Vancouver Events

Fee-for-Service & ILL in Vancouver

by Carol Saxon.

SLA WCC's "Fee-For-Service & ILL In Vancouver" panel discussion was held at the offices of Teck Cominco on February 12, 2004. Approximately 25 members and non-members attended the event, which featured presentations by Debbie Schachter of the BC Courthouse Library Society, Maureen Matthews of InfoAction (Vancouver Public Library), Kate Bird of InfoLine (Pacific Newspaper Group), and Amber Lannon of UBC Robson Square. The presenters spoke of the challenges addressed in creating fee-for-service information products, services currently provided by their organizations, and their plans for the future. The discussions sparked a lively question and answer period with questions from both attendees who wish to use these services and from attendees who are considering starting new fee for service products or services.

The session was sponsored by Stanford Solutions Inc. and Thompson ISI. Stanford Solutions also provided speaker gifts of a one-year subscription to KnowMap: The Knowledge Management, Auditing and Mapping Magazine, as well as a draw prize of a subscription and framed print, won by Del Rosario of the BC Provincial Museum.

Carol Saxon is with Business Intelligence and Customer Research at ICBC.

Achieving Results Through Relationships: The Power of Influence - Heidi Porth

by Carla Graebner.

According to Heidi Porth, a consultant with the Dialog Graduate Education Program, priorities for Librarians and other Information Professionals should include ways to enhance professional influence within their organizations. Speaking to a group of 22 people, hosted by the SLA Western Canada Chapter Vancouver, on March 22nd, Porth outlined how professional influence is key to ensuring that librarians become a valued part of any organization's strategic decision making process.

Porth outlined four steps to achieving professional influence, noting our biggest obstacle is that of perception versus reality - the way we see ourselves is not necessarily the way others see us.

Evaluating our image through self assessment (how we see ourselves) and opinion audit (how others see us).
Assessing our environment by determining who or what is valued and what external forces may have an impact on the organization as a whole.
Understanding our stakeholders by finding out what the strategic roles of the organization are, where information is needed, how it will be used and so on.
Building professional relationships by establishing credibility and learning when and when not to promote services.

The recurrent theme in Porth's discussion was the importance of librarians taking an active approach in ensuring the results of the self assessment be adopted by the organization as a whole. Our perception, everyone's reality.

For further reading, see: http://quantum.dialog.com/q2_resources/whitepapers/
for several white papers on this topic as well as others.

Carla Graebner is a Liaison Librarian at Simon Fraser University's WAC Bennett Library.