Indianapolis Museum of Art

We slept in and left Anderson in a torrential rain--something they desperately needed. Got to the museum as it opened at 11a. My sister, Ruth, a photographer, had worked there 20 years managing the rights to reproduce images from their collection. She loved her work and loved the museum. And their collection is wonderful. Jessie said that the Chicago Art Institute had paintings by famous artists but they were not necessarily good representations of the artist's work. In Indianapolis, she saw lesser known works by well known artists but the works did reflect what the artist was known for. She was pleased to see what they had, including three by Georgia O'Keefe. She also enjoyed (as did I) Indiana's own TC Steele. So we had a good visit. I hadn't donated to the museum on Ruth's death so I made a point of Christmas shopping today in their gift shop and found for myself some lovely turquoise. So we have paid our respects.

Jessie also found us a great pizza place downtown with good food and free copies of The Onion. We both decided we'd been too long from home and healthy eating so we continued on to Cincinnati but will head home tomorrow. I've already picked out a kayak trip and am wrestling with the electronic maps to take the backroads home. So this is the last of the blog until the next adventure. We'll be meandering home down Federal 52 along the Ohio River--going to Carolina in our minds until we get there. Can't wait. 

Intergenerational Communication and MEBates again on Marketing for Introverts

Two good sessions today. I'm in Anderson, Indiana, very late after a wonderful visit with an old college chum I hadn't seen in person since I'd graduated back in the time of Pangea. So this will be quick.

The first session was on intergenerational communication. Basically, after much discussion and brainstorming with the group, the speaker concluded that generations are only the context, not the core issue. Intergenerational differences are as old as humans, the current situation seems to be a transition between an Industrial Age mindset and an Information Age mindset and that culturally, we haven't all made the transition to the new age.  She says that a failure to communicate is the root of all office problems and that we can overcome that by making the effort to ask questions of and getting to know our co-workers. She also says that managers need to be explicit in stating their expectations. The core behaviors expected of all employees of any generation center around a) manners and kindness b) pride in one's work and c) willingness to be of help and service.  Defining these norms for the workplace, communicating them clearly, and being willing to put self aside to listen to one another are key. She offered a handout that included the four steps to good communication. 

The second session was another by Mary Ellen Bates on marketing for introverts. Boy I'm whupped. Hope this makes sense. A lot of this is about carefully choosing words. The idea is to talk about what you value in ways that are authentic and come from the core of why you love what you do. The other part of this is to NOT talk about features (ie. what services the library offers) but to ALWAYS talk about benefits to the listener. 

So if conversation is a ping pong game, when someone asks you what you do, don't say "I'm a librarian"--that stops the ball. The best response is to say, "I just love my job, and this past week I got to do (this really cool thing)  that resulted in helping someone (do this)." This gives the other player something about you to be interested in and wanting to learn more.

She also said to never say you went to library school, always reply that you went to graduate school as folks give that more weight. It's all about being conscious of assigning meaningful value to what we do.

Ie. Don't say "We do online searching" or talk about "search results". Instead, "We do in depth searching for content Google can't find". Search results are "information analysis". Other good phrases include:

• We bring insights from the outside
• We go deeper than Google to bring you analysis you can use
• We deliver information when decisions need to be made
• We make critical information findable
• We reduce risk through better understanding
• I help people find and use information
• I enable staff to work more strategically/effectively/efficiently

I'm sure you get the drift. She also suggested having prepared in advance a three sentence elevator speech for when someone asks what you do based on real events you've made anonymous. 1) Give a one sentence description of a client's situation 2) Give a one sentence description of your deliverable 3) End with a one sentence description of what the client was able to do with the information. So when someone asks what you do, you can say, "Let me tell you what I just did . . . 1) 2) 3)

And if that makes sense you are a better man than I am. Hitting the hay. It was a great conference. I learned a lot about better clarifying to others what I do and why it matters whether it is reporting carefully thought out metrics that illustrate the value of my work, or answering a casual question at a party. We covered a lot of ground about making our work meaningful to others. We'll talk more about it Monday. The rest of this week is vacation.

Miss you all!

