Infonista

If you’re a fan of Howard Gardner’s earlier works on intelligence (Frames of Mind, Multiple Intelligences, etc.) or have enjoyed Daniel Goleman’s books on emotional intelligence (Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, etc.) or Daniel Pink’s work on right-brainers taking over the world (A Whole New Mind), you may want to take a look at Gardner’s most recent book, Five Minds for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but so far, it’s a pretty interesting take on how our brains will need to work in the coming years.

Gardner pioneered the concept of multiple intelligences with Frames of Mind (Basic Books, 1999), which identified the most common “intelligences” as linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal. In Five Minds, he identifies the five cognitive abilities (as opposed to intelligences) that will be most in demand (and will be most useful in our careers) as: the disciplinary mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind.

Lots of examples, much to think about here – especially in terms of how we create an opportunity in our libraries and in the LIS profession to encourage, embrace, and reward these abilities.

This just in from Rachel Singer Gordon:

Just a note that Info Career Trends, LISjobs.com’s free electronic professional development newsletter, is winding down the year and celebrating the season with a few changes:
First, individual articles are now online at the new Info Career Trends blog. This means a new RSS feed, so please update your subscriptions. But also, and more importantly, it means YOU now have the ability to comment on articles and add your own ideas and input.
The Library Career People column you know and love is also changing over to a blog format in order to facilitate communication and to provide more timely answers to questions. Q&A columns will no longer appear in their entirety in this newsletter, but will be replaced by highlights from recent blog posts and conversations. Subscribe to the Library Career People blog separately here.

Rachel’s also put out an all-call for Info Career Trends writers. She’s currently seeking queries for the May 2008 issue, for which the theme is “Show me the money!” Potential topics for this issue include: finding and landing personal grants, awards, and scholarships; getting funding for conferences, workshops, and other continuing education opportunities; financing an MLS, Ph.D., or LTA degree; strategies for earning a raise or promotion at work; negotiating starting salaries. E-mail queries outlining your proposed article to editor@lisjobs.com, and see ICT’s contributor guidelines here.

I’m an information strategist. That means that a lot of my information projects involve helping clients develop an information strategy that aligns with the overall goals of the organization.

If you’re helping your organization (or client) use information as a strategic asset, I’d recommend you read David Meerman Scott’s Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers into Buyers (Cyberage, 2005). Scott focuses on the approaches and content elements that lead to successful websites, i.e., websites that help organizations meet their goals. Although many of Scott’s real-life case studies describe companies trying to sell goods and services online, a substantial number of them also consider how nonprofits can use web-based information to advance their organizations in other equally valuable ways.

And if you’re thinking about ways to redeploy those LIS skills into new opportunities? Cashing In With Content is jammed with examples of companies needing information architects, writers, researchers, catalogers, indexers, knowledge managers, and web developers, among others. It’s a great resource for thinking about those alternative career paths….

I recently posted the November column to my Rethinking Information Work website, titled “Sit with the Kids.” It’s about how much more those of us who have been working for, ahem, a couple or more decades can learn if we actively seek out opportunities to work with those much younger than we are. Some of the top reasons:

• Those just out of college are immersed in the cutting edge social-networking digital tools and speak the language that those of us who, ahem, have been around for awhile are still trying to master

• They’re mostly incredibly enthusiastic and patient about sharing what they know with someone who enjoys learning from them and respects their knowledge, regardless of which generation (okay, decade) we hail from

• They’re haven’t lost their enthusiasm for learning or trying cool new things – those fresh out of college haven’t yet build up enough “professional equity” (which often translates into ego and status) to fear making mistakes, which many of us equate with losing hard-won professional credibility

• It’s way easier to learn something new when you’re working with kids who aren’t trying to score points off of your lack of knowledge (which sadly is often the case, at least in the business world, when we’re working with our generational peers)

• They’re just really, really fun and interesting to be around!

Yep, it’s true, I did fall off the face of the earth – well, to be more specific, I took a job with a Colorado start-up called Disaboom.com, which is pretty much the same thing. I had been working with Disaboom.com on a consulting basis, helping them to develop their online content and information strategy, when they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: great job, flexible schedule, ability to continue my LIS-related projects, and the learning opportunity of a lifetime. Basically, everything I could possibly learn about Web 2.0, e-commerce-driven online content, and how to do content development from the bottom up (user interest) rather than the top down (hierarchical topic build-out).

The site is intended to be an online resource of information and community for people with disabilities and those whose lives they touch. Content is currently focused in two areas, medical and lifestyles, and goes hand-in-hand with the site’s forums and blogs. We’ll be building out areas like parenting and caregiving, education, and voting, among others in the coming months.

So for the past several months, it’s been all-nighters, all-weekenders, and not much else (including blogging) – but also an incredibly exhilarating project. Still tons of work to do, lots more to learn, and many areas to improve, but the site has now launched – check it out at www.disaboom.com!

For independent information professionals (IIPs), creating multiple revenue streams is a smart way to build both your business and financial security. And one of the easiest ways to find those multiple revenue streams is to think about “productizing,” or creating information products to sell, from existing content or services you have created/offered.

The mantra: create once, sell multiple times.

Essentially, the way to think about this is to take a look at what content you’ve created, and then consider 1) whether or not that content might be repurposed and “packaged” into, for example, a report or CD or online seminar or annual update, and 2) whether there might be a broader market for that product.

Benefits? Less dependency on client revenues, disengaging dollars earned from a direct relationship to hours worked, and the ability to grow your business in a scalable manner not dependent on cloning yourself, among other benefits.

I’ll be delivering a presentation on Multiplying Revenue Streams for the Association of Independent Information Professionals tomorrow and writing a column on information products for the September column of my website, www.rethinkinginformationwork.com. Please let me know if you have any cool ideas for creating information products that you’d like to share!

Hot damn, Priscilla Shontz’s new book is out! Specifically, that’s A Day in the Life: Career Options in Library and Information Science (Libraries Unlimited), and it’s a compilation edited by Priscilla K. Shontz and Richard A. Murray. (Shontz is also the creator of LIScareer.com.)

I have used two of Shontz’s other books, Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science (Scarecrow Press, 2002) and The Librarian’s Career Guidebook (Scarecrow Press, 2004) in a course in alternative LