New Professionals! Get hold of a Library organisational chart and start plotting your path...

 

I believe that as a new professional in the information industry, you're better off with a plan of where you want to be, and specifically HOW you want to get there. Some people (who I respect very much)  have advocated a 'relax and see what happens' approach, pointing out the need to be able to try new things you'd never have thought of, and be taken off in new directions. I agree with this, but I still think this:

The profession is SO competitive now, if you can come up with a plan of how you'll move through it then it's worth doing so, even in the knowledge that it's perfectly okay not to stick to it if something interesting comes up.

So how do you go about this? Well first of all you need to know where you'd actually like to end up. (And by 'end up' I don't necessarily mean the job you'll retire in - just the one you're aiming for in the medium term.) There are various ways of getting a feel for this:

• Talk to people in those roles (seriously do this - it's MUCH more effective than anything else I can think of. If you'd like to chat about what being a Subject Librarian involves and the skills it requires I'm very happy to do so)
• Try and get some work-shadowing in those roles, or an actual job in a more junior version of the same role
• Read about how people got where they are today via the many excellent stories on the Library Routes Project
• Keyword search the Library Day in the Life wiki for the kind of job titles you're interested in, and see how people in these roles actually spend their days
• (I'm probably missing something useful so please leave a comment with more suggestions if you have them...) .

Once you've formulated an idea as to where you want to get to (and keep in mind this may evolve or change completely as you go along, which is fine), you can start to plan how to get there. Relating to this there are two important things which I've mentioned on here before, and in talks to New Professionals.

Firstly don't think of Librarianship as having a career-ladder, think of it is as having a career-climbing wall. Ladders go straight up and have evenly spaced rungs; climbing walls require a certain amount of traversing or diagonal movement, and a certain amount of inching forward followed by ambitions stretches, to get to the top of them. The example I always give is if you want to be a Customer Services manager for your library - the natural place to start is in Customer Services itself as a lending assistant (or whatever - the terminology is interchangable here but hopefully you know what I mean) but there's often a 3 pay-grade gap between asssistant and manager, with no obvious jobs in between. It's very, very rare for anyone to jump three grades in one go - so you need to go diagonally upwards so you're high enough up the grade structure to get a high-graded role, whilst trying to retain the relevant experience necessary to become the Customer Services manager. This improvisation and flexibility is not very ladder-like, and much more akin to a climbing wall.

The second thing I always advocate is to find the job you really want (Head of Special Collections, Subject Librarian, Children's Librarian, Law Librarian or whatever) and when you see it advertised at the kind of place you want to work, download the job spec and save it in a folder even when you have absolutely zero chance of being able to apply any time soon. Look at the person specification and make sure you shape your professional experiences to hit every single one of the essential and desirable skills over the coming years (either through jobs or involvement with professional bodies or writing papers or giving presentations or all four of these) so that you're in a position to nail the application in the future. Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity as they say - every time a great job comes up, you have a chance to try and manipulate your future luck in your favour...

 The Organisational Chart

So to the point of this post, the Organisatinal Chart (known also as Organisational Structure, Staffing Framework and, apparently, an 'organogram'). The Organisational Chart shows how the hierachy of any given organisation works - who is at the head, who is responsible to and for whom, how the teams fit together, and who manages what. It's quite hard to get hold of ones for organisations you don't work for, so I'd recommend finding your own library's (it's probably in the intranet somewhere...) and saving a copy into the same folder as your ideal job spec. Obviously libraries in different sectors have very different charts, so if you're aiming to work in the academic sector then a public sector chart may not be of much use to you.

I can't find a single Creative Commons example online (for obvious reasons) so here's a link to a publicly available chart for a big library. Obviously the point of this chart is to detail the positions and how it all fits together, but for the excited new professional it's a chart to literally plan an upwards trajectory with a highlighter pen (if you print it out - I wouldn't recommend using one on your monitor). Ask yourself, which of the higher jobs than mine can I get next? Does it lead to the job I really want (or the job before the job I really want)? Could I stand doing X for a year if it helped me get to Y the year after, or am I better off doing Z for two years and getting more relevant experience outside of the workplace at the same time?

I think it's particularly important to look at where the tree structure stops or hits a dead-end. Look at the role you're in now - is the only position directly above that your boss? Is your boss likely to leave any time soon? If not, you need to make proper plans for progression or you'll be doing the same thing you're doing now in 5 years time. Is there a path which opens up lots of possibilities for you, as opposed to the 'dead-mans shoes' syndrome of waiting for one or two people to retire or leave? Is the division you're in one with many holds on the climbing wall or just one or two (both of which someone else already has a firm grip on)?

I'm not advocating naked ambition - ambition for ambition's sake is something I'm not a fan of at all. But you DO want to be fulfilled, and ultimately you will want to earn a decent wage rather than get stuck on an okay one forever. If your current path hits the buffers in one job's time, think about the fact that you're going to be in this for 20, 30, 40 years so even if it's worthy and fulfilling now, it may not be stimulating when you're still doing it in 2020. Because as much as the rhetoric around library jobs is often about how 'none of us are in this for the money' and 'I just want a job I'm happy doing' the fact is there are lot of frustrated librarians who have just got mired in a certain part of their library and can't see an obvious path forward. So I really think it's worth being aware of what the future possibilites are, so you can start planning how you'll meet the challenges and achieve whatever it is that will make you happy.

