The LONE STAR LIBRARIAN
Spring 1996 Issue
by Margaret Carroll, Microsoft Library
In 1985 Michael Porter wrote, "How Information Gives you Competitive Advan-tage", but he was referring to information tech-nology, not information itself. We all learned about the nature of information in Library School, but who could have foreseen that it would become one of the most important global strategic assets, representing a competi-tive advantage -- that a Library's fate could hinge on its ability to contribute timely, relevant information to organizational decision making? Did our professional community ever envision the fierce competition we now face to manage and deliver information to our customers? Have we yet understood that internal and external competitors realize "Content is King" and are working to circumvent libraries in the quest for our organization's information dollar? There has been much talk about "surviving and thriving" and yet librarians con-tinue to battle daily for recognition and re-sources, and against antiquated misconceptions of who we are and what we bring to the party. We've heard about "doing more with less", "getting close to your customers", providing "value-added services", that it is essential to market the library, but not so much that you cannot deliver, and so on.... Where do we start? How do we develop that roadmap that moves us towards our goals? How, indeed, do we even determine those goals?
Strategic intent, thinking, and planning are simple yet very powerful tools we can use to pick our battles, or perhaps even avoid them altogether. Win enough battles or avoid enough battles and ultimately you'll win the war. Strat-egy models recognize the problem of competing in a hostile environment with limited resources. Sound familiar?
Strategic Intent represents the vision -- the highest goal of your organization. It gen-erally articulates some goal to be the best and implies a stretch for the organization, creating a discrepancy between resources and ambitions. The end is usually very specific with the means being very non-specific. Lots of creativity is re-quired to execute a strategic intent. Do your know your parent organization's vision? Do you have one for your library? How can the library support your organization's vision?
Strategic Thinking typically starts with a clean sheet of paper. Do not start with your current successes but do not forget your failures either. The key is not to get stuck with a single notion of success. The absolute primary focus must always be your customer, that customer's needs, and then how you respond to those needs. Strategy should ultimately create value for your customer.
"You have to read your organization's mind! "
Strategic Planning involves the "what-if" scenarios. This is the data gathering and analysis to determine how best to provide value for your customer. You must first understand your customer, their mission, core competencies, critical success factors, information requirements, and a ranking of those requirements. This will be a moving target so you need a plan (maybe a Strategic Plan?) to consistently gather and analyze this data so you can maintain your alignment with your customer base. Have you: Profiles of your customers or maybe even org charts? (Never underestimate the value of building a relationship with a group's admin person!) Identified your key customers since we all know we cannot be everything to everyone? Constructed a list of customer information needs and resource requirements to offer solutions? Built a case for additional resources, if needed? Knowing your organization, your customer's operating environment, is equally importance. Bear in mind that as the organization goes, so goes your customer, and so goes the library.
Strategy also means understanding what your products and services are about. Success can either be doing or not doing something. Let your customer participate in the decision (remember you've already asked them to rank their information requirements) about products and services you can offer. Can you give them what they need in a more timely, cost efficient manner than what they currently have? (Maybe a subscription to an outside paper clip-ping service can be replaced with an alert deliv-ered via email?) What are they not getting that you can supply? (Could they use desktop access to searchable journal literature?) What will they need in the next six months that they do not need now? (Internet training to work with the new organizational "Intranet"?) Make no mistake about it, we are at war -- a fight for our very lives.
It is critical to maintain a library's alignment to its parent or-ganization and individual customer groups. How to do that? You have to read your or-ganization's mind! Continually collect informa-tion on your organization (Do you have an alert set up on your parent?), on your customer (Never underestimate the value of wandering around and having casual conversations!), or cultivate partnerships or relationships (When did you last have lunch with one of your cus-tomers or send up a trial balloon about a new service or resource you were considering?).
Take a step back from what you are doing, maybe have been doing for some time, and find out what you should be doing. Think-ing ahead requires adding the present to the past to deduce the future. A routine of Strategic Intent, Thinking, and Planning offers a methodology to enable this activity.
