Government Info Pro

Librarianship and Leadership Skills

Cindy Spohr, LexisNexis Team Lead, shares some thoughts on sharpening leadership and soft skills in this Librarian Relations Group Monthly Column entitled: “Soft Skills, Leadership Skills, and “the Best Days of Librarianship Are Ahead of Us”*: A Mashup of Ideas”.

Here's an excerpt:

The role of librarians, and how we define ourselves, will continue to evolve, and grow, as our communities, organizations, and technology change. I don’t know where all we will go along this path, but I do very much agree that “in the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are,” Max Depree in Leadership is an Art.

This has been an underlying, recurring subject for me this year as I’ve participated in developing and presenting a leadership program as well as the LexisNexis® Teaching Research in Private Law Libraries (TRIPLL) Conference, attended the Private Law Libraries Change as Opportunity Summit, and heard the Keynote speaker at the AALL Annual Meeting.

Through all of these experiences there are several themes that have emerged that I would like to share with you, as food for thought, and maybe inspiration, as we continue on our evolution: Soft Skills, Leadership Skills, and a bright future.

To continue reading Cindy's article, CLICK TO READ FULL COLUMN.

Being the Information Expert in Your Organization

Deidra Payne, LexisNexis Senior Librarian Relations Consultant, shares some thoughts on how librarians can continue to be seen as the information experts in their organization in this Librarian Relations Group Monthly Column entitled: “Sitting back is not an option!”

Here's an excerpt:

How can you continue to be seen as the information expert, in your professional organization, with the constant changes in technologies? The last decade saw our profession adopting, changing and learning new skills for tools that we now actually consider quite normal in mainstream life. Tools like blogs, instant messaging, wikis, and social networks. Now a whole new decade has begun and we must continue to prepare, learn and adapt to whatever new and emerging technologies are around the corner for us. Enormous possibilities exist which I think will continue to have a huge impact on how we search, use, store and share information.

A new career path can arise unexpectedly as a result of these new technologies or with new trends in management. We can’t always anticipate these opportunities, but we can certainly prepare ourselves to take advantage of them. In today’s challenging economy the more skill and abilities you master and successfully integrate into your work life, the better your chance of enhancing and advancing your own interests as well as those of your library. So let me change the initial question to: What are you doing to remain the information expert in your professional organization?

To continue reading Deidra's article, CLICK TO READ FULL COLUMN.

Thoughts from a Librarian on Turning 50

Michael Saint-Onge, LexisNexis Team Lead for the LexisNexis Librarian Relations Group, writes about the challenges of change, taking stock, and thinking about the future as he turns 50 in this Librarian Relations Group Monthly Column entitled: True Confessions: Personal and Professional Reflections on Turning Fifty.

Here's an excerpt:

I recently celebrated my fiftieth birthday, and no, it wasn’t traumatic — no midlife crisis, no expensive little sportscar purchased to compensate for my waning youth (actually, at fifty, I think it is now fully waned…). But there is something about reaching a milestone that makes one sit up and notice. Life is good, thankfully, but I think it’s a perfect opportunity to “take stock” and figure out where I’ve been and where I am going, both personally and professionally.

It is obvious that there have been some profound changes in our profession during my lifetime. Can you imagine what a law librarian from 1959 would think of a modern law firm library? I think her first question would be “What happened to all the books?” but she couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much information we now have at our fingertips. And we don’t even have to go fifty years back to marvel at these changes. Just in the twenty-three years I’ve been a law librarian, we’ve seen incredible advances. (Have you ever noticed that when a bunch of librarians of a certain age get together, we start to sound like those two old men in the balcony on The Muppets? “In my day, we didn’t have the World Wide Web. We had to FTP files.” “Yeah? In my day the only computer we had was that huge Lexis® terminal in the corner of the library with the rolled paper we had to cut down to size so the attorneys could read it.” It’s the librarian’s equivalent of bragging about having to walk to school in the snow, barefoot.)...

CLICK TO READ FULL COLUMN.

Information Professionals as Intelligence Analysts: Making the Transition

Thanks to Dr. Edna Reid, Associate Professor, Clarion University, Department of Library Science, for the this article:  Information Professionals as Intelligence Analysts: Making the Transition. This article was originally published in the 2009 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Change: Managing It, Surviving It, Thriving on It. The 2009 edition includes 60 articles and other submissions provided by more than 50 contributors from librarians in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.

Read on...

Introduction

Do you identify, synthesize, and analyze trends, threats, and opportunities in an industry or organization? Do you go beyond what you know and gather information to dissect an unfamiliar situation into parts to determine how they relate to one another or to an overall problem?¹

If your answers to these questions are yes then the reforms in the intelligence community (IC) and enhanced recognition of the value of open source² (unclassified) information can provide new opportunities for you! According to Vee Herrington, Chief of the U.S. Army Intelligence Library, Fort Huachuca, there are emerging roles for information professionals as open source experts and champions. Accordingly, this article provides a follow-up to Herrington’s discussions about the need for information professionals to acquire intelligence analysis skills and become active members of intelligence analysis teams. It describes shortage of intelligence analysts and uses Bloom’s taxonomy to describe the analytical skills required of intelligence analysts so information professionals can see how these map to their competencies, experiences, and career aspirations.

Shortage of Intelligence Analysts The massive post-9/11 reforms in the intelligence community (IC) and establishment of an Open Source Center³ (OSC) in order to effectively respond to terrorist groups’ increasing sophistication in using the Internet signaled that it is time to further demystify and enhance the visibility of an under-the-radar career: intelligence analyst. With the sharp increase in the size, complexities, and its mission-critical tasks the U.S. intelligence community is experiencing a critical shortage of intelligence analysts. And that shortage doesn’t seem to be abating! To be sure, analysts are needed in many of the 16 intelligence community agencies (e.g., FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA) particularly in newly established departments and agencies after 9/11 (Shrader, 2004; Losey, 2007). For instance, despite the current bleak economic environment, the FBI announced that it needs to immediately fill over 3,000 positions including intelligence analysts, language specialists, heath care analysts, and records management professionals (Frieden, 2009).

Although the U.S. intelligence community has poured millions of dollars into educational programs (e.g., certificate in intelligence analysis, summer camp for high school students) during the last decade, the number of educational programs in intelligence analysis remains woefully inadequate (Willing, 2006). Given the ‘battered’ reputation of the IC some educators, including library school administrators, shy away from discussions on implementations of intelligence analysis or ‘analytics’ programs. Others ask what an intelligence analyst is and how intelligence analysis fits within the broader academic context. Some simply do not understand the concept of an intelligence analyst notwithstanding the career demands, challenges, competencies, and opportunities associated with it.

Read the entire article starting on page 40 of the 2009 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Change: Managing It, Surviving It, Thriving on It.

___________________________________________________________________

¹ See Wilson, 2006

² Open source is unclassified information such as news articles, books, and foreign language reports. See Steele, 2006

³ OSC is the former Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) that is under CIA. See Bean, 2007

Government Info Pro Podcast 2009 Replay: Interview with Andrea Muto on the Afghanistan Rule of Law Project

During AALL, this past summer, I had a chance to sit down with Andrea Muto, recently back from working on the Afghanistan Rule of Law Project (ARoLP) and interview her for the Government Info Pro Podcast.  If you haven't gotten a chance to listen to this wonderful interview with Andrea, please give it a listen now. I know that you are going to enjoy hearing about some of Andrea Muto's experiences as an information professional working in Afghanistan. And by the way, Andrea is back in Afghanistan and has promised me another interview upon her return.

MP3 File

You can listen to the podcast in three ways:

• right from the embedded player in this post
• download the mp3 from the link right below the player
• subscribe to the Government Info Pro Podcast on iTunes

 

 

SHOW NOTES:

Here is a short description of this project as provided to me by Andrea:

The Afghanistan Rule of Law Project (ARoLP) was funded by USAID, and implemented by Checchi & Company Consulting from 2005-2009. ARoLP was the US presence in the justice sector, first working with the Ministry of Justice (legislative drafting training, organizing and publishing laws), then later tasked with Supreme Court training and administrative reform (developing judges' training curriculum and materials, collaborating on writing the first Judicial Code of Conduct, publishing Supreme Court Cases). The development of the law library at the Independent National Legal Training Center (INLTC) rounded out judicial training and curriculum components.

The INLTC is located on the campus of Kabul University, situated between the Law & Political Science and Shari'a law faculties. It is a quasi-governmental organization, built by the Italian Embassy, administratively staffed by by the NGO International Developmental Law Organization and run by a Board whose representatives include the Supreme Court, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Attorney General's Office. USAID was invited to design and staff the first full-service law library in the country at the INLTC, since its Rule of Law project was heavily involved with both the Supreme Court and MoJ, and because its international staff included a law librarian (myself) who had joined ARoLP in February 2007.

The INLTC Law Library is actually full of firsts. It is the first library to catalog its collection in three languages (Dari, Pashtu and English) using Koha open-source software. It is the first law library to provide patrons legal research training, and a nascent version of first CALR courses. It is the first whose staff wrote the first Dari-Pasto legal research manual in the country in more than 30 years. It is the first to offer its resources via a web site in three languages (www.inltclawlibrary.org).

Here are some additional links of interest:

• The INLTC Law Library's web site (Icon for English is in the upper-left corner of the page) 
• USAID releases regarding the opening of the law library: http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Article.386.aspx and  http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Article.390.aspx
• USAID follow-up release regarding the library's progress
• USAID release describing ARoLP
• FCIL announces Masoud has won its scholarship
• The INLTC Law Library is part of a group of world-wide using Koha open-source cataloging software

Also, take a look at this post out on the Pace Law Library Podcast site: On Law Librarianship in Afghanistan. It has a good summary of the AALL Foreign, Comparative and International Law Special Interest Section (FCIL-SIS) program: The Past, Present, and Future of the Law Library and Librarianship in Afghanistan: The Challenges and Rewards of Building a Library After 30 Years of War. Among the resources listed there is a link to a podcast of the actual program. I attended this session and can tell you that it was one of the standout programs of AALL 2009. and that this podcast will be well worth a listen. Speakers were Mr. Ahmadullah Masoud, Andrea Muto, and Blair Kaufmann.

Government Info Pro Podcast: Episode 12

During AALL, this summer, I had a chance to sit down with Andrea Muto, recently back from working on the Afghanistan Rule of Law Project (ARoLP) and interview her for the Government Info Pro Podcast.  

I know that you are going to enjoy hearing about some of Andrea Muto's experiences as an information professional working in Afghanistan.

MP3 File

You can listen to the podcast in three ways:

• right from the embedded player in this post
• download the mp3 from the link right below the player
• subscribe to the Government Info Pro Podcast on iTunes

 

 

SHOW NOTES:

Here is a short description of this project as provided to me by Andrea:

The Afghanistan Rule of Law Project (ARoLP) was funded by USAID, and implemented by Checchi & Company Consulting from 2005-2009. ARoLP was the US presence in the justice sector, first working with the Ministry of Justice (legislative drafting training, organizing and publishing laws), then later tasked with Supreme Court training and administrative reform (developing judges' training curriculum and materials, collaborating on writing the first Judicial Code of Conduct, publishing Supreme Court Cases). The development of the law library at the Independent National Legal Training Center (INLTC) rounded out judicial training and curriculum components.

The INLTC is located on the campus of Kabul University, situated between the Law & Political Science and Shari'a law faculties. It is a quasi-governmental organization, built by the Italian Embassy, administratively staffed by by the NGO International Developmental Law Organization and run by a Board whose representatives include the Supreme Court, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Attorney General's Office. USAID was invited to design and staff the first full-service law library in the country at the INLTC, since its Rule of Law project was heavily involved with both the Supreme Court and MoJ, and because its international staff included a law librarian (myself) who had joined ARoLP in February 2007.

The INLTC Law Library is actually full of firsts. It is the first library to catalog its collection in three languages (Dari, Pashtu and English) using Koha open-source software. It is the first law library to provide patrons legal research training, and a nascent version of first CALR courses. It is the first whose staff wrote the first Dari-Pasto legal research manual in the country in more than 30 years. It is the first to offer its resources via a web site in three languages (www.inltclawlibrary.org).