  The Cochrane Collaboration

The symbol for the Cochrane Reviews (above) is the two Cs for Cochrane Collaboration but the graph in the middle represents an early review on the benefits of giving steroids to mothers who are delivering pre-term. This review changed clinical practice and saved babies lives. A Dr. Scherer of the Cochrane Center gave an excellent history and overview of the CC. Our friend, Claire, from APLIC, was a co-presentor as she does searches for Cochrane Reviews and will be a wonderful resource when Allison begins helping Dalia with the reviews she hopes to do. Fortunately for us, The Cochrane Handbook of Systematic Reviews of Interventions as well as training videos are available online. In-person training is available twice a year through the US Cochrane Center if we need it. Review Manager is their online software and template for preparing reviews. ARCHIE is an online directory of collaborators and a file sharing site--all available on the Cochrane site.

The United States Government has published Finding What Works in Health Care: Standards for Systematic Reviews. If we don't have it we should probably order it. I'm sure Dalia is very familiar with all of this, and Allison, the online materials are all available when you need to start checking them out. Knowing Claire was just an email away was the best news.

They think of the dangdest  things here . . .

I'd not seen one of these before. It's in the bathroom stall. You strap your young'un to it so you can set a spell in peace. Wrigley's gum is made in Chicago and the Illinois SLA has 500 packs of it to pass out. And apparently McCormick Place is famous for several dancing fountains. Here is another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mniFFtW17TY&feature=plcp

It's been a learning experience on multiple levels.  Oh, and it Guy Sinclair, not St. Claire. I was tired last night.

Mary Ellen Bates spoke again this morning as my 8a session. Her title was From Info Pro to Info Hero: Five ways to turn info into insight. It was an excellent expansion of her 15 minute presentation last night. My instructor, Ellen Dickey, at CCCC put me on to Mary Ellen years ago and I've watched her with interest. Apparently so have many others. You can see from the pix that it was standing room only. She talks about how important it is to add value to your work by asking these questions during the reference interview:

• How could I make this more useful to you?
• What can I do to help you accomplish that?
• What else can I do to make this more valuable?

She says to be a taste pushy and use the marketing tool FUD if necessary (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)--by asking quietly, "You used Google for THAT?!" and follow up with "Could I send you what I would have found?" if needed.

She says each reference report needs to begin with a statement of the question and then, "Interestingly, I found that . . ." by highlighting what was important and also where there were gaps. She also urges using visuals as often as possible, lots of white space, and offering to use the client's template if it is helpful. She emphasized again that the format of the results should reflect the quality of the work--ie. like not wearing flip flops to a job interview. 

She suggests three word cloud generators as a great way to emphasize aspects of the results (with some weeding of the obviously overstated words).

• wordle.net
• worditout.com
• tagxedo.com

And she says if you are doing something for the first time and are a bit uncertain, tell you client you'll do a beta version and see how it comes out. Most folks get that and will accept that response. 

The 11a session on KM Across the Health Care Spectrum was not so helpful. Mostly the three panelists emphasized that the KM terminology is murky and success with KM initiatives in HC settings, which often have a lot of turnover, are culturally dependent and a Sisyphean task. One noted that it takes 17 years to ingrain a new best practice in patient care and that while 94% of businesses recognize the need for KM, 70% of KM initiatives fail. I am bringing home a bibliography of recommended readings but two books were particularly called out and Kerry may want to look into ordering them if we don't have them:

• Bennis: Tribal Leadership
• Rearden: It's All Politics

I'm pretty burned out at this point--four days of listening to folks struggling with developing professional recognition in an ungrateful world (after four years of graduate school emphasizing the same) is wearing thin.

I skipped the 60 Apps in 60 Minutes mostly because we don't use a lot of apps and we probably were only interested in about 8 of the 60 Web Sites in 60 Minutes and I wasn't sure how much more I could get in my head. I'll hit the Cochrane Reviews session at 4p and that's it for today. One or two sessions tomorrow and I'm off for Ft. Wayne. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI1SswI9Mzk&feature=plcp
YouTube link to fountain video. How do they do this??

Craaaaaaaazy

I hope the video of these crazy fountains comes through. They send pieces of water through the air. Amazing. But (and) not as amazing as the figs wrapped in bacon served during the afternoon reception. All work and no play tomorrow--the reception break this afternoon was really appreciated. 

