Old Dogs and New Licks

1 Oct

freemandolinvideos.com

[A quick reflection.]

I went to mandolin camp this past weekend; a 3-day festival of jamming and lessons and ensemble practice. I came home with sore fingers, tired hands, and a renewed passion for sitting down every single day to practice. We’ll see how long that last one lasts. I’ve been to camp 5 years now, each time amazed at the collection of folks who sign up for the fun with me. It’s a rotating crowd. There are always a few familiar faces, but the majority of campers are first-timers. The majority are also … older.

This keeps happening to me. More and more, I go to concerts and say to my spouse, “Why are all of these old people here?” I go to mando camp and say to myself, “I’ve got to be the youngest person here.” BUT then I am reminded by Lynn OR I remember myself, I’m not 25 years old any more, either. If I stop and really pay attention, the people at the concerts are indeed older because I am older, too. Mandolin camp actually was populated by a good number of folks with a couple of decades or more on me, but as I thought about it longer, I stopped wondering what they were doing there and more, started being inspired by their being there. I can only hope that 25 years from now, I’m still heading off to camp, mandolin in tow, looking forward to late-night picking parties. What could be better in life?

For a good number of years now, we’ve been hearing the cries from our professional leadership about the aging librarian workforce and the dearth of young professionals to fill the gaps. (Note: I don’t personally buy the “dearth” argument.) At the same time, we hear the calls for existing professionals, middle-aged and/or on the downward slope to retirement, to change, evolve, become willing to accept new roles and learn new skills, regardless of one’s point in his/her career (see Julie McGowan’s piece in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, for one of the newer reviews on the topic).

Those thoughts in mind, what I saw at  mandolin camp applies to academic and health sciences librarians today. If you have ever tried to play a musical instrument you know at least two things:

  1. It is never easy.
  2. You never master it.

There were adults of all ages 50 and up at camp, and all with different skill levels. Some folks have been playing for years. Some picked up the mandolin last week. Some know lots about music (reading it, writing it, arranging it). Others know only how to pick out a tune by ear. Some know every place on the fret board to find every single configuration of a G chord possible. Others can lay down two fingers on the E and A strings, and make do. In other words, everybody at camp had something to learn. Everybody at camp had room to grow as a player.

The same holds true for librarians. Age is a mindset, to a good degree. As is the willingness to grow and change. Maybe we need to love our work as much as campers love the mandolin, to keep coming back to it again and again and again, with a willingness to keep learning and keep changing. The good news is that most librarians that I know DO love their profession. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single colleague that I may have ever heard say, “I can’t stand being a librarian.” It’s a career that people are drawn to for many reasons, but almost all of them are rooted in some passion or love for the work. That passion, coupled with the willingness to accept that it’s not easy to change and we’ll never master our profession, will take us far.

 

 

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Can Anyone REALLY be President?

25 Sep

My new role as an informationist, an upcoming panel talk I’m giving on emerging roles for librarians, some things that I heard while listening online to Purdue University’s Data Curation Profiles Symposium yesterday, and any number of articles, discussions and/or listserv postings I encounter regularly in my profession leave me thinking a great deal about what it takes (or is going to take) to be successful (read, “relevant”) as a librarian in the future. Remember back when you were in elementary school and you took those aptitude tests that were supposed to help you figure out what might be a good profession for you? I can’t remember what mine told me. I do remember that my brother’s results told him that he’d be a good forest ranger. He was really happy with it, too, but his guidance counselor advised that he was too smart for that. Know what he does today with his two degrees from the University of Virginia? He lives out in the boondocks on a farm. Gentleman farmer or well-educated forest ranger, take your pick.

My point in this is that we all have certain traits and certain characteristics. We also have certain areas of interest and certain aptitudes for certain things. For a long time, perhaps since the beginning of the librarian profession, a certain type of person has been drawn to the field. This is not stereotyping, this is fact. Librarians, in general, are not the most extroverted and outgoing people. Sure, some of us are, but in truth, if you survey all of the librarians in the world, you’re gonna find that the overwhelming majority are fairly reserved. We’re also fairly organized. We like rules and order. We like helping people, supporting the work of others, and laying a foundation, often unseen and/or seamless, that allows people of all walks of life to find the information that they need to do whatever it is that they need or want to do in life. It is a most honorable profession and I count myself truly fortunate to call it my own.

