Building with Competencies at ALA

Staff Name: Jennifer Spriggs

Learning Event: Building with Competencies at ALA 2010

Library System: ACLS

Date: June 26, 2010

Summary: I was so pleased that I was able to attend this session, which was sponsored by the LearningRT. The two presenters were excellent - Betha Gutsche of OCLC and Sandra Smith of Denver Public Library. They engaged the audience by giving everyone a two-sided sign with a smiley face on one side and a frown on the other. They continually asked questions and asked the group to respond to their answers with their signs. Competencies can be a scary word - the presenters suggested that skill set might be a less intimidating term. The outcomes for session attendees were:
-A basic understanding of what competencies are
-A basic understanding of potential employee and organizational benefits to utilizing competencies
-Examples of how libraries are utilizing competencies to enhance their operations and missions
-An increase in willingness to explore the use of competencies in their work

The presenters walked through 6 case studies that showed how competencies were used in a practical way to benefit library systems and individuals. I took away quite a few good ideas, especially in regards in how to tie competencies to performance reviews, which I hope to implement in the next review cycle.

Aha! to share: On average, approximately 60 to 70 percent of library funding goes to staff - salaries, benefits, etc.

You can view the session resources at:
http://www.webjunction.org/conferences/-/articles/content/99973597

Marketing Seminar with Matt Hackett

Posted by J. Zamostny on behalf of M. Fuller.

I learned to detail why our customers choose to do business with us rather than our competitors, i.e., we're free, better searches, and provide online info by subject

I learned to detail the one thing we do better than anyone else, i.e., provide free books and DVDs.

Booklist Webinar - Trends in Literature

On May 18 I viewed the Booklist webinar with the speakers Andrew Wooldridge, publisher of Orca Books, Rick Wilks and Susan Siptoe of Annick Press and Firefly Books, and the wonderful Michael Cart of Booklist and YALSA president. Each of them discussed current Teen/YA books, specific titles, and the changing scene with authors and publishers and most of all - the interests of young people. Much of this discussion sumarized what we already know about from our reading and awareness of the teen requests but the views from them were quite informative and interesting. I trust that the webinars will be an on-going activity for us.

Assess, Prioritize and Manage

I recently attended the National Archives and Records Administration Preservation Conference in DC entitled Plan for Preservation: Assess, Prioritize and Manage. A pretty daunting title, and an impressive list of speakers, including the head of Collection Care at the UK archives, as well as the Archivist of the US, who was formerly the chief executive of the research libraries at The New York Public Library, Duke University's librarian and had worked for 31 years before that in the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies libraries. This bio in itself was interesting - former Archivists had been historians.

Topics that raised interest:
Do you perform mass deacidification to reduce the ongoing decay of organic matter, or do you fix the younger items first so you will have fewer problems in the future - along the lines of a stitch in time saves nine
Do you just deal with the paper and other artifacts you have, or should archivists also be concerned climate change, fossil fuel reduction, and the need to reduce CO2 emissions? (This raised issues that I believe WCFL should address for the Western Maryland Room in the new library, as well as the history room in George's Creek).
Should the Archives/history rooms be a cataloging agency or is their role to consider vulnerability of objects?

Useful to know organizations
EGOR - Environmental Guidelines, Opportunities and Risk
The Centre for Sustainable Heritage
Heritage Health Index

Besides issues like these, some statistics put me in my place -
Only 2% of government records are selected for permanent preservation at the National Archives.
The UK National Archives has 80 million documents on line
The Library of Congress has 12 million photographs and 4 photograph conservators

LOEX: Library Orientation Exchange

I'm going to hazard a guess that many of you have never heard of LOEX, the Library Orientation Exchange primarily made up of instruction librarians at academic institutions.

Now you can say that you've heard of LOEX and that you know someone who attended and presented at the 2010 annual conference: me, Julie Z.

You might be asking yourself, why did she attend such a conference when she's no longer affiliated with an academic library and does not do as much instruction? That's a good question, and the answer is two-fold. Firstly, I attended the conference in order to deliver a co-presentation with 4 colleagues of mine on the topic of non-traditional methods of instruction. Secondly, I attended the conference because although few public librarians attend LOEX, there is still much that can be applied to the public library world--especially from a staff development point of view. For example, one session I attended was on the learning cycle (how to make learning stick) and this is a very real concern regardless of whether your workshop participants are first year college students or twentieth year library employee veterans!

So, if you teach in a public setting, you might want to look into some of the materials LOEX makes available online to help you freshen up your instruction skills. Eventually, the proceedings of this conference, complete with reports and slides of each presentation, will be available online. Until then, you're welcome to look at the clearinghouse materials and past-conference materials.

Of course, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to talk with you!

What's your sign...I mean, style?

This is the first of many installments on the MLA 2010 Annual Conference that the western Maryland library staff (this means you!) will be posting to our learning journal and I am definitely excited to hear about all the adventures everyone had in Ocean City.

