Pivot Points For Change: Libraries And Librarians

March 4, 2010 · Posted in Change · View Comments

The fabulous Buffy Hamilton gave her Pivot Points of Change presentation at my library’s Staff Day last week. The points were inspired by post from Seth Godin in which he states changing everything is too difficult. Buffy applied this to libraries and librarians for the 9 pivot points of change. This is a slightly modified version of her original 9 pivot points of change for school librarians.

Instead of thinking you can only participate in face to face conferences, consider how you can participate virtually
Keep your traditional means of connecting with patrons and colleagues, but innovate at every possible touch point through social media and social networking
Keep reading your print journals, but use a feed aggregator or information portal to access and organize your favorite blogs, journals, podcasts, youtube videos, and twitter rss feeds to stay on the cutting edge
Keep networking with colleagues face to face, but cultivate a personal learning network to broaden your PLN (Personal Learning Network) to include librarians and other professionals from around the world who can inform your thinking, practice, and philosophy
Keep your traditional productivity tools, but use cloud computing to encourage collaboration and information sharing
Continue sharing your library program goals and reports through traditional formats, but also compose these in a different format, such as a mindmap, video, or other multimedia/visualization medium
Keep your traditional services and materials, but expand those services and “containers” of materials to reflect patron needs
Keep positing literacy as a primary focal point of your library program, but expand that definition of literacy to include new media literacy and information literacy as mainstream literacies equal in importance to traditional literacy.
Keep your traditional sources of authoritative information, but let the research topic and mode of research guide the integration of social media information sources and tools for delivering that content in your subject guides

Pivot Points For Change: Libraries And Librarians

View more presentations from Buffy Hamilton.

Tags: <buffy hamilton, Innovation, Librarians, pivot points for change, resources>

Top Ten Links Week 8

February 28, 2010 · Posted in Links, Read This · View Comments

My personally selected top 10 from the links I shared on Twitter from 2/19/2010 thru 2/25/2010

1. RT @VenessaMiemis: 16 free ebooks about social media via @fredzimny. Just look at this list of titles and authors :

Building a Social Media Team, Amber Naslund,
ContentCory Doctorow
Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media, Brian Solis
Fish Where the Fish Are – Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle, Chris Brogan
Getting a Foothold in Social Media, Amber Naslund
Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Business, John Jantsch
New Media and the Air Force, United States Air Force Public Affairs Agency
Social Media and Network Starting Points, Chris Brogan
Social Media Time Management, Amber Naslund
Social Media Tips: Sharing lessons learned to help your business grow, Jeff Hayzlett
The Art of Community, Jono Bacon
The Essential Guide to Social Media, Brian Solis
The New Rules of Viral Marketing, David Meerman Scott
The Simple Web: A Philosophy for Getting What You Want, Skellie
The Social Media Starter Kit, Amber Naslund
What is Social Media?, Antony Mayfield

2. RT @VenessaMiemis: new post – reimagining human/social capital & how to spark innovation - Tapping the Network to Facilitate Innovation – How can the power and scope of social networks, combined with a human capital inventory, be used to facilitate shared creation and innovation?

3. RT @FluffTheBunny: Unlink your feeds – A Manifesto – as someone who is driving slightly (or slightlier) crazy by friends who dump their tweets into Facebook I can’t agree more!

4. Incredibly proud to be involved in the new Libraries & Transliteracy blog with @Tombrarian & @buffyjhamilton – oh come on, you didn’t think I could leave a mention of this out did you? I’m SO excited about this project!

5. RT @rww: On Facebook, You’re Really You - “Psychologists found that “faking it” online is tougher than previously imagined.”

6. No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing and Feeling Like a Fraud – great read! via @griffey – I don’t know about you but I feel like this all the time, I’m just waiting for someone to notice I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve discussed it with friends and some people have called it the impostor syndrome (don’t look at wikipedia’s definition its too

7. RT @zephoria: UX Magazine (@uxmag) has published my “Streams of Content, Limited Attention“ today: Hope you enjoy! – An important read from danah boyd on information flow and “four challenges, points where technological hope and reality collide.”

8. Why are you apologizing? – Like all of Seth Godin’s posts this one is short but gets the point across. Don’t apologize for something you’re doing. Either don’t do it, or do it and don’t apologize.

9. How Social Is Too Social? – not everything is better with friends.

10. Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape – Another important read from danah boyd et al “The FCC published a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on the important topic of empowering parents and protecting youth in an era of an evolving media landscape. John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I took the opportunity to respond to the NOI on behalf of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center. What we wrote should not surprise any of you who are following our work, but our research-grounded response may be of great value for those of you who are interested in this topic. For this reason – and because we all believe in transparency – we have decided to publicly share the document that we crafted.”

Tags: <attention span, children, Facebook, fraud, free ebooks, impostor syndrome, information overload, Innovation, Libraries, parents, Social Media, socializing, Transliteracy>

Want Innovation? Get Out of the Way

February 10, 2010 · Posted in Change, Innovation · View Comments

cc image used courtesy of Vermin Inc on flickr

We hear a lot about innovation and change these days. Everyone is talking about it, every is doing it, or at least trying to. There’s a problem though, change and innovation require more than lip service. Declaring that you are innovative does not make it so.

You know what I’m talking about, someone reads an article, attends a presentation, has a conversation over coffee and comes back to work and says – we’re going to be innovative! Maybe there are even a few committees put together. But then what? Nothing. The committees quit meeting and things go back to the way they were. Maybe one or two people are still trying, but no one is listening.

You know why? Because innovation doesn’t happen by committee or decree.

Organizations do not innovate. People innovate. Inspired people. Fascinated people. Creative people. Committed people. That’s where innovation begins. On the inside.

The organization’s role — just like the individual manager’s role — is to get out of the way. And while this “getting out of the way” will undoubtedly include the effort to formulate supportive systems, processes, and protocols, it is important to remember that systems, processes, and protocols are never the answer. - Mitch Ditkoff

So how do you create a culture of innovation? You start with the people who think differently than you do.

Diversity is one of those sticky terms that people seem to boil down to creating a Benetton ad. Diversity isn’t about some magical collection of five differently colored skin tones. It’s about bringing different perspectives and backgrounds to the table and creating an environment that values what can be gained from different voices who’ve taken different paths. Skin color (or gender performance) is often interpreted as a reasonable substitute for this and, for many reasons, it has been historically. But bringing in a woman whose attitude and approach is just as masculine as the men isn’t going to help your team break outside of its current mindset. They key is to bring people who think differently than you - danah boyd*

Then get out of their way.

Once you’ve hired a good staff, you sit down, you formulate a plan and then you get out of their way. John Limbert

Let them do what you hired them to do.

The really good people want autonomy — you let me do it, and I’ll do it. So I told the people I recruited: “You come in here and you’ve got to keep me informed, but you’re the guy, and you’ll make these decisions. It won’t be me second-guessing you. But everybody’s going to win together. We’re part of a team, but you’re going to run your part.” That’s all they want. They want a chance to do it. - Gordon M. Bethune

You can not force innovation to happen. You can provide the autonomy, the trust to allow people to be innovative.

*danah boyd’s post is about gender issues and being a woman in todays workforce. It’s worth a read (and mostly likely a blog post) in is own right.

Tags: <Change, committee, different, diversity, employees, innovate, Innovation, innovative, management, Managers, think, work>