More and more, though, librarians face the uncertainty of a future that may or may not need them anymore. You can argue this statement, and truth be told I’d be arguing from my heart that it’s absurd – that in an information age, what the world needs more than anything are librarians (and libraries). But if I pause and argue with my head instead, I can see how and why many claim that we are indeed a dying profession; that it’s only a matter of time before we’re extinct.

What I hear a lot, read a lot, and think a lot about is why this might be. More, I think about what changes do we need to undergo, as a profession, to remake ourselves into one that is without question, relevant today. Is it simply changing our name? If I am an informationist, if I practice knowledge management, if I do the work of a librarian, yet in a different context, am I keeping librarianship – the profession – alive? If a librarian falls in the research lab, does anybody hear?

More related to my current role (and way less of a philosophical quandary… maybe) is the question of what it’s going to take for me to be successful as an informationist. What skills do I need? What traits do I have that work well here? This was the discussion toward the end of yesterday’s symposium and the one I found of most interest. People were asking, “What kind of students do library schools need to be recruiting now?” They were saying things like, “Librarians are not risk-takers. They do not have entrepreneurial spirits. They aren’t natural salespeople.”

And they’re right. By and large, we are not.

While President Obama (or your parents) might tell you that you can grow up to be anything, the truth of the matter is that really … REALLY … only one in a gazillion men (it’s like one in a quadracentenialgazillion women) will ever grow up to be the President. Heck, being President isn’t even a profession. It’s a title. Like informationist.

So where am I going with all of this? As I listen and read and think about the qualities and skills of an informationist, I believe I have them. I believe it’s a pretty good fit. I have a background in research and health sciences (skills). I have experience in organizing information, i.e. being a librarian (skills). But I think it may well be the qualities that I possess, innately and/or environmentally-formed, that are going to bear out as the most significant in my goal to be a good informationist. I am creative, pretty self-confident, and a fairly good communicator. I’m good at being a team player. I’m comfortable speaking my mind in teams, sharing what I know and what I think.

I hope readers don’t take this assessment as bragging, because honestly, I laugh at myself way too much and take myself seriously way too little to really be a braggart. These are just characteristics of me AND of others that I see moving into these less traditional librarian roles. For some of us, the traditional librarian role was maybe one that never fit all that well, but these new opportunities are perfect.

Lots of people go into politics. Not all of them are made to be President. I’m hardly comparing being an informationist or an embedded librarian or a data curation specialist or any other of these emerging roles in our profession, to being President (although I COULD tell you how I’d run the world if I were in charge). I only use it as an example to demonstrate that in every profession there are positions that require a little something different in order to be successful.

As I said earlier, being President is not a profession. The President is just a particular kind of politician with a particular set of skills and qualities. I think that this is what I’m learning so far about being an informationist. I also think it’s a really important thing to pay attention to in terms of helping the profession of librarianship move into the future. We need to pay attention to these other skills and qualities and we need to be actively recruiting people who possess them into our profession. We don’t do this at the expense of others who are made to be wonderful librarians in any of the other, perhaps more traditional, roles. But we need to realize that we need some different people, too.

And finally (seeds for future posts), we need to believe that some qualities CAN actually be taught – in library school, continuing education courses, and professional development opportunities. Creativity is not an inherent trait. We aren’t all going to be able to play the mandolin like Chris Thile, regardless of the number of CE credits we earn in mando lessons. But that’s not to say that there do not exist lessons and exercises that we can practice, just like with the mandolin, that will make us more creative. We can become better communicators. We can practice public speaking. We can learn about sales. Some may take to these better than others and for them we have new roles. (Others, i.e. all of us and our profession as a whole, will benefit from a little more of them, overall.)

