de Stricker

Thinking of Writing a Book? Think of Collaborating!

The Information and Knowledge Professional's Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success was published by Chandos in Spring 2011.  I am so very grateful to my co-author Jill Hurst-Wahl for our successful collaboration, and I encourage others who are thinking about publishing to seek an opportunity to work with a colleague.

Note: The following was recently posted to the blog operated by the Leadership & Management Division of Special Libraries Association and is brought here with permission from LMD:

Sometimes, an idea floats around for a long time, looking for a hook into reality. I can't count the number of years it occurred to me vaguely "the advice colleagues ask for and receive ought to be written down for easy reference" as I went about my usual practice of speaking to student groups and reviewing resumes. Then it hit me: Why do it alone? Who else do I know who regularly has conversations with new career entrants and career changers? Hello, Jill? We each had some publisher contacts, and the process of pitching the proposal unfolded. I encourage others who walk around with a "book in the head" to seek out a collaborator - having a sounding board is priceless, and mutual reviews of text makes for a very clean manuscript going to the publisher.

The resulting book can be seen as a "recording" of so much we have said and keep wanting to say in public speeches and seminars and in private conversations. It sets out a foundation on which our interactions with colleagues can be that much more productive because we can focus on the situational specifics. Moreover, it's a manifesto allowing us to be frank about some convictions we built over decades of experience.

For me personally, the book in addition represented an opportunity to speak about the very individual nature of our work lives: I believe it is important to factor one's innate strengths and preferences into any planning for a career, and I hope readers will feel encouraged to take into account how powerful it can be when we do so. Sure, the first and second job out of school may be happenstance … but we still have every opportunity to put conscious planning in the mix.

I am grateful to Chandos for the opportunity to publish the Handbook - and do allow me a plug: The entire process of working with Chandos was smooth and efficient beyond my wildest expectations. I am blown away by the professionalism of that team!

References:

Facebook page: http://on.fb.me/hetqpD

Kim Dority's review at http://bit.ly/jklN69

Robyn Stockand's review at http://bit.ly/iWLnAF

Interviews with Ulla and Jill by Dennie Heye: http://twaud.io/qKwQ and http://twaud.io/qQ79

AMAZON listing and reviews: http://amzn.to/e285mO

Europe: www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=2101&ChandosTitle=1

Career Book in Print ... We Offer to Speak on its Key Topics

Last Fall, I announced with great pleasure that Jill Hurst-Wahl's and my book - The Information and Knowledge Management Professional's Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success - had been sent to the publisher.  After an incredibly smooth process - kudos to the publisher - the book was a physical reality last week:  ISBN 1 84334 608 7  and  ISBN-13: 978 1 84334 608 1.

Published by Chandos (Woodhead) Publishing in the UK, it is distributed in North America by Neal-Schuman.  It may be ordered at Amazon (pre-publication price guarantee) and Barnes & Noble and Neal-Schuman. 

Jill and I hope it will serve as inspiration for our current and future colleagues.  Conceived to offer a set of guidelines for a career  - not as a guide to how to find a job - the book shares our own experience and that of our colleagues "in the real world". 

Jill set up a Facebook page  - we hope you'll check it out!

We now extend an offer to colleagues who may be in a position to arrange meetings and programs for information professionals:  If it's feasible, we will come to speak at your event about the key topics of the book; otherwise we will make ourselves availble on skype or in virtual meetings to address your group.  Let us know of your interest and we will discuss the options for presenting.

Overview and Table of Contents:

Information Professionals and Knowledge Managers deal with significant career challenges for a number of reasons associated (for example) with common misperceptions of their expertise and roles. In environments where they must often justify their work and value over and over, those already in the profession and those just entering need to prepare for a reality that may differ from expectations.  Based on the authors' own extensive experience, the book is intended to give readers a set of tools and techniques with which to secure a strong career, build an effective brand, and succeed as professionals.

1. Introduction:  What is in the book

2. An opaque profession:  Special challenges

3. Knowing who you are:  Determining a good "fit" for you

4. Developing your brand:  The professional image

5. Looking for a job:  Tips and tricks

6. Creating your story:  Crafting a compelling resume

7. Knowing where you want to go:  Plan - but not too much!

8. Navigating corporate waters: Understand organizational psychology

9. Winning support:  Sell your proposals, ideas, and solutions

10. Making the leap to a leading role:  Your first job as the boss

11. Resilience at work:  Thrive even on the challenging days

12. About the money:  Earn what you are worth

13. Passing it on:  Collegial support and mentoring

14. Our colleagues speak:  Career snapshots

15. Jill and Ulla speak:  Our professional journeys

Sharing What We Know: Our Professional Tradition

At the recent Internet Librarian International conference in London UK (www.internet-librarian.com/2010/) I once again had the privilege of meeting with colleagues from all over the world to find out what they are working on, hear about their latest ideas and innovations, see what the concept of “user friendly systems” can mean, and so on.  In addition, the conference is a superb vehicle for catching up with old friends and meeting new ones.  As always, I appreciate the organizers’ efforts to create a dynamic environment for interacting and building on those social networks of ours.

In particular, the conference afforded me the opportunity to catch up with Jane Macoustra – an international information professional of the first order – and hold her new book Global Research without Leaving Your Desk (Chandos, 2010, ISBN 978-1-843343660 - www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=1795&ChandosTitle=1).   In it, Jane puts her 27 years of worldwide research experience to use for the benefit of readers, showcasing resources even seasoned researchers may not have come across.  Jane’s emphasis on understanding how information is collected and treated in various parts of the world – so as to “consider the source” at an entirely deeper level – is an eye opener, and the richness of practical tips (e.g. how to mine discussion lists and blogs and leverage social media, how to search anonymously) is impressive.  I hand it to Jane for compressing so much valuable information into her guide and for having committed to updating it.

I see collegial sharing as one of the prominent characteristics of information professionals, so Jane’s book illustrates for me the “sharing what we know” attitude I have admired for as long as I have been in the profession (and continue to strive to emulate).  Amassing what we have learned during the course of our careers and distilling it into a practical tool for others is our hallmark and a habit I hope we will never lose. 

Jane’s book will be a useful “case in point” for encouraging those entering the profession to be diligent in keeping in the back of their minds the questions “How could I one day share what I have learned to help speed others on their way?  What are the lessons I could pass along?  How could I save others the time and effort in finding out for themselves?  What would be the best way to offer a heads-up so as to point out potential pitfalls and lead the way to golden gems?"  Granted, younger professionals tell me they have a lot on their plates getting oriented in their first jobs, but I want to encourage them anyway:  You, too, will one day be in Jane's shoes, having an awful lot of high-value material to share!

New Book on the Way - Info / Knowledge Professional's Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success

Jill Hurst-Wahl and I recently submitted our manuscript for The Information and Knowledge Professional's Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success to Chandos Publishing (see www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/ChandosHome.aspx for general information and www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=2101&ChandosTitle=1 for the book entry).  The anticipated publishing date is February 2011; the book will be distributed in North America by Neal Schuman Publishers. 

Needless to say, we are thrilled and look forward to working with the copy editor Chandos will assign.  Allow me to share with pride the acquisitions editor's comment on the high degree of polish in the manuscript text! 

The book is intended as a career-long companion to be read now and later dipped into as its topics are relevant.  It will be a terrific gift for new graduates and young professionals, but it is written as well for those who change careers later in life.  If focuses on personal attitudes, professional networking, learning and mentoring, interpersonal skills and organizational savvy, and other elements going into building a rewarding career.  (Just to be clear, it is not a technical "how-to" manual or "where-to-find-a-job" directory.)

Jill and I leaned - with gratitude - on many colleagues for their input to the book, and we present our own experience in hopes it will serve to inspire readers.  We have learned so much from other professionals who guided us as we were developing out careers, and we hope the book will add to our continued efforts to support and encourage our colleagues.

There will be reminders as soon as the book is "in hand" … and we understand advance orders are possible. 

The Copyright Cost - and Loss - of Societal Memory

Corporate memory is a key concern for many information professionals and a focus in many of my projects.  I join several colleagues in speaking and writing about the cost associated with protecting it and of not having access to it.  Thanks to Marc Aronson, I was just reminded the memory-loss scenario pertains to society as a whole - exacerbated by none other than the e-book, our current poster gadget for new media.

 

In a 2 April 2010 New York Times article entitled "The End of History (Books)" www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/opinion/03aronson.html?th&emc=th, he paints a thought provoking picture of gaps in societal memory induced by the cost of acquiring rights to feature images or text from previous works in new nonfiction works :  "Seeing the clouds on the horizon, publishers painstakingly remove photos and even text extracts from print books as they are converted to e-books. So instead of providing a dazzling future, the e-world is forcing nonfiction to become drier, blander and denser."

 

Clearly and concisely, Marc Aronson explains how nonfiction writers seek to give depth to their work through showcasing something outside of it - objects or literature from the past, issues discussed by others - but encounter barriers to illuminating their writing with such illustrations due to prohibitive costs.  He points out how current copyright regulations and rights agreement structures as they affect e-books could limit new nonfiction works to drawing on public domain material or to creating completely original material, thus leaving in obscurity a vast landscape of existing content that is in practice untouchable.

 

He goes on to propose a logical and simple copyright payment scheme for facilitating the use of repurposed items to enliven and enrich new nonfiction works.  The scheme acknowledges the interests of all stakeholders in fostering a vibrant new platform for selected items of content to tell the stories of the past using the media of the future.

 

I commend Marc Aronson for proposing a re-think of rights payments to address unintended consequences of current copyright schemes, and I urge my readers to keep the article in mind next time they hold their e-readers.

 

As for the information generated within an organization, I suppose we could say it's fortunate re-using it is free but for the effort of keeping it and ensuring it can be found.  It's unfortunate the latter effort is often out-prioritized by other organizational activities.

Publishing's March: Part 3 - Implications for Info Pros

(Continued from December 9 and 13)

 

What does it mean for Info Pros when our clients work with transitory "publications" assembled on their screens on the fly (think http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/)?  How do we assist users who participate in scholarly forums and thus exchange ideas and observations outside the traditional publishing channels?  What do we need to do differently vis a vis a younger clientele accustomed to the kind of information gathering typical of social networks?

In our current context, we are already working with the social networking tools and with the open source community in order to straddle the span from traditional publishing and dissemination mechanisms to the evolving ones.  We continue to be ideally placed to act as connectors between the long established and the new means of publishing - and thus of knowledge sharing, too.

Our future challenge is assessing how best to support our clients.  For example, how do we balance work to ease access to and use of scholarly publishers' materials versus work to help clients navigate the ecosystem Michael Nielsen talked about (see my November 13 post), and how do we support the educational community's need to provide for mobile learning at the same time we sustain the original academic learning environment?

One useful guiding principle could be that we strive to be viewed as information partners and "secret sauce for success" by our clients - as opposed to being seen as advocates of certain approaches to information gathering.  The fact that we may demonstrate qualitative and other differences among sources of information and among tools is a strength to apply when appropriate; our message is "come talk to us, together we will work out what is best for you to save time and get what you need" rather than "we represent an official standard in information practices".  (Our clients may well come to hold the view we are the gold standard, but it's best they form such an opinion on their own.)

It is equally essential for us to work closely with the developers of existing and new sharing tools, public ones as well as those intended for internal use in an organization.  Herein lies a special challenge in that such developers may not leap to the conclusion - as Google is widely reported to have done - that they need librarians on their teams! 

On January 21, I'll be joining colleagues on a career oriented panel event organized by the SLA Toronto Student Group:  Yet another opportunity to reinforce the message "the publishing industry is on a march and we need to be in it!"

Publishing's March: Part 2 - Users as Co-Publishers

(Continuation from November 9)

 

Possibly one of the more impressive features of the broader world of publishing is the degree to which users are now involved as contributors of content.   Here are just a few examples; Thad McIlroy's collage of resources on www.futureofpublishing.com is worth reviewing for additional pointers to the evolution of publishing as we knew it. 

 

1.  User-submitted photos in Panoramio enhance Google's Earth service. 

 

2.  Commentators on the announcement of automatic captioning of English-language YouTube videos speculated that user-submitted captions for non-English language videos might not be far behind.  

 

3.  Stanford University students may now submit their dissertations directly to Google instead of or in addition to submitting it for a fee to ProQuest.  A representative from that company in my audience raised the matter of value-add features such as indexing, guaranteed preservation, and more - and I completely agree those features are worthwhile; however it is a practical option for students to consider letting Google hold their work in its growing global repository.  (See "Google publishes Stanford dissertations online" in the 16 November 2009 San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/16/BA721AK4NV.DTL&type=printable.)   

 

4.  International scientist Michael Nielsen comments:  "What’s new today is the flourishing of an ecosystem of startups that are experimenting with new ways of communicating research, some radically different to conventional journals. Consider Chemspider, the excellent online database of more than 20 million molecules, recently acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Consider Mendeley, a platform for managing, filtering and searching scientific papers … or consider startups like SciVee (YouTube for scientists), the Public Library of Science … and dozens more. And then there are companies like Wordpress, Friendfeed and Wikimedia that weren’t started with science in mind, but are increasingly helping scientists communicate their research."  (MichaelNielsen.org blog "Is Scientific Publishing about to be Disrupted?" June 29, 2009)

  

What do such new types of publishing scenarios mean for information professionals' work?

