On 13 Dec, we would like to gather for a special webinar with you. Let’s take a look back at a year full of interesting conferences and exciting events! The basic idea behind it is very simple: So many professional events are happening that it becomes almost impossible for an individual to attend all of them at once. Here is a chance to talk about your conference experiences in 2012, what they meant to you and the global LIS community. By sharing our key take-aways with each other, we will all get insights into interesting events, even if we could not make it to a conference.
Instructions
This truly is a collaborative event, so you are all invited to tell your peers about an interesting conference or other event you have been to in 2012. Please list the event(s) you would like to talk about for 5-10 minutes. The webinar is supposed to be relaxed and informal. No PowerPoint is required. However, feel free to share websites, pictures and other material to illustrate your conference experience. Please also feel encouraged to co-present with others on the same event. As a platform, we are going to use Adobe Connect that includes chat (IM, voice/video chat), sharing documents with each other and many more options.
Date and times
13 Dec, 2012
2:00 p.m. CST
3:00 p.m. EST
9:00 p.m. CET (21:00 Central European Time)
7:00 a.m. EDT (next day)
The University of Maryland’s four iSchool student groups held a screening of the “Cycling for Libraries” 2011 documentary that inspired a discussion about creative library outreach, the possibility of organizing a “Cycling for Libraries” event in Maryland, and how American graduate students in library science can become more involved in the international library community. Participants from the Student Archivists at Maryland, the Special Libraries Association, the American Library Association, and the iDiversity student groups were impressed and inspired by the way in which “Cycling for Libraries” brought international librarians together to make meaningful connections with each other, to discuss important topics that affect the future of libraries around the world, and to conduct library outreach in an entirely new and innovative fashion.
The documentary sparked a conversation about the forums available for American library science graduate students to connect with an international community of students and young professionals in libraries, which led to a discussion of NPSIG and the Bobcatsss conference. The main concern for many students was how to participate in events and conferences around the world that are prohibitively expensive to travel to. Students were interested in the possibility of organizing events in the United States and participating in webinars, but the question of how to bring international library students together despite the cost of travel will be one to consider.
By the end of the evening, everyone agreed that international library student activities should be more than just more professional workshops: they should focus on fostering lasting connections within a worldwide network of information students and professionals.
Student reactions:
“Great documentary! I think it got a lot of us really excited to try a similar event. We should totally try to organize a US version … I have a lot of library friends on tumblr who are really into cycling, and who I think would join this kind of event in a second.” – Rebecca Hopman, MLS ‘12, @rchopman
“The cycling for libraries event was really inspirational for me. It seemed like an awesome opportunity for librarians to grow and encourage one another. I would love to participate in a similar event.” – Laura French, MLS ‘13,
“Super excited that this is something that we could actually make happen right here in Maryland!” – Rebecca Oxley, MLS ‘13, @LibrariansFTW
Follow UMD’s student group activities on Twitter: @mollyfication , @alaatumd , @SLAatUMD , @LISDiversity
Kay Raseroka, University Librarian, University of Botswana. IFLA President 2003-2005. Highlighting the topics: Mentoring, best practices, pros and cons of different approaches such as peer-to-peer, classical mentor-mentee relationships and much more.
The series explore useful topics to help new professionals at various stages of their career, including:
LIS school curriculum, gained skills and degrees vs. “the reality” at work. Bridging the gap between theory and practice. How to deal with generational differences at work?
Mentoring and best practices including pros and cons of different approaches like peer-to-peer, and classical mentor-mentee relationships.
How to develop leadership skills as a new professional: programs, mentoring, learning by doing. Working abroad, leaving your home country.
Continuing Professional Development for new professionals, how to stay up to date from the very start even if conditions at work (funding/permission to attend conferences, support with writing articles, etc.) are not the best.
Questions and requests for information:
Loida Garcia-Febo
Coordinator of the series loidagarciafebo@gmail.com
What an amazing BOBCATSSS 2012 conference! The organizing teams from Amsterdam, Groningen, and Stuttgart worked very professionally and turned this anniversary edition into one of the best that we had so far! Also, the beautiful city of Amsterdam set a marvelous scene for the gathering of over 400 New Professionals from all over the world.