Two noted information professionals and SLA's national president will be the featured presenters at the annual Texas Chapter Spring Meeting and Educational Conference. The Radisson Hotel on Austin's Town Lake will be the venue for the March 23 program featuring speakers William DeGenaro, Guy St. Clair and a luncheon address by SLA President Jane Dysart.
The morning session will begin at 9 am, featuring Bill DeGenaro's presentation on "Business Intelligence in the 90's". DeGenaro, as president of his company specializing in providing strategic intelligence for decision-making, is an expert with 25 years of strategic planning, competitive analysis and business management experience in companies such as IBM and 3M, as well as organizations including the Defense Department and The Futures Group.
Lunch and vendor visits will be followed by a 1 pm address by SLA President Jane Dysart, a founding partner in Dysart & Jones Associates.
At 1:30 begins the afternoon session "Entrepreneurial Librarianship: The Key to Effective Information" presented by Guy St.Clair, president of SMR, a company providing management support to the library and information services profession. St. Clair is also a former officer of SLA, and author of numerous books and papers.
by Gail Wilson
Spring is busting out all over the state as you read this. Trees are flowering, the azaleas in bloom, bulbs peeking through letting us know that the cold is past and we're in for a change. Time to renew ourselves and our surroundings, perhaps take up the resolution to walk more, replant the yard, get organized (get real!) or just go fishing!
Susan Yancey and I attended the SLA win-ter board meeting and leadership training sessions in Cleveland in late January. I must say it gave me a new perspective on the meaning of cold! Unfortunately we were not there long enough to see much of the city but we were able to meet with chapter officers from around the country and share ideas and plans that we will hopefully be able to integrate into the Texas chapter. Susan will soon be filling board and committee positions for the upcoming year and I encourage each of you to consider how you might become an active participant in the chap-ter.
Jeffrey Tobe was the featured speaker this year and his presentation "Coloring Outside the Lines" encouraged everyone to get creative - if for no other reason than it's more fun! Most people are inclined to hold on to a behavior (read: a habit) because it's comfortable but it takes only 21 days of doing something another way to make a change (of course then it be-comes a habit as well so don't hold on to it too long)!! Take a minute to assess your routine and see what changes might be made to make your job or life more fun. All of us are up to challenges but often get bogged down by what we see as "problems" in our lives. Jeffrey offers the suggestion that we change "problem" to "challenge" and get creative in finding solutions.
One challenge for our profession is making ourselves visible. SLA has recently hired a communications consulting firm to offer as-sistance in this area. A representative from Read Polland presented their goal to reposition and enhance our position with decision makers as expert guides to vital information. They plan to do this through:
Their target audience consists of CEO's and other business executives, academic leaders, government and association executives and media representatives. To date they have con-tacted "Governings" editors about an article on the "Future of Libraries", Industry Week about including part of the SLA research related to corporate savings surrounding the use of infor-mation and special librarians.
They are interested in stories that members may be able to contribute related to successes in their libraries and organizations. If you have something to share please contact Mark Serepca at headquarters.
One suggestion that emerged from a break out group on public relations was to contact your local Public Broadcasting Station and offer to staff several hours of their televised fund raising activities with members of SLA. They usually are quite receptive to volunteers and may be inclined to give a bit of good PR to the profession in return for your time.
I receive a number of chapter bulletins and note continuing discussions related to men-toring. Some of us have been fortunate enough along the way to have been taken under the wing of someone with more experience - whether it be related to marriage, parenting, a career or any other experience that doesn't come with a well indexed users guide! We have the opportunity to share our successes, mistakes and our insights with students and new gradu-ates across the state as they pursue their pro-fessional careers. We all recall the academic environment, with free time between classes, little concern over online fees, time to catalog, do collection development, ponder how we will handle the challenging employee or boss, being abruptly replaced with: --the incessant ringing of the phone and the message light coming on while you are on the other line...while the fax machine spits out an off-site request...and the computer beeps an incoming e-mail request...and the warm body at the door is pacing while awaiting your at-tention...and you still haven't gotten to those thousands of dollars worth of online database invoices on the desk! (remember...these are "challenges"!)
