Highlights of SLA 2009

I attended SLA’s centennial conference in Washington, DC and had three wonderful days, jam-packed with sessions, exhibitions, parties and receptions. I’ve tried to capture some the highlights in this article.

Something Tried and True: Mary Ellen Bates

One of my maxims when attending SLA conferences is - you can’t go wrong with Mary Ellen Bates. This proved to be true once again in Washington, DC where I started and ended my conference session experience with presentations by Mary Ellen. I have always found her to be a stimulating and entertaining speaker and the overflowing rooms at both sessions was evidence of her popularity with many conference attendees.

The title of the first session I attended was Painless (No, really!) Negotiating, and Bates captured our attention from the start with some interesting admissions and assertions about negotiation:

She herself is not a natural negotiator and has had to work at developing these skills

The first thing you hear is just the first offer - it is not necessarily true or the final offer

It doesn’t hurt to ask

Everything is negotiable

Negotiating is a moment of discomfort to get a large pay-off

Before getting into the details of specific negotiation techniques, she introduced an important base concept underlying all negotiation - the locus of control (LOC) or, put another way, “who is running your life?”. Those with an external LOC assign power to the external world whereas those with an internal LOC assign power to their own actions - “I had no choice” versus “I didn’t look at the alternatives.” People with an internal LOC take responsibility with “I” statements. According to Bates, having an internal LOC is essential for successful negotiation.

Mary Ellen’s secrets to strategic and painless negotiation include the following:

Identify your best outcome - what is your ultimate goal and what are your fallback outcomes?

Identify your BATNA (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement) - if your BATNA beats negotiation, walk away

Become “the other” - identify the other side’s best outcome, their BATNA. Which of the two of you has to change the status quo? That person has less power in the negotiation. Ask, “How can I move my focus forward while advancing the other person’s interest?

Keep your focus on the benefits of the outcome and don’t get into the details of how the outcome will happen. Details close off alternatives.

Two other important ideas I came away with from this presentation were:

Don’t negotiate for your minimum. Your first offer should be high - something that you can come down to your minimum from.

You don’t have to be dissatisfied to ask for more. It’s business, not personal

The other Mary Ellen Bates session I attended had a title I just couldn’t resist - Creating Groupies: How to add value, make yourself irreplaceable and beat the pants off Google. This session was essentially marketing for non-marketing types and Bates started by identifying the two key points of the entire session:

Focus on benefits not features

As librarians we need to address the “What’s in it for me?” question from our clients. We need to describe our services in a way that our clients don’t have to take the next mental step.

“Follow the money”

Another way of saying this is - we need to look for love in the right places. We need to consider who contributes to revenue in our organization. Is it Large Account Managers, the Donor Development dept., the Government Relations group or the Strategic Planning unit? We need to identify the people who talk to the people at the executive level in our organizations and make sure we are serving these people.

According to Bates, it is very important that we become part of the life blood of our organizations instead of an appendage that can be cut off. We need to make it so that our clients can’t make a strategic decision without consulting us first.

During the course of her presentation, Mary Ellen raised a number of interesting points about client feedback and finding out what clients really value. She emphasized the need to be aware of the difference between what our clients say versus what they choose. It is a reality that our clients do not not always tell us the truth about existing or proposed library services - they don’t want to hurt our feelings. They may say that a service is a “good idea” or “nice to have”, but never use it. Bates suggests that one way to find out what services our clients really like is to offer them a choice. We can offer trial access to a new library product or service and see how many people take up the offer. If they don’t take up the offer, it means that the proposed service is not a valued service. Mary Ellen also recommended encouraging negative feedback from clients and pointed to studies that have shown that people who complained and had their problem resolved were as satisfied as people who were satisfied from the beginning. When soliciting feedback,she recommended open-ended questions such as, “What would be more useful?, rather than yes or no questions.

Both of the above presentations can be found at, www.batesinfo.com/SLA2009

Something New . . .

I also tried something new at this SLA conference. I attended my first poster session and also went to a Leadership and Management breakfast with an alternative and interesting presentation style.

The poster session was the Business and Finance Division’s first-ever conference poster session and the theme was business information literacy. I didn’t really know what to expect from this session, but I found a room full of lively discussion and great exhibits from university and college business librarians. I enjoyed being able to wander around the room, take a look at the information presented on the posters and then pose questions to the people directly responsible for implementing the projects depicted on the posters. You can get a sense of the range of topics covered and take a look at the posters at this link on the Business and Finance Division’s website. I found the poster session made a refreshing change of pace from the presentation-style sessions - you still learn a lot but you get to network and meet new people at the same time!

The Leadership and Management Division breakfast I attended offered another alternative to the traditional presentation. At this event, entitled Creative Practices: Discovery in the Round, the speakers were scattered throughout the audience, seated at different tables, and they spoke from these tables while the attendees listened and enjoyed a continental breakfast. The focus of the session was best practices and strategies for reinventing our libraries (and information services) to have the impact they should within any organization. The three speakers were Mary Schwartz, Cindy Romaine and Gary Price.

Mary Schwartz of the Center for Creative Learning spoke first and shared the story of how their library team became a self-managed library team (SMT) when their library director fell ill. She talked about the benefits and challenges of this type of new structure. Cindy Romaine was the librarian at Nike’s design library for 16 years and her topic was the importance of creativity in the workplace. The design library at Nike developed innovative ways of delivering information and Cindy shared some of those practices with the audience and identified key points applicable to any library: 1) know your customers, their work methods and business practices, and know their customers 2) integrate with the business process (know the cycles of your firm’s business processes etc), 3) value objects as information, 4) inspiration is something that leads to solutions 5) be sensitive to clients’ needs, 6) saturate yourself in clients’ verbiage. The third speaker, Gary Price, discussed not only creativity in search, but also in non-traditional roles and shared some of the creative tools he has used in his work.

Overall, I thought that the “discovery in the round” format worked very well. It created an informal atmosphere, which led to plenty of discussion and questions after the presentations.

Something to Celebrate . . .

Of course, as every past conference attendee knows, the sessions are great but it’s all about the parties and this centennial conference was definitely no exception. The champagne at the opening centennial reception set the tone - this conference was all about celebration! I went to a lot of great events and division open houses, but two functions stood out for me: the Canadian reception, naturally, and the SLA Salutes Awards and Leadership reception at the Library of Congress. The Canadian reception was a great success. The venue was wonderful - a perfect courtyard setting in an historic inn - and all the attendees just seemed so happy to be there. The reception at the Library of Congress was awe-inspiring to say the least. Having a private dinner reception inside the Library of Congress, followed by a tour of the famous Reading Room must rank up there as one of those ultimate librarian fantasies. The Reading Room was full of happy librarians oohing and aahing over the ceiling mural, the benches, the card catalogue and lining up to have their photos taken standing at the top of the lectern. I have to admit, I was right there with them. A perfect way to end a great conference experience..

The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress

Frances Main is Team Leader of the Knowledge and Research Centre, Pacific Region at Canada Revenue Agency and President-Elect of the Western Canada Chapter of SLA.

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