To get started, we introduced the audience to the work of NPSIG, its open infrastructure that makes participation quite easy, and its position within a huge international association like IFLA. We also presented the various online and on-site activities of the group and highlighted the benefits of getting involved internationally…
Aim of the workshop
workshop introduction video
presentation slides
One of the main goals of the workshop was to make the participants think about their role and position in the LIS field as New Professionals. For this purpose, we divided the audience into six groups and asked them to identify and discuss:
the Top 5 of unique strengths of New Professionals,
a list of possible weaknesses of New Professionals,
the Top 5 of the most important areas in LIS that New Professionals need to be good at.
group work
After 45 minutes of intense brainstorming and discussions, every group had successfully accomplished the task and came up with a creative visualization of their findings which they boldly presented to their peers.
Results of the workshop
Hands on with group 1
group 1 presentation video
results group 1
The strong tree of group 2
group 2 presentation video
results group 2
Star Trekking with group 3
group 3 presentation video
results group 3
The world is round with group 4
group 4 presentation video
results group 4
Cycling for New Professionals with group 5
group 5 presentation video
results group 5
A cloudy day for group 6
group 6 presentation video
results group 6
Synopsis
Based on the raw data we condensed some interesting overall insights and surprising revelations. First of all, here is an overview on the strenghts, weaknesses, and LIS areas that appeared most often in all six groups.
unique strengths:
up-to-date knowledge (5x)
enthusiasm (5x)
flexibility (4x)
openness (3x)
understanding user perspectives / people skill / user centered (3x)
weaknesses:
lack of experience (5x)
lack of trust / courage (3x)
arrogance (2x)
Side note: One of the groups identified a lack of financing, time, and influence as three weaknesses of New Professionals. Depending on each other, these factors indeed constitute ongoing serious issues for lots of people in their early careers. For NPSIG one answer to this challenge lies in video coverage, online conferences and webinars. On the other hand, you cannot retain the major benefits of conferences, namely networking and face-to-face interaction, when going online. For this reason, it is as important to lobby for the needs of New Professionals and to support all efforts and existing initiatives that help enable access to conferences as early in your career and easy as possible!
important areas in LIS:
networking / collaboration (6x)
technology / ICT (5x)
marketing / PR (4x)
dealing with users / psychology (4x)
information literacy (3x)
management (3x)
innovation (3x)
Three observations:
The vast majority of categories does not belong to a discipline-specific knowledge. Instead, they rather highlight generic capabilities such as management, marketing, collaboration etc. What is the reason for this choice of the workshop participants? Partly, you could refer to the huge pressure on libraries due to the economic crisis. Faced with budget cuts and huge financial pressure, the well-being of your library depends on efficient management of the resources, creative marketing campaigns, collaboration with other institutions etc. The fact that our group of New Professionals came up with these kinds of categories, might also be prove for their educational background. In recent years, concepts of marketing, management etc. play a more and more important role in the coursework of many BA / MA programs in LIS. So it would only feel reasonable for students and new graduates to handle these areas as important parts of LIS.
It also appeared a lot of the fields above are so broad that we cannot put them under one definite area. When talking about promotion, for example, is it about highlighting the library services in particular or the library profession as a whole? In a multinational group like our workshop participants, everyone has slightly different views here, shaped by his or her educational and cultural background.
A surprise might be that social media was mentioned just two times, digital services even only once. Does this mean these two fields play no significant role in the eyes of the workshop participants? Probably it only shows the very opposite: Digital services and even more social media constitute an integral part of lots of New Professionals in their professional and private life. Therefore, there might be a tendency of taking them for granted. Btw: Of course, one could also argue that technology / ICT as second winning category very well includes social media and digital services.
General observations
Taking a step back, here are some general observations across the three categories that caught our attention:
All groups decided to go for a visualization of their findings. Especially the tree (group 2) and the bicycle (group 5) very nicely show the close intertwining and dependence between the strengths, weaknesses, and the important LIS areas. The tree needs strong roots (LIS areas) to grow and to bloom (unique strengths). The bycicle only runs with two wheels – you don’t only have to know your strengths but also be aware of your weaknesses to keep moving (succeeding) and avoid the risk of falling.
Strengths and weaknesses are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most of them have an ambivalent nature. Some groups found that “courage” was a specific strength of New Professionals, whereas others listed “lack of courage” or “being afraid of proposing your ideas” as one weakness. The same goes with “multitasking” versus “information overload” / “distraction from…”. We also overheard discussions of groups which had hard times to decide whether a lack of experience and being idealistic rather belong to strengths or weaknesses of New Professionals.