It is, in my view, much better to be happy than successful. Being the 'best you can be' is only worth it if it makes you happy - I see a lot of people putting pressure on themselves, hitting great heights, but not being overly content. But forward planning never hurts, so even if you're not aiming for Head Librarian (I know I'm not - I'm going to completely ignore all my own advice and stagnate in my current job forever, although I did a lot of the above into practice to get to this position that I actually like in the first place) then knowing what you ARE aiming for will help you stay fulfilled.

If you're interested, there's a whole page of essential advice for new professionals elsewhere on this website, put together from the quotes of loads of librarians who have been there and done that...

Good luck!

- thewikiman

Libraries! Let's stop underestimating simplicity. (Simplicity is user-friendly)

I think one excellent way forward for most libraries would be to adopt an aggressively pro-simplicity stance. We often make decisions about services or models based on the need to accommodate everyone - the need not to put anyone out, rather than the need to really inspire people to use what we have. It's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be both inspirational and compromising at the same time. Look at loan periods as a really basic example. Most libraries have a lot of them - this is an attempt to make sure everyone is catered for. But sometimes it's so complicated as to be detrimental to the users.

Simplicity is great for many reasons.  It allows focus. It allows us to market with clear messages about what we do. It helps the user feel like they know where they are. It stops the model being too diluted by attempts not to offend. And - and this is the key point I want to make in this post - people can often prefer simplicity even to desirable options.

Think about your own experiences. Let's take a mundane example - sometimes it's nice to go to a coffee shop and have a choice between an Americano, an Espresso and a Latte, in two sizes. Even if you really like cinnamon lattes or whatever, you might prefer the simplicity of options to 7 different types of coffee, in three different sizes, with syrup options ago-go.

There's all sorts of retail experiences like that - booking hotel rooms or flights, for instance, or choosing a sandwich in Subway... - where options that are designed to personalise the experience to suit you actually just get in the way of some sort of essential process.

So I think (and I'm thinking about all this because I suggested it at a work meeting the other day) that all new processes and models and services should be designed to be simple and to make an impact, rather than to cover all the bases. (I realise librarians often feel a sort of moral obligation to make sure we're not disadvantaging anyone, and I'm definitely in favour of that as long as it doesn't come at the expense of our actual future.) And I think any services we re-design should be re-designed at least partly with the question 'What would users who'd NEVER EXPERIENCED THE OLD SYSTEM really want her?e' uppermost in our minds, as well as the need not to offend existing users. Chances are, they'd want something efficient, non-complicated, and easy to understand.

- thewikiman

p.s some of the themes in this post are also covered in my previous one

A book about Prezi

 

Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations, by Russell Anderson-Williams, has just been released by Packt Publishing.

I have an interest in this, because I served as one of the two Technical Reviewers for the book. Check it out, I even get a little bio in there!

About the book

As the name suggests the book is aimed at people giving business presentations - but basically all of it is applicable to anyone wishing to progress their Prezi skills to the next level. What I really like about it is it's written by someone from a proper design background, so there's a lot of technical stuff which is really handy if, like me, you quite like designing multimedia things but have no real idea what you're doing. The sections on using audio and video are really good, and Russell certainly knows a lot of tips and tricks which were new to me. He really gets to grips with the potential of the software, and it's very engagingly written.

About being a technical reviewer

The way the process works with this particular publisher, is that they send you each chapter basically as soon as it has been written. You're encouraged to use the comments facility of Word to go into as much detail as you can, suggesting changes and improvements or highlighting the bits you think work really well. There's also a questionnaire for each chapter, which includes questions like 'what do you think the next chapter should be' and so on. You send back the chapter and the questionnaire, they pass it on to the author along with the other reviewer's comments, and then you get sent the next one or two chapters once they're done.

It's an odd process because you want to be doing a good job as a reviewer and actually making constructive suggestions, so you want to add as many comments as possible - but at the same time you don't want to be finding fault where there is none, and the fewer comments you make the more complete the chapter is already, which is a good thing. So the balance is a hard one to find.

I was doing this around the same time I was finishing off my own book, and I have to say I would have found it very difficult to work like this - showing people what I'd done as I went along. I'm the kind of person who likes to have anything creative more or less complete before showing anyone - and that includes having all the chapters drafted, for context! Facet asked for one chapter early on in the writing process (to check I could actually write) but then let me get on with it thereafter till it was a completed draft. At this point they said they could send it off for proofing, indexing etc - or they could get it reviewed. I asked for it to be reviewed, and specifically asked if Antony Brewerton could review it; I'm really glad I did as the extremely helpful comments he came back with led me to actually restructure the book quite significantly, moving content around and adding some stuff in.

