SLA President Stephen Abram made an “unofficial” visit to the Fairfield County Chapter on April 30. Twenty-two of our members attended. Because he is a motivational speaker, he got several people all fired up with his remarks and with the potential for being an SLA member. I’ve outlined a few of his points below. I hope they are of interest to all of you.

Stephen began by making a rather firm statement: “Special librarians are improperly trained to communicate their value.” He proceeded to give several points that should be used in determining our value. He mentioned some research at Mt. Sinai Hospital where it was determined that there was a 19% reduction in the death rate of patients, in part because of the role of libraries and information. He talked about “transformational librarianship,” where what we do transforms our users in some significant way. We can get our message through if we look to people who hire and pay special librarians. What do they want to hear about the value we provide?

As part of the “Realignment” project currently going on within SLA , there have been focus group sessions with groups of executives. One of the goals is to determine how our users are changing. One result of the project will be to give us credible, provable models on which SLA members can be trained about how to capitalize on the change, what words to use to explain our value, on how to determine whether we are serving those who fund us, for the reasons they need service, etc.

One of the findings is that these executives may love their librarians as individuals—there is value in the individual relationships and service that we can develop.

Early data from the project shows the perception that we are too slow. We provide quality, but we are too slow, particularly in a world that runs on Google. Abram talked about Andy Klein, a technology futurist who is working with SLA . He says we are five years behind some of the rest of the world. On top of that, we are faced with a five-year period of huge social, economic, and technological change—greater than the recent past.

One of Abram’s initiatives during his year as president of SLA is “23 Things….” It will launch at the Annual Conference in Seattle . Members will be given an opportunity (and he hopes every single SLA member will take advantage of the opportunity) for learning about individual elements of current technology by doing.  It will require a commitment of about 15 minutes per item (how to create a blog, digital pictures and how to loan them on blogs, etc.) over a period of nine weeks. There will be learning support available.

Another “perk” of SLA membership is the Ebrary collection of management and leadership materials, available free. All you need is your membership number and password to access the collection. If you don’t remember them, contact Quon Logan, Chief Technology Officer,  at SLA Headquarters (qlogan@sla.org). After your first use, they will be in the system and you will not need to enter them again (but it wouldn’t hurt to enter them somewhere in your SLA materials, for future reference).

Along the same lines, members can sign up to receive a weekly four page summary of a current business book. You sign in to Click University and type in the subject. Another benefit offered by Click University is a monthly free course/webinar. Check out the topic for this month.

Abram kept stressing that SLA member value isn’t just Chapters, Divisions, and Annual Conference, although they are very valuable member benefits.

Another of Abram’s initiatives is the Innovation Lab. SLA will be licensing 400 software products for all members to use, free. Training will be available on all of them. The point is to give members the opportunity to learn by doing. There will also be a collection of 35,000 videos on a wide variety of topics. The collection should launch in May.

SLA members also are eligible to receive Factiva news feeds on over 200 topics, again, free. Check the web site for more information and instructions.

By July, SLA will have a presence in Second Life, designed by Jill Hurst. This effort to put SLA in the forefront of technology applications is, in part, in response to a Gartner report that says, by 2012, all searches will be done by avatar!

Finally, through Click University , SLA members can take over 9000 courses at a discount. These courses are on the PhD and masters levels and also result in certificates in Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management, and Copyright.

All-in-all, Abram painted a picture of a dynamic association. It would appear that 2008 is a good year to be an SLA member. If you haven’t done so already, why not plan to attend the Annual Conference in Seattle and be immersed in the energy that is sure to be there.