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 ;-)

Chinatown

My old college chum, Kathy, is now a PhD psychologist doing neurofeedback here in Chicago. I get to see her occasionally when she visits with her mother in a retirement community in Lexington, NC. Her mother is a librarian and it's always a treat to visit with them. Kathy's  husband is Chinese and sailed in the Merchant Marine before settling in doing mechanical work for a local private school. He's retired now but they both have interesting tales to tell. So Kathy offered to take us to Chinatown to visit the local shops. I have a new Buddha figurine and a Tshirt for Ben. Local restaurants fill their windows with food. Chinese epicure shops offer exotic ingredients, including dried abalone for $830/lb. I settled for a wonderful watermelon ice at lunch. 

Her husband is a wonderful cook. I asked her if he shopped here to buy his ingredients. So she took me to his favorite grocery store and among many other things, this is what we saw: 

The frogs were the size of softballs. There were crabs, eels and a wide variety of fresh and dried fish. They also had turtles and conch shells with the critter in them. 

Fortunately, the Taste of Chicago reception at the conference was much more normal fare. I ran into Mary Lane and had a good chat with her. I also caught a glimpse of Kei Malesky (I did tell you I had a quilting class with her sister-in-law at the Folkschool?). Didn't see anyone else I knew but specifically went to the InMagic booth and shook hands with Mike Segur's boss and told him how great Mike was and how grateful we were to have his help.  

Since I'm moving and have a taste of environmental concern, I've not been grabbing "gimme" items from the booths. And I'm trying to be judicious with brochures. But I am scanning for useful things tho so far, I've not seem much that relates to us that we don't know about already.

Still, lots of excitement. The place does not seem very full considering the size of the hall. I suspect folks are still arriving. We'll know tomorrow. 

Sessions begin at 8a. and end at 5:30p. We've been invited to supper with another school chum from high school and college who lives in Racine, WI now and will take the train in to meet us at a nearby restaurant. We'll get a real taste of Chicago then and a good visit. 

Looking for new insights . . .

Measures that Matter

This morning we attempted to drive to the Field Museum and find the parking deck for the Navy Pier. The traffic was impossible, the road construction baffled the GPS and the conclusion was to go back to the hotel and let Jessie take the bus after lunch to the Aquarium near the Field Museum. After my class we set out again for the Navy Pier where we had tickets to take a sightseeing boat up the Chicago River and take in the architecture. The time frame required taking the car again, but after some librarianly research, we had a way around the construction and made it handily to the dock. I really don't travel well and navigating the food situation is almost as stressful as the crazy traffic, but the river trip was wonderful and well worth it. The buildings are spectacular, the river is the place to see them, the evening was lovely and cool.

My class today was excellent and has left me convinced we need to totally rethink the data we collect and also the services we provide. She said so much it will be hard to summarize--little things like always saying "and" instead of "but" because "but" is a negative turn-off and "and" connects ideas in a positive way. And big things like aligning services AND metrics carefully--and after investigation and conversation with decision makers about their views on the organization's larger goals--to reflect and enhance the organizational goals. Every service we offer needs to answer the question "What difference does it make?" and each service needs to have metrics designed into it from the beginning that track goals and demonstrate that difference.

The process of designing meaningful metrics begins with understanding their context in relationship to the organization's goals, passing through the development cycle on the left and ending with communicating results to stakeholders only in terms of how the library has met the larger goals.

She stressed the importance of NOT focusing on stats except to use them internally to improve service, but to report the impacts of library services--qualitative rather than quantitative values.

She also noted that librarians take on new roles without giving up anything and can end up off track and not doing the important things well. Which is why she stressed evaluating services against the organizational goals and being willing to lay down those that don't directly relate. She said by demonstrating the choice to build services that are truly in mission alignment, the remaining services are more highly valued by management.

She talked about Balanced Scorecard evaluation and the Logic Model, but the bottom line was that everything we do has to positively answer the question, "What difference does it make?" and any metric we collect has to demonstrate that it does make a difference. As we are committing to taking on new and more projects--Endnote, photo archives, wikis, Spanish web portal, I think we really need to focus on these question before we commit to these projects. AND we need to follow her advice about designing metrics at the outset that demonstrate value and set specific targets and goals to assure we are on track.