All in all reviewing this Prezi book was enjoyable. Sometimes I found it hard to turn around the work in the time the publisher wanted, and I never really had a sense if what I was doing was actually useful - I asked for feedback but I was told they'd be in touch if there were any problems, so hopefully that means there weren't any. The best part of it was definitely getting to read a great book! There are loads of really useful tips I've adopted, and my recent Prezis are much better than my earlier ones because of it.

One thing is certain - I much prefer this kind of reviewing than critical reviewing for publication, and when I get asked to do that I always suggest someone else to take it on. Knowing what goes into writing a book means I could never really criticise anyone else's knowing they might read that criticism, so a review from me is of no use to anyone...

The Library Marketing Toolkit is OUT NOW! Here's what's in it

The book I spent 2011 writing is finally out! Facet Publishing have printed and released the Library Marketing Toolkit and the pre-orders have been sent. There are details of what the book contains, and who writes its 27 case studies, on librarymarketingtoolkit.com, but as you'll know if you've read this blog before I really like slide-presentations as a way of getting info across in a non-boring way; with that in mind, here's what you can expect from the book. Chapters, themes covered, case studies, etc.

A preview of the Library Marketing Toolkit

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Still too early for full reviews, but some pre-prints were sent out and have been getting some good feedback:

‘Ned Potter's  book will help any library succeed in creating a community that is aware and engaged in its library. He has written an easy to follow tool kit targeted at the specific marketing needs of librarians that is sure to become a favourite resource for anyone involved in marketing a library. There are case studies from libraries around the world that will inspire you no matter whether your library is large or small. You'll love this book!’ - NANCY DOWD, AUTHOR OF 'BITE-SIZED MARKETING'

‘[The Toolkit] is brilliant and  a great addition to the library professional discourse.’ – ANDY WOODWORTH

'The Library Marketing Toolkit is packed full of useful, informative and above all practical information about the best ways of getting your message across, and it should be on the shelf of every librarian and information professional who needs to promote the idea of the library and its value in a modern day society.' – PHIL BRADLEY, CILIP PRESIDENT

You can click here to buy in the US, via Amazon.com, or if you're in Canada you can click to buy via Amazon.ca or finally in the UK you can click here to order via Amazon UK - or just get it straight from the publisher.

It's finally done!

- Ned

Introducing the Library Marketing Toolkit website!

Months in the planning, the library marketing toolkit website is finally live! It can be found at www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com.

What's on it?

The site is essentially designed to give you lots of practical advice on how to market your library - be that public, academic, special or archive. There are tools and resources, lots of useful links, new case studies which will be added to on an ongoing basis, and there's info about the Library Marketing Toolkit book and its contributors.

There's also a blog, which will give tips and aim to highlight the best (and sometimes the worst) marketing from libraries around the world. The first post is Marketing libraries with new technologies: what you need to know, and what to do next and features this presentation, which I gave yesterday at an Academic and Research Libraries Group conference on new technologies in libraries:

(Works best on full-screen mode)

Marketing with New Technologies on Prezi

What's coming up next?

The next post on the site will be a fantastic case study from the Bodleian library at Oxford, about their amazing smartphone app which has had everyone from Stephen Fry downwards swooning over it's amazingness.

There's also some additional case study material which I couldn't fit into the book, and several other brand new case studies including stuff from the UnLibrary in Crouch End, high-level tips on crowd-sourcing from JISC's Ben Showers, and a brilliant how-to on social monitoring from Andy Burkhardt.

Subscribing etc

I'd love it if you subscribed to the new blog - you can subscribe by clicking here - and there's a Twitter account too, @libmarketing, which you can follow here. If you want to spread the word about the new website on Twitter (for which I'll love you forever!) here's a ready made click-to-tweet link to it.

About The Library Marketing Toolkit book itself

The Library Marketing Toolkit will be published by Facet Publishing this Summer (probably 20th of July in the UK, and slightly later in the US / Canada. Stateside it will be distrubuted and marketed by Neal-Schuman, who've just been bought by the ALA). It is aimed at public libraries, special libraries, academic libraries and archives, and is extremely practical in nature - ideas you can apply right away to market your library more succesfully.

The best part is, it has 27 fantastic case studies from really amazing people and libraries from the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. Contributors include organisations like the British Library and the National Archive, New York Public Library, University of Cambridge, JISC - and amazing individuals too: see the Contributor's page of the Toolkit website for details of all of them.

You can order it direct from Facet, or via Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Canada etc. As mentioned in the previous post, a free chapter is available for download, here (PDF).

We have one advance-copy review so far, a great one from Nancy Dowd, the vertiable QUEEN of marketing libraries!

Ned Potter's  book will help any library succeed in creating a community that is aware and engaged in its library. He has written an easy to follow tool kit targeted at the specific marketing needs of librarians that is sure to become a favourite resource for anyone involved in marketing a library. There are case studies from libraries around the world that will inspire you no matter whether your library is large or small. You'll love this book!’ - Nancy Dowd, Author of ALA's Best Selling Book, Bite-Sized Marketing

- thewikiman