Here are some additional links of interest:

• The INLTC Law Library's web site (Icon for English is in the upper-left corner of the page) 
• USAID releases regarding the opening of the law library: http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Article.386.aspx and  http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Article.390.aspx
• USAID follow-up release regarding the library's progress
• USAID release describing ARoLP
• FCIL announces Masoud has won its scholarship
• The INLTC Law Library is part of a group of world-wide using Koha open-source cataloging software

Also, take a look at this post out on the Pace Law Library Podcast site: On Law Librarianship in Afghanistan. It has a good summary of the AALL Foreign, Comparative and International Law Special Interest Section (FCIL-SIS) program: The Past, Present, and Future of the Law Library and Librarianship in Afghanistan: The Challenges and Rewards of Building a Library After 30 Years of War. Among the resources listed there is a link to a podcast of the actual program. I attended this session and can tell you that it was one of the standout programs of AALL 2009. and that this podcast will be well worth a listen. Speakers were Mr. Ahmadullah Masoud, Andrea Muto, and Blair Kaufmann.

Gardening and Librarianship

LIz Peoples, LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant, writes about some similarities between gardening and librarianship in the LexisNexis Librarian Relations Group Monthly Column for May 2009 entitled: April Showers Bring May Flowers.

Here's an excerpt:

The saying goes that "April showers bring May flowers" … I am a gardener and in the early spring I get excited to clean away the leaves and winter gunk and see what has made it through another New England winter (read ice, snow, sleet.) As spring creeps up I begin to receive more seed and garden catalogs and magazines which I peruse and plan out new color and plant combinations for my flower beds, vegetable plots and combo containers. I think that there are several valuable connections or similarities between gardening and the work we do as librarians—hear me out on this subject...

CLICK TO READ FULL COLUMN.

Web 2.0 and the Global Community

Suzanne Morrison, Branch Librarian, Eighth Circuit, North and South Dakota, talks about Web 2.0 and the power it provides us to cross boundaries and collaborate at a whole new level in this post. Her unique experience in traveling to far off places around the world and providing herself as a resource for global colleagues for a month each year makes Suzanne a fascinating person and this post a fascinating read.

This article was originally published in the 2008 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond. The 2008 edition includes 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 40 contributors from libraries in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.

Read on...

First the World Wide Web transforms our lives, and the entire information community shifts and changes. And just when the World Wide Web becomes familiar, the techies jerk the carpet out from underneath us and replace it with Web 2.0. What is this new technology? Gazing into my trustworthy crystal ball, I see murky water, moving and changing. Can this be what it is all about? Don’t we have enough of information moving and changing? And then, I get it. The strength of this new technology lies within its ability to collaborate across timelines and continents, between known and unknown colleagues. The future of this technology fuses the global community.

And how does this affect me? I work with the federal courts eleven months of the year, earning my daily bread and enjoying my profession. But, the other month, I travel on a magic carpet that whisks me to exotic countries---Albania, Kosovo, the West Bank, Central Asia, Jordan, and most recently in Afghanistan. These are the days when I actually meet some of those unknown colleagues--law librarians, professors and students in developing countries. Exhilarating as this is, continuing the dialogue and collaborating upon my return is just as fulfilling.

And how does this work? After three weeks working in Jordan, I continued my dialogue with a law professor from Jordan, and together we fanned the dream of introducing legal research and writing courses in the Jordan law schools. After nearly a year of email discussion, sending scanned articles on American teaching methodology and course descriptions, Professor Nisreen Mahasneh designed a class on legal research. She gathered professors from six universities in Jordan and proposed this addition to their legal curriculum. After each meeting with her colleagues, Professor Nisreen sent me the discussion minutes, posed additional questions, and requested input. My return messages focused on methods using legal research in classroom projects, introducing students to the law library, using consistent citation, designing a grading matrix, and exploring how American methods could work within their legal system. I encouraged her to build upon the Jordanean strengths and borrow the methods and ideas that worked for them. Less than a month ago, she sent an email telling me that all six universities agreed to add a legal research course to their curriculum in the fall of 2008. We are already collaborating on a writing course.

