the total percentage of grads reporting they got jobs appears to have held steady between 2007 and 2008, the status of those jobs is more telling. In 2007, 87.9% of the graduates reported employment, including both full-time and part-time placements, compared to 2008, when 87.3% of graduates reported employment of any sort. The noticeable difference is in the percentage of full-time placements; 89.2% of the 2007 grads reported full-time employment while 69.8% of the grads were employed full-time in 2008.

Read entire post at: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6700592.html

From Michelle Kraft (again)-getting institutional support for Web 2.0

A few weeks ago I [Michelle] was a part of the Technology Forum for the Midwest MLA Annual Conference in Columbus, OH.  I spoke on libraries using Twitter and Facebook.  Later I wrote a blog post linking to the slides as well more of my thoughts on the topic.

Ever since then I have gotten a few emails from people asking how they can convince their IT departments to allow Facebook and Twitter so they can reach out to library users.  I have sat down and thought of a few good arguments for librarians to use with their IT people, however upon reflection I don’t think that will be very productive.

The short of it is, the IT departments are not going to deal with security perceived issues because the librarian wants to use social networking tools.  We can plead and beg all we want but in the minds of the IT people Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are either security risks or bandwidth hogs that have no real world use in the hospital world.  We are spinning our wheels to approach them on this, we would be better off trying to get them notify us when they mess with the IP ranges causing all sorts of havoc with the authentication systems of our online resources.  At least we can easily and directly show how that (IP ranges and the changing of them) impacts our work and that of the employees doing research at the hospital.

Recently (within the last 4-6 months) my institution opened up Facebook after years of it being blocked.  The library had no part in Facebook being unblocked.  Facebook, Twitter, and few other social networking sites are being used by my institution and other institutions for marketing, public relations, patient relations, and alumni relations  purposes.  Often an institution’s head of marketing or the CEO is the driving force behind these sites magically being unblocked.  When the Chief of Public Relations and Marketing sees that a competitor’s hospital is using Facebook and Twitter to effectively communicate to patients and market the hospital, you better believe he/she is going to want their hospital get involved too.

Who do you think IT is going to listen to, the librarian who wants to set up a Twitter feed from the catalog to the library website or the CEO who wants to use Twitter to help distribute institutional news and information?  If the CEO wants his/her institution to use these applications, IT has a little more reason to investigate and make sure these resources don’t pose a security or bandwidth threat to the institution than they do if the librarian asks.

So what do you do if your hospital hasn’t adopted these social networking applications?  I guess it all depends on the size of your hospital and how well you know the big fish.  There are a lot of recent successful examples and articles of hospitals using these things.  Perhaps if you are in a small hospital and know the big wigs fairly well you might begin sending them some of these articles.  If you are in larger hospital or you don’t have a real working relationship with your CEOs then perhaps you can start by contacting someone in marketing.  That person in marketing may not have enough clout but they might know somebody else who does.

While you as the librarian may not have the direct power to get your hospital to unblock social media sites, you might be able to influence those who do.  Social media hits many more areas than libraries.  It is a huge marketing and public relations tool that many hospitals and academic medical centers are persuing with specific marketing plans and goals….read entire post here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/?p=263

Free AZLA Conference Registration by Volunteering!

For the 2009 Annual Conference, December 7-9, AzLA is starting a Student Volunteer Program. Library school students will have the opportunity to receive free conference registration in exchange for (only) three hours of volunteering.  Volunteers will be assigned duties when they arrive for their shifts.  Duties include but are not limited to: staffing the registration desk, hospitality desk or AzLA booth, speaker liaison, and other duties as needed.  The only requirements to participate in this program are to be a current student in a library school program and a current AzLA member.  (Student membership in AzLA is only $30 annually.) We have extended the deadline to November 6th.  See conference info here:  http://azla.org/displayconvention.cfm.  Form is HERE– 2009 Student Volunteer Application.

This is a great networking opportunity!!!

Librarians still have vital role in the Web 2.0 era

Information professional Hervé Basset shares his observations about the role of Web 2.0 technology in science intelligence in industry

From Research Information: October/November 2009

In the past months much has been written about the hyped Web 2.0. Evangelists have talked about applying this to almost everything published or diffused online. Many people expect scientists to be leaders of the Web 2.0 pack. Observing the behaviour of my end users, however, it is not yet clear to me whether this prophecy has been achieved.

The concept of science intelligence (SI) in science can be compared with business intelligence for economics. SI is defined as a combination of technology, methods and tools used by an organisation to watch its scientific environment, in order to maintain its level of knowledge and face challenging issues.

It includes the processes of gathering, analysing, storing and diffusing the information. It is about making a science company more innovative, more efficient, more compliant and more competitive.