I got to hear Mary Ellen Bates in the Factiva booth. She's written about Free vs Fee information http://www.factiva.com/campaigns/2011/infopro/?from=econtent_bnrad_infopro14nov2011 . The article is titled The True Value of Information: Making the case for value-added aggregators. She offers this article to justify to management the cost of database access and she notes that no one can get unfiltered data from Google any more (she had several friends do the same search from differing IP addresses and they all got different results in Google News). Anyway, she does suggest checking out PLoS. She reiterates everyone else here about tying reference responses to mission values but made some additional good suggestions. She said that during the reference interview we needed to ask how the information will be used and to try to look for ways to add value in mission alignment. She also said that our reference responses needed to be presented in a format that implies value. I think we discussed how at CCL, there was a standard reference format for reference responses, and if they were printed out, they used letterhead. The idea was that the appearance of the report--electronic or paper--reflected the value of the information enclosed--like wearing the right clothes to a job interview. This would be simple enough for us to do and I think really would add value to what we send out, just in terms of readability. Some of our cut and paste-ings are pretty awful to read and look really haphazard.

The final session from today was on Web Scale Discovery, "discovery" being the new, cool term for search.  Apparently there are vendors now who are aggregating content that includes both a library's catalog and the content of its databases so that all can be searched from a single search box. Large university libraries are migrating to this search type and some are hiring "ethnographers" to study how faculty and students interact with the search software. Most of this talk was about how to identify a good vendor, test products and what the ethnographer needs to do. Not exactly our cup of tea, but interesting to know its out there and what the promises/pitfalls are.  Andrew Asher has created a toolkit for evaluating how to improve a user interface we may want to read at some point that has come out of some of this new interface development.

Off to supper at Lloyd's (on Lower Wacker Drive, of all places ??!!??) with an old school chum from high school and college. 

Fountain of Knowledge

Jessie is at the Art Institute today. This is the view from the front of the Conference Center out to the Lake. 

My 8a session was on Taxonomy Design. I thought I was going to learn something about creating a taxonomy. I was disappointed to learn that he was not going to address creating taxonomies, rather he was talking about designing a taxonomy project. But (I mean AND) my disappointment disappeared because what he gave was an excellent talk on project management. He gave me lots of ideas for organizing the EndNote project. I took more notes about my ideas than about what he described, but (oops, AND) it was a good session. I learned what a Swim Lane Plan was and also what a RACI Plan was and they may prove useful herding our particular group of cats.

The next session was Guy St. Claire talking Knowledge Management. It started at 10a. After about 20 minutes, I slipped out to a 10:30a session on 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. Mr. St. Claire's talk sounded more like a cheer-leading session than something informational and I think I made the better choice. The speakers went through 60 online tools, all of which were very interesting, a few of which may be really useful to us personally and professionally. KLOUT tracks and evaluates your web presence on social media. If COMMS isn't using something like this, they make like to know about it. TEKSERV buys and resells Apple Products (this one is for the kids and their old iPods or new toys they'd like to buy). KNOEMA is a dataset site we need to explore. The AARP Bookstore has lots of Wiley books (including the Dummies series) for free check out. STILLNESSBUDDY provides stress relief at the computer. And EUTOPIC archives web links and screen captures for future reference. I currently use Delicious, but this one sounds like it holds more  types of information and may be more sophisticated.

I do wish Julia were here to help me discern what is really useful to us in terms of the vendor booths. I don't want to bring home a lot of junk, but don't want to miss something really useful. I have been to the NLM booth and praised their PubMed training we just took and got a list of their mobile apps. I went by WTCox and thanked them for their good service. But I'm not seeing a lot of new stuff (which I hope means we really are on top of things). I did pick up a brochure on an elegant table top scanner for digitizing documents with some sophisticated software for archiving. 

I also talked with the Freepint.com folks who "publish practical articles and reports about information practice, content and strategy".  There is some free content on their site that may indicate how useful the subscription might be. I also spoke with a women from Eastview.com. These folks aggregate statistics and also obtain in-country publications and government documents for countries ranging from Eastern Europe through the Middle East, Asia and North Africa. She's to send me some links.

I skipped my session on the history of Chicago, having had the boat tour. Headed back shortly for a 4p session on Web-Scale Discovery Implementation with the End User in Mind. I can't wait ;-)