The two winning categories for strengths and weaknesses are mutually dependent somehow: As a New Professional you are probably lacking experience in the field. On the other hand, your rich up-to-date knowledge makes you very valuable for the working force.
Of course, the above group findings cannot simply be generalized. However, they represent a very interesting snapshot of perceptions and experiences of a multinational group of new librarians in early 2012. Moreover, a lot of the findings of the workshop participants do impressively fit with outcomes of similar events we organized in recent years (see the results at Bobcatsss 2010 and 2011, for example)!
The Future
Finally, you are all invited to share your individual views on this topic! Based on your experience, do you agree or disagree with some of the statements above? Is there something to add to the list of strengths, weaknesses, and important LIS areas? What do you think about the workshop concept? We are looking forward to hearing from you and to going on with the discussion!
Hello everybody. I would like to share experiences on what kind of responses “new professionals” and especially expressive, organized “new professional movements” are getting within the wider library profession.
Here in Finland a loose network of relatively fresh librarians are known as “Nuorkirjastolaiset” (engl. Young librarians), a self-chosen name. A small handful of people are more outspoken, and criticise libraries for their human resource management, leadership, innovation strategies, oppressive work-culture, hidden power-structures and so forth.
In the new issue of Kirjastolehti (“Library magazine”, ISSN 0023-1843) there is an interview by Ira Koivu of four people who identify themselves as members of this “Nuorkirjastolaiset” -movement. Here is my brief translation of the article’s ingress:
Kirjastolehti 6/2010: "We demand change"
We demand change!–Young professionals building a new library
Pessimism, cynicism and frustration persist among young professionals, so it’s been told. That’s why we asked four young library professionals what’s wrong with the library now and what would be the library of their dreams. And most importantly: how it’s done?
Now, in response to the article, we are having quite a heated discussion on Kirjasto-kaapeli, the most important public discussion forum of finnish librarians. The discussion there is titled KYSYMYKSIÄ NUORKIRJASTOLAISILLE (Viite: Kirjastolehti 6/2010 (engl. “QUESTIONS TO YOUNG LIBRARY PROFESSIONALS (Reference: Library magezine 6/2010“). It started out as a list of questions to Nuorkirjastolaiset, but the discussion soon lost focus (i’m expect Godwin’s law to fulfill very soon; you know how these online discussions sometimes are LOL).
Anyway, it seems all sorts of fears and frustration within the profession is partly reflected on young professionals, especially if they are united. It’s not just this article and it’s response on Kirjasto-kaapeli, but i think i’ve noticed it elsewhere too. All sorts of reservations and suspicion towards a network of organized, proud, largely unknown people come to my ears. Some librarians are worried about age-racism because the name has the word “young” in it, and some colleagues think that young professionals are all about wasting library resources on Facebook and Twitter and not doing proper work. Some claim that new professionals are too blind to see behind cold statistics and that economic efficiency is something that is categorically wrong and dangerous for libraries. Some ridicule and say that all voices of change will be hushed as soon as the new professionals get a steady job.
All of these fears and accusations has been heard many, many times already. Previously the blame has been on a) politicians b) evil capitalists c) library directors d) consultants or e) the mass media. Now, at least part of the blame is on young professionals… in other words: on close colleagues.
Do you recognize this, or something similar from your environment? I would love to hear what sort of response “new professional movements” are having elsewhere? The NPSIG group seems to be very well received within the IFLA organization, or that’s my impression. Is your library profession openheartedly welcoming it’s young, self-aware, confident and united members with their ideas, energy and innovation, or do some colleague see them (=us) as a threat?
IFLA New Professionals remember Bob McKee as a dear friend.
We were fortunate to receive his absolute support from the very beginning of our group. In 2004 when the NPSIG was established at a session during the IFLA Congress in Buenos Aires, Bob presented an encouraging call to include new professionals on the agenda of library associations and leaders. Bob’s advice represented a significant vote of confidence needed to lift off the concept of an IFLA group including new professionals. Stuart Hamilton, Andrew Cranfield and Loida Garcia-Febo were very appreciative of his advice and support.
For many years after that, Bob participated in the NPSIG programs. He advised us during long conversations in hotel lobbies, cafes and at FAIFE activities. His impact on the group will be remembered for a long time. We will sorely miss Bob.
Our condolences go out to Bob’s family, friends and colleagues at CILIP and the United Kingdom.
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deichel
Claudia S.
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