Personally, I don’t want to enter the profession of informationist-ism. I like being a librarian. That’s the profession I’m a part of. It’s also the one that I hope to help preserve and enhance, by opening its doors to new roles and the people who will best fit them. I think I’m on my way.

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Failure to Communicate

19 Sep

com-mu-ni-ca-tion – (noun) a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior (Merriam-Webster online)

in-for-ma-tion – (noun) the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence (Merriam-Webster online)

over-load – (verb) fill to excess so that function is impaired (thefreedictionary.com) or (noun) a heavy metal rock band from Bollnas, Sweden

After yesterday’s meetings, these are the words that filled the notebook where I jot down ideas for this blog. As an informationist, I’m called upon to bring research support and knowledge management services to the research team. I’m asked to develop data dictionaries, to design a better system to request data, and to assist with systematic reviews. In all of the descriptions and definitions of an informationist, these type things fall under “knowledge management.” Along with “informationist,” KM is a trending, i.e. “hot” topic in medical libraries today. These are the new roles for librarians in clinical, academic, and research settings.

I couldn’t help but think, though, that the one thing missing in all of our talk about information is communication and so I refreshed my memory this morning by looking up each word. Since the definition of information contains communication, perhaps we can assume that it is implied. Information is what we communicate, thus they go hand-in-hand. Still, I want to think about them separately here, for I think that there are elements of good communication that I can hone to make myself a better informationist, lest we all end up here…


There are thousands of books and articles and motivational speaker websites devoted to explaining what makes a person an effective communicator. For the purposes of this post, I chose some points from a statement on doctor-patient communication that appeared in the British Medical Journal way back in 1991 (Simpson et al., Doctor-patient communication: the Toronto consensus statement, BMJ. 1991 November 30; 303(6814): 1385–1387). From this Statement I learn that active listening, empathy, and the ability to explain things clearly are all key elements of effective communication (and patient satisfaction).

So how, if in any way, might these translate into the work I’m doing trying to manage information, i.e., to facilitate better communication?

Much of these first weeks on the job are taken up with sitting in on meetings so that I can observe, and thus ultimately understand, not only the research project, but also the process(es) that are a part of it. In other words, I need to be listening – actively listening – to who and what and how the information is being shared. I need to ask questions based upon what I hear. I need to reiterate points, to ask, “Have I got that right?”

I also need to empathize with the situation. This is easy for me. I’m a fairly empathetic person by nature, but more, it’s not much of a stretch for any of us to empathize with the overwhelming sense of being crushed by a mound of information. Information overload. Communication overload. We are constantly in a state of being swamped by stuff – data, words, ideas, news, all the noise, noise, NOISE from those Kardashians down in Whoville. As I stated in last week’s post, it’s a miracle we understand anything we say to one another. It’s a miracle we can hear it amidst all of the noise. And so the skill of empathetic active listening becomes one not limited to clinicians, but to informationists, too. I need to become good at listening through the buggering noise to find the important pieces of information that need to be conveyed clearly.

And finally, I need to become skilled in explaining things. Why have I chosen these particular labels or vocabulary? Why organize things this way instead of that way? Why use this tool rather than that one? I need to be able to clearly convey my own message of what I am doing and why I’m doing it, otherwise my value to the team is severely undermined. We librarians complain a lot that people don’t know what we can and/or do do in our work. Maybe part of that reality needs to land on our own collective shoulders. Maybe we haven’t done the best job up until now communicating our skills. Not that it’s a Catch-22, but we really do need to gain communication skills so that we can communicate our librarian or informationist or knowledge management (you name it… and might the many names be part of the problem?) skills.

Lastly, my favorite line in this brief article is:

Clinical communication skills do not reliably improve from mere experience.

That’s the take-away message for me today. Clinical communication skills, librarian communication skills, informationist communication skills, just communication skills… these don’t merely come to us from experience. Like too many things in our profession, I fear, we believe we’ll gain our skills in communication simply by communicating over and over and over again. But like one of my mandolin teachers once said, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent.” We need to learn the skills of good communication and then use them over and over. There’s a definite need we can fill here.

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