I really am concerned we are overreaching in our commitments and would encourage us to pause and take the time to do this evaluation. We have not in the past, as in other organizations, been challenged to justify our work, but we are undergoing changes in management and funding and I think it would be smart of us to be ahead of this curve. I volunteer the barn for a planning retreat.

On this note, Jessie is headed downstairs for a Corona for us to split and hit the hay. Short session tomorrow then two beastly long days on Mon & Tues. Will try to keep it succinct.

We made it!

Still learning how to use GasBuddy, we bought gas where we could easily get on and off the highway. The traffic was surprisingly heavy. Those population scientists may be on to something . . .

We are on a nosebleed floor in the Hyatt attached to the McCormick Place Convention Center tho attached is a loose interpretation. (The elevators consistently pop our ears and one of them sticks on the 27th floor) It might be a mile from our room to the SLA section of this place which probably is as big as a small NC town. You can get there from here, and do it indoors, but I'm glad I brought my walking shoes. We did walk the building tonight to locate my class tomorrow, the registration area, and food vendors. The place was totally empty except for a couple of security guards. It absolutely dwarfs the place we were for APLIC in DC. I'll be curious to see it busy and full tomorrow. 

Folks have been basically friendly and helpful. There is a Metra station in the building for Jessie's convenience. The reservation was garbled and lots of incidentals will be automatically charged to the room so Gina and I will have a good chat over my checkbook when I get back. And I may be able to talk them into parsing it all out before I check out on Wednesday. At this point, I'm glad they figured out how to give us the same room all 5 days so I wasn't going to be fussy about the bill in that moment. So we are here and settling in and making friends with the Concierge.

The trip was mostly uneventful Interstate except for a run through downtown Indianapolis and around the Monument Circle, which Jessie had never seen and I hadn't seen in years. At Christmas, they string lights from the top down to the fountains (the picture is only the base, it is a substantial obelisk) which become skating rinks and they sometimes have horse drawn carriages out. A very good urban revitalization project.

In northern Indiana, in the middle of the BFE, there was an enormous, meandering windfarm with large fields of corn and soybeans underneath. Look closely and you can see windmills to the horizon--it was so in all directions, stuck here and there between fields and barns. Pretty incredible to see, difficult to photograph from the road. But encouraging. I suspect good for the farmers as well as the environment.

So with the time change, I'm off to bed early, Chicago time. See you tomorrow!

Image courtesy of http://DailyClipArt.net

Off to the races!

We are in Lexington, KY not far from Man 'O War Boulevard. It was nearly midnight when we arrived, courtesy of major slow-downs on I-40. The Scootabout did us proud, crossing Black Mountain handily and averaging 38+mpg overall so far. I am amazed that such a little car was not buffeted by the big trucks, she actually feels quite secure on the road. 

But we've crossed other mountains as well and have a few left ahead. Most of them learning curves. I have a relatively new phone which is now loaded with multiple apps for traveling, navigating the conference, and mapping the Chicago Metro. I've loaded templates for my workshops and NCSLA participant lists, hotel and conference registration forms on my laptop. And then there is the issue of actually navigating downtown Chicago and a conference center the size of Staley once we get there. So while I'll be learning about new library technologies in workshops, I'll be learning to use new technologies to get there. And the learning has begun.

What I've learned so far: 

*The hands free phone works great if a) you took the time to actually properly label friends' phone numbers (work, cell, home, etc) when you entered them into your iPhone and b) their names are short and easy to pronounce

*My Garmin GPS works better than the SYNC GPS mostly because it's faster to download and doesn't require a reliable phone connection or a computer to preprogram in advance

*Do NOT try to use voice commands with the GPS on, "Recalculating" seriously messes with the car's limited vocabulary, and when the two are arguing, it's really easy to miss your turn--not unlike having children in the car. Not a happy throwback.

*Many apps do not a consensus make--Ford's expensive SYNC technology offers traffic reports that in no way agree with the free WAZE phone app, which only really works if there is another WAZEr in the area and that person is truthful. Neither one was really accurate and we still got stuck in traffic. Airball for technology.

No rush today. We can't get into our room in Chicago until 3p so we'll mosey up and maybe practice riding the Metro tonight. And checkout GasBuddy on the way . . .