The concept is not a brand new one, but companies rarely have a global view of the entire system. One group might be excellent on gathering information, while another might focus on internal repositories, for example. For a science organisation, therefore, it can be a temptation to be attracted by religious promises of Science 2.0 as a way that it might improve some of these processes.

Information gathering

Online science has achieved great success in the last few years, thanks to close collaboration between publishers and library services….read entire article here:  http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=237

Friending Libraries: Why libraries can become nodes in people’s social networks

by Lee Rainie
Mar 30, 2009
at Computers in Libraries conference

Lee discussed Pew Internet’s latest findings and why they suggest that libraries can play a role in people’s social networks in the future. He described the reasons that people rely more and more on their social networks as they share ideas, learn, solve problems, and seek social support. And he explored how libraries can act as “nodes” in people’s networks.

View more presentations from Pew Internet & American Life Project, Pew Research Center.

Read it at http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2009/8-Friending-libraries.aspx

From Re:Generations-reaching new academic librarians to re-energize the academic librarian profession

by Nicole Eva

It’s been just over a year since I became a newly-minted librarian, eager to start my first ‘real’ job in my new profession. I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on the things I have learned over the past year and where I’ve learned them from, so that I may point some of you to these sources of information and help continue the time-honoured tradition of librarians helping librarians.

Colleagues
It can be very intimidating to ask your new colleagues for help; after all, you don’t want them thinking you don’t know anything, do you? I found it especially hard to ask for help as time went on, say six months to a year after I’d started. I felt like at that point, I should have already figured all this stuff out! But I don’t think anyone expects you to know everything already; and even senior colleagues ask each other things that they know their co-workers are more knowledgeable about than they are. Obviously, you will soon figure out who is most helpful and approachable, and who knows the most about certain areas….read entire post here: http://www.cla.ca/divisions/cacul/regenerations/2009/10/year-in.html

Social Media Revolution

Lots to think about in this little video!

Thanks to Brooke for the nudge!

From Michelle Kraft–Libraries Leveraging Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media

Monday afternoon I was a part of the Technology Forum for the Midwest MLA Annual Conference in Columbus, OH.  I spoke on libraries using Twitter and Facebook.

You can see my slides at http://bit.ly/hA9g0.  I specifically wanted to show examples of what other libraries were doing with these two social networking sites.  I tried to find as many medical library examples as possible (I even found one example of a hospital library).  But there were also neat things being done by other libraries and I went with those examples when I found they were doing something that the medical libraries hadn’t picked up on yet.

Some of my favorite examples:

• Weill Cornell and Loma Linda both have tied their catalog new books feed into their Twitter account. So when a new book is added to the catalog a tweet is sent out with a tinyurl.  Clicking on that tinyurl gets you to that record in the library catalog.  I thought this was cool.  I don’t know how difficult it is to set this up, perhaps somebody who has done this could comment.
• Health Library & Resource Center of El Camino Hospital put their patient education material up on their Facebook page under Notes.
• UTS Libraries (University of Technology, Sydney Libraries) use Twitter’s tweet poll feature to create a quick survey and ask for feed back on an issue.  In this case it was the use of QR codes, but almost any question could work.

I notice a lot of libraries out there dipping their toes into the social networking arena, but as I was researching this topic for the presentation, I started to notice that a lot of libraries good efforts seemed a little disjointed.  What good is having a Twitter account if you don’t list the feed on your home page.  I’ll even go a little further with that idea.  What good is even having the Twitter icon on your site if you don’t have the feed displayed anywhere on your website.  There are tons of libraries that are using Twitter as a sort of “what’s up at the library” news service.  Yet, I really couldn’t find all that many that tied this news feed into their own news feed on their own library web page.  Why?  Why do these libraries have two different news feeds?  Which on should a patron pay attention too?  We spend so much time on authority records in our catalogs and databases, yet where is our authority control on our Twitter and news information feeds?  I don’t mean specifically what they are posting but the fact that there are two (or more) sources of different news information.  This is extremely distracting.  So a library patron has to subscribe to the Twitter feed to get information and check the library’s site for information, not good….Read entire post and other great articles here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/

From the SIRLS Bibliotech blog: Hard Times, Job Hunting Done Right

By Rachel Cannady & Daniel Newton

I did it, we did it, and many more of us are going to do it soon: graduating. The big difference is that today we are faced with one of the toughest economic climates since the Great Depression: layoffs are taking place, budgets are being cut, and some open positions are no longer being filled. This means that there will be more competition in an already tough job market and job seekers will be facing a unique set of challenges. It is now more important than ever to make you and your application stand out, but the question of how to do this remains….Read entire post here: http://lsobibliotech.blogspot.com/2009/10/hard-times-job-searching-done-right.html