And what if there are severe conditions? In January, I met with professors from the Kabul University of Law in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Shariah law faculty needed a law library designed to fit their collection. Working in a cold shell without electricity or blueprints, we stepped off the area and transformed it to grid paper. We collaborated on what should go where and what was necessary to accomplish this dream. The Internet provided examples of tables and shelving and circulation desks for local carpenters. The most exciting experience was the morning spent in the storage area housing the books. We used our cell phones to light the pitch dark room until one of the carpenters arrived with a kerosene lantern. Thousands of ancient religious legal documents spilled from boxes and littered the floor. Old metal lockers pockmarked with bullet holes contained books and files. Seeing the collection and experiencing the reverence for the printed word by the Afghans has propelled me to continue this collaboration through email.

Acting as a resource to our global colleagues makes me a better librarian. The creativity to think outside my everyday box forces me to focus on the necessities—for their libraries as well as for my own. An Ethiopian Proverb says it all:

“When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.”

Let librarians unite globally to build services, spread information, and connect the world.

Serendipity

Rhonda Keaton, LexisNexis Librarian Research Consultant shares her thoughts on serendipity from both a personal and professional perspective in the December 2008 Monthly Column over at the LexisNexis Info Pro site. As usual, Rhonda writes an interesting column in which she shares herself and her ideas in a highly readable way.

Here's an excerpt:

And the advent of digital libraries is truly exciting.  No longer limited to a space or to physical objects like books and journals, law librarians can amplify the opportunity for serendipity to occur any time and any place a person has a network connection.  Non-legal resources and current awareness stories can spark an idea, create stimulation and cross pollinization that can trigger active minds to make important connections from seemingly unrelated information.   A new term for the process has been christened, “digitdipity.”

CLICK HERE to read it all!

But I Don’t Want To Have a Standard Deviation …

Bob Farina, Library Director, Trademark Law Library, shares his thoughts on the power of numbers in the life of the information professional, complete with original illustration, in this guest post. Bob's articles are always fun to read and filled with good ideas. Read on....

Did you ever think that everything in your life boiled down to the number 23? If you didn’t think to yourself, “Oh Christmas, not that load of bull …” then you have a future in some kind of bean-counting existence. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it can put food on the table for some. But that’s not what librarians do. We’re people persons. Ewwwwwwwww, not! Well, maybe a little, but that Streisand thing is so 60s, ya know?! Anyway, my point being, no matter what mode of existence you reside in within your workaday life, get ready to quantify what it is you’re doing or you will be counting the beans on the table that are available for you to eat.

Luckily, that particular light (numbers, numbers, numbers!) went on in my head at a relatively early stage of my career and it just so happened that I eventually learned to use numbers to figure some things out. Depending on your point of view, statistics can tell you different things; it’s the half-empty, half-full dichotomy. My point of view is always to emphasize the numbers or stats that provide the most positive, life-affirming aspects to what is going on in my little piece of the world. Is it important to count how many people use your library? If so, don’t just count heads, count hits! Find out how many internet and intranet hits your web pages are getting, how many items are having to be re-shelved, how many more bookmarks you’re having to get printed up every quarter. How many searches are you doing? Are they easy or hard and how do you prove it? Do your searches beget more searches – is that all one search or is each one another statistic? By counting the number of resources used to fulfill each search request, the level of complexity may better reveal itself.

Rule #1: You decide what numbers are important, and present them accordingly.
Most of the time, everyone tells you to give them simplistic raw numbers – the number of: (1) bodies visiting your library; (2) searches performed; (3) books circulated; (4) interlibrary loans completed, etc. Want more than the average raise? Use your professional expertise and some common sense - do some research and break down those gross numbers. If for example, you are working for a legal organization, don’t you think the managing partners would want to know what law office groups are making the most use of the library? If the Intellectual Property Group is your best customer, wouldn’t you want to bolster your collection development activities in that area to keep the numbers up? Sounds like win-win to me. If you’re a staff librarian (not the boss), the same rule applies. Come up with some ideas to help the boss see what’s going on in order to plan for more positive results. Exert some initiative and show interest in your chosen profession by documenting what you are doing to improve the organization and find a way to quantify it.

THERE'S MORE! READ ALL OF BOB'S RULES ON MAKING THE MOST OF THE NUMBERS...