The first learning adventure that I'm going to share with you is the preconference I attended on Wednesday, April 21 entitled, "What's Your Style? 9 Paths to Personal and Professional Development" with facilitators Peter and Suzanne Bromberg.

This workshop centered around The Enneagram (pronounced ANY-a-gram), a personality inventory that describes one's primary motivations, outlook on life, and how and to where energy and attention are focused. There are 9 Enneagram styles:

1. Style One, aka: perfectionist, reformer, principled teacher
2. Style Two, aka: helper, giver, pleaser, caretaker, mentor
   
3. Style Three, aka: achiever, performer, motivator, producer
   
4. Style Four, aka: individualist, romantic, creator, artist, poet
   
5. Style Five, aka: investigator, observer, thinker, scholar, sage
6. Style Six, aka: questioner, loyal skeptic, troubleshooter
7. Style Seven, aka: adventurer, enthusiast, fun lover, cheerer
   
8. Style Eight, aka: challenger, leader, boss, confronter
   
9. Style Nine, aka: peacemaker, mediator, acceptor, connector

I am a Seven and my core motivation is to experience life to its fullest. But knowing which characteristics I borrow from other styles during periods of stress is actually the most beneficial piece of information I took away from the preconference. Each style is fluid and in times of stress and in times of security will morph into other styles. For example, when a Seven is feeling secure and stable she morphs into a Five and becomes more thoughtful, deep, and serious about ideas. Under stress however, a Seven starts to take on qualities of a One and becomes rigid, angry and controlling. Knowing this will help me become more aware of my energy and if I see myself becoming angry all the time I will know that I'm showing my One side and that I need to stop, take a deep breath, and reevaluate my situation.

Whew! It's a good thing we have some stress management programs scheduled in May!

On the other side however, if I notice my Five qualities starting to show I can take advantage of them as well, but for good instead of evil.

This is a topic that I'm very interested in and could probably blog all day about but, I won't, and instead I'll share one last take away.

In the afternoon we split up into groups by style to answer some questions about ourselves like:

• What do we like about being Sevens?
• What annoys or stresses Sevens?
• Sevens are needed in our library because we...

But even that wasn't the most eye-opening part. The eye-openers came from listening to the other groups of styles share their answers to these same questions and making the connections between things they said and real examples from my own life (i.e. John Doe might be a Three because in meetings he's always saying, "get to the point" or "just spit it out.") which will help me modify my behaviors in the future in order to foster better relationships because I realize now that certain behaviors like in the John Doe example, are linked to core motivations and that they shouldn't be taken personally. If John Doe is a Three then it's important to him to be efficient and me spending time to give him background that I think he needs is just slowing him down so, in the future I can always let him know (after I've gotten to the point) that I have background information available and if he wants it he can ask me for it.

If anyone is interested in learning more about The Enneagram just let me know. The Bromberg's said it was OK to share their materials with anyone who's interested. In the meantime, you can take the brief, free version of The Enneagram inventory and learn more about your style at The Enneagram Institute's web site.

New Jersey Train the Trainer

About three weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend a four-day Train the Trainer seminar in Eatontown, NJ. Although the program was designed with New Jersey librarians in mind, they were kind enough to open registration up to the surrounding areas. Alicia Hyre from Harford County Public Library was the only other Maryland library employee who attended--and like all of the other Maryland librarians I've met thus far, she's totally awesome and is doing great things for her library! I met several wonderful NJ librarians to whom my heart goes out during their current budget crisis. There were folks from public libraries, academic libraries, the State Library of NJ, special libraries; it was awesome!

The program was pretty intense. The first three days consisted of jam-packed schedules of 9AM-9PM classes with scheduled breaks and meals in between. We covered everything from adult learning principles, how to plan effective trainings, how to use training aids appropriately, ways to incorporate technology into training, group facilitation, and evaluation.

Then we had one week to put what we had learned to the test. We were tasked with writing an instruction plan and training guide for an upcoming course that we will actually be executing at our library system and we had to come back on March 26th to present a select portion of that training to our peers so we could receive feedback and so we could practice with a captive audience. This was an extremely valuable exercise. I was able to write my instruction plan and training guide for the self-defense program I'm presenting to the Washington County branch staff at their meeting on May 10th. I received some useful feedback that allowed me to edit my plan and guide to make the training more participant-friendly!

As I start to get ideas for home-grown continuing education/professional development (whatever you'd like to call them) courses, I will most definitely continue to write up instructional plans and guides for each one. These will come in handy as well if the libraries across the state move forward with the idea to form a staff development coop. The instructional guides and plans will be posted electronically for anyone to download and edit to suit their needs!

A couple of fun NJ facts:

• The bartender at the hotel I stayed at worked as an extra for the TV show, The Sopranos.
• You cannot pump your own gas at NJ gas stations. They are full-service only.
• You cannot make left turns off of most NJ highways; instead, you have to use these things the natives call Jug Handles...they're like sideways horseshoes.