There are mentoring activities going on within the chapter but I would like to see us pursue this to the extent that any student or new graduate wishing to have someone to share all of this fun with has the opportunity to do so. It is valuable to both persons involved - each giving and receiving doses of experience and fresh insight while developing important communication and leadership skills that can be adapted to many situations within and outside of the workplace. I would feel privileged to make myself available and encourage anyone else who is interested to contact one of the stu-dent liaisons and make their interest known. In turn I encourage students who wish to participate to do the same.
I suspect that if you have gotten this far you are indeed ready to move on! Enjoy the beautiful spring weather, meet a few chal-lenges, change a few habits and don't be afraid to "color outside the lines".
by Debra Bailey Ellet, UT GSLIS
Thomas Mann, noted author of Library Research Models, and reference specialist at the Library of Congress, spoke at the University of Texas Graduate School of Library and Information Science, February 14, as part of the Spring Colloquium series. The lecture was entitled "What I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was In Library School." Mann focused primarily on subject searching, emphasizing a hierarchical structure for subject access. His first approach to refer-ence questions centers on the use of controlled vocabulary subject heading searches, structured around the "red books," or the Library of Con-gress Subject Headings. He spoke out against those who wish to discontinue the print version of LCSH because it is available online.
Mann stated, "It's true--it's the same information and the same content, but when you change the format of the content, you radically change the access. You can't see the alphabeti-cally adjacent narrower terms easily in an online screen display."
Mann's next steps are: keyword searches, citation searches, searches through published bibliographies, computer searches (Boolean combinations of terms), people sources, systematic browsing via classification scheme, related record searches and type of lit-erature searches. Citation searches seem to have the most potential for value-added service. The process enables one to find subsequent articles--those written after the item in hand, which cite the original in a footnote.
Mann ended his speech with a strong pitch for the status quo of libraries with walls. Mann asserted, "People who are saying that we need free information are doing it in copyrighted books; if anybody wants to read those books for free they have got to come to the library with walls, that has books arranged on bookshelves."
In order to emphasize the enormous task of providing online full text, Mann stated, "the Library of Congress grows by 10,000 volumes every two weeks. Not only are the full text da-tabases not catching up, they are falling further and further behind. If you think that all books are eventually going to full-text online, please wake up...copyright law alone is going to pre-vent that."
by Erika Mittag (Just after completing this report, Erika was appointed to serve on the National SLA Government Relations committee. --ed.)
The last several months have seen Congressional action in a number of areas of interest to libraries and librarians. I have nearly 60 pages of notes and quotes on these issues which I will attempt to condense here. Please feel free to contact me at ecmittag@mmm.com if you are interested in more detailed information.
Telecommunications Act of 1996. This law, known in some circles as the
Telecommunications Lawyers Full Employment Act The Snowe-Rockefeller-Kerrey-Exon amendment made it through the final
bill and authorizes discounted rates for advanced telecommunications
services to libraries, K-12 schools and rural health care providers
under the universal service section of the law. Next steps here
involve FCC rulemaking in conjunction with state utility commission
proceedings.
The controversial Communications Decency Act language was changed in
conference committee at the last minute from a "harmful to minors"
definition to "indecency" which is more vague and generally untested
in the courts. The provision has prompted an outcry from many with:
direct action such as the 48 hour black out of Web pages and the Blue
Ribbon campaign of the Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility (CPSR); the filing of a lawsuit by the ACLU and others
resulting in a Temporary Restraining order and fast-track federal
court testing of the provision; and the filing of the Leahy-Feingold
Bill (S 1567) to amend the Communications Act of 1934 and the
Communications Decency Act of 1995 regarding obscenity. Ironically, a
Supreme Court ruling (FCC v. Pacifica) which defines indecency (in
broadcast media) is now on-line at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
however provisions of the new law suggest that providing this
document may result in fines and jail terms since it contains the
indecent language it is trying to define. Stay tuned on this one...
Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) is moving toward electronic
dissemination. On December 29, 1995, the Government Printing Office
(GPO) released a report detailing a plan to move the print-based FDLP
to an almost completely electronic program by October 1998. This
transition would be dramatic. For example, in FY 1995, GPO
distributed 17,466 titles in paper, 26,856 in microfiche and 412 in
electronic format. Nearly 17 million copies of these 44,734 titles
were in depository libraries for public use. According to the
transition plan, by October 1998, only a core list of 24 publications
would be distributed in paper to depository libraries, with everything
else electronic. ALA has recommended a 5 to 7 year time frame instead
to insure an orderly transition and members of the Government Docu
ments Roundtable (GODORT) and the Depository Library Council are
participating in a number of task groups initiated by GPO addressing
various issues relating to electronic dissemination of government
documents. Their report is due to Congress in March 1996. Depository
librarians are concerned that documents be obtained in the manner most
useful to the user, but they also see an opportunity to include even
more government materials not traditionally part of the FDLP. The plan
is still a proposal and would require Congressional action to revise
Title 44 to implement the plan. In related news, the GPO Access
Internet access program is no longer restricted to registered
depository library sites, but is freely available as of December 1,
1995 Superintendent of Documents homepage is http://
www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/
ALA Statement on Access to Electronic Information, Services, and
Networks: an Interpretation of the LIBRARY BILL OF RIGHTS. ALA, at
the Mid-Winter meeting held recently in San Antonio, endorsed a
statement which details the implications of the computer age for
libraries, librarians and library users. Full text of the statement is
available at the ALA web site (http://www.ala.org).
Copyright Bill working its way through the maze. HR 2441, currently
styled the "NII Copyright Protection Act of 1995,"
is the subject of recent hearings in the House. This bill would create
a new "transmission" right for copyrighted materials, and impose very
tough civil and criminal fines for infringement of that right. It
would also make it illegal to disseminate software that defeated
copyright schemes, or if anyone takes any actions to defeat or remove
"copyright management" information. (Up to 5 years in prison, and a
$500,000 fine). Opponents of the bill say it does not address
traditional fair use of copyrighted materials, and that it would set
up a copyright police state, where Internet service providers would be
forced to monitor electronic mail and other file transfers to prevent
copyright violations. The Digital Futures Coalition, opposing the
bill, includes consumer and library groups, the national writers
union, and several computer firms and has a home page at
http://guess.worldweb.net/dfc. The Creative Incentive Coalition (CIC),
including a number of big publishers, cable, TV and software companies
and trade groups, such as the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA), Microsoft, McGraw Hill, West Publishing, the Information
Industry Association, etc., supports the bill and has a Web page at
http://www.cic.org. This will be an issue to watch closely.
State news: A recent attempt by California State Assemblyman Willard
Murray of Los Angeles (AB185) to allow local government jurisdictions
to sell their required public access function for their computerized
disclosable public records, to the highest bidders from the private
sector who could then charge for access to them, failed to pass the
Assembly. However, the growing need for cities to raise funds from
whatever sources they can find, makes this a strategy that could be
tried elsewhere.
Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund (TIF). This fund was set
up the last Texas legislative session (HB2124) through controversial
taxation of telephone companies and the wireless industry to provide a
basis for building the telecommunications infrastructure that will
ensure access to the information highway for all Texas citizens. The
$150M fund is the subject of hearings by the TIF Board to determine
the best ways of spending the money with distance learning and
tele-medicine receiving a lot of attention. The web site with
additional information is at http://www.tif.state.tx.us
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