 

(To be continued)

 

Publishing's March: Part 1 - From Static to Dynamic

At the recent Online Information 2009 event in London UK, I had the pleasure of keynoting the "Publishers Stepping Up to the Challenge" track on December 3.  Preparing for the talk turned out to be an exciting discovery as it provided an opportunity to review examples of the evolving definition of the concept of publishing. 

 

Inspired by Stephen E. Arnold's series of books on Google - in my humble opinion required reading for anyone in the publishing industry - www.infonortics.com/publications/google/google-trilogy.html - and by articles by Noah Richler and Alex Hutchinson in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus, I selected as a key theme the increasingly dynamic - in some cases fleeting - nature of publishing and the varying involvement and effort of users in the process.

 

For starters, publishing is a means to an end - we don't value or pay for it in its own right.  We pay to find things, learn, be entertained, and so on.  Therefore, publishing must evolve to meet the demands of our evolving styles living, learning, researching, and communicating. Contrast  the old style of publishing - going from hand writing through typesetting through printing, where the consumer had no participation in the process until the book or journal issue was in hand - versus the contemporary wiki and annotation mechanisms allowing for participation throughout the process of making information accessible.  Come to think of it, the distinction between "public" and "published" is blurring.

 

Compare the use of an old fashioned map - where the user must interpret a two-dimensional image from above, transform it into a mental three-dimensional image "from the side" and devise a strategy for getting from point A to point B - with today's GPS commands getting truck drivers stuck in unsuitable narrow alleys.  We like the convenience of the GPS systems, but as Alex Hutchinson suggested in "Global Impositioning Systems"  (http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.11-health-global-impositioning-systems/, they may lead us to abdicate judgment.

 

The ever smaller granularity of published items - $.99 individual book chapters at Shortcovers.com, personalized selections of various materials at Bookriff.com to make one-of-a-kind assemblies - has consequences of various kinds, one being our ability to trace them. There is another implication:  Noah Richler in "Turning the Page" http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.11-business-turning-the-page/ refers to the stunning effect of the consignment scheme, invented by Max Schuster in the 1930s and saving the book publishing industry then:  That scheme sees 24 million more books trucked around to book stores in Canada each year than are sold.  That's 200,000 lost trees, lots of fuel, and lots of book pulp.  Could more kindle reading save some of those trees?

 

To be continued …

Special Offer: Buy on Amazon at over 4x the list price!

My blog readers may be aware that I have authored two books in the last two years - see www.destricker.com/en/resources1.html and follow the links to the publishers' online stores where the books are listed and sold at approximately $40.  So far, so good.  Potential purchasers may, of course, wish to shop where they frequently shop - on Amazon.

In the case of Is Consulting for You, they would be well served.  Copies are available from Amazon direct at list price and from resellers - at list price as well as below and above.  The highest price today is $188.  Those viewing the options may give their heads a shake and focus on the more advantageous prices.

However, today on Amazon, Business Cases for Info Pros is only available from resellers - at over $160. It would be easy to assume "that's the price". Until a list price offer becomes available, interested  buyers may want to get that item direct from the publisher at $39.50.  

Caveat emptor, indeed.

Get Ready for a Drucker Treat

Some years ago, it was a treat at a Special Libraries Association annual conference to be up front and close to the stage as Peter Drucker spoke about the role of special librarians in the success of their organizations. His down to earth comments resonated with what I have observed throughout the years, and the audience's reaction indicated how much we all appreciated his insights.  Since then, The Essential Drucker has been kicking around my office, yielding inspiration (aha!), confirmation (I thought that's what I was noticing!), and validation (he expresses that challenge perfectly!).

At the most recent SLA conference, I encountered Drucker again in the form of Bruce Rosenstein, author of the forthcoming book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker's Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life (Berrett-Koehler, August 2009). Focusing on individual development, the book is based on over 20 years of Rosenstein's research into Drucker's life and thought.

See brucerosenstein.com for details on the book and clips from a 2005 interview in which Drucker sums up our continuing work:  "In the past, we always had a desperate shortage of information.  Now we have an incredible overload of data, and the executives of tomorrow will have to learn to transform data into information - which very few know [how to do]". In commenting on "the shift from managing manual workers" he says plainly about knowledge management that "we are doing [it] very poorly". 

We information specialists will always reach for ways to help our employers and clients improve their information related practices and do better with knowledge management. Bruce's book now adds a personal dimension to the legacy Peter left us ... get ready for your next Drucker treat!