Librarian by Day

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.

1. Instead of thinking you can only participate in face to face conferences, consider how you can participate virtually
2. Keep your traditional means of connecting with patrons and colleagues, but innovate at every possible touch point through social media and social networking
3. 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
4. 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
5. Keep your traditional productivity tools, but use cloud computing to encourage collaboration and information sharing
6. 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
7. Keep your traditional services and materials, but expand those services and “containers” of materials to reflect patron needs
8. 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.
9. 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