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Wired West: Volume 12, no. 1

SLA Conference 2008 - Pre-Conference Report, Part 2

By Lena Kuzmina

The official numbers from SLA’s 2008 annual conference in Seattle are quite impressive: 5,011 total registrants, 1,681 exhibitor registrants, and 464 booths.
My report will cover the sessions that I attended and found valuable as well as some highlights of the conference.

What Do I Do After I Log Off?: Being a Value-Adding Info Pro

I was looking forward to this session because Mary Ellen Bates is not only an excellent researcher and experienced info pro, she is also an engaging speaker.
Information professionals are constantly challenged to demonstrate their value to their organizations. This workshop with Mary Ellen Bates equipped participants with tools and resources to create added value and to make that value evident to our clients.
Mary Ellen started with explaining the art of reference interviews. She stated that clients only ask us to find, or to do, what they think we can do. It is useful to let them know what you are capable of finding as well to ask this question in the reference interview: “If I can’t find exactly what you are looking for, what will be the second best?"

She also emphasized that we need to listen to our clients and understand how they acquire and use information. This will help to make our deliverables “plug-and-play”. Here are the questions to ask:

What other information (not provided by the library) do they use? How distilled is it?

Does you client value: text only? graphs, spreadsheets? lists? Mary Ellen provided an interesting example: she did extensive research for a client and then distilled results of her research until she had several pages of excellent results to be shown to her client. At the meeting her client requested that Mary Ellen provide her results in one power point slide. It was a difficult task to accomplish (distilling several pages to six sentences that fitted a power point slide!), but this is what her client requested and ultimately paid for.

While talking about search results delivery Mary Ellen introduced a novel idea: "Why not deliver search results to your clients in a podcast, so they can listen to them in a car on their way home?"

She suggested routinely using a three-question evaluation form in addition to the answers to research questions: Did we answer your information needs? (or, Did it help to achieve your business goal? or, How much time did our research save you?) Is there any additional information you need?

She also shared some of the tools that she uses in her work. You can find the links to all the tools that were covered in this pre-conference workshop as well as examples of their use here.

Elena Kuzmina is Library Manager at Natural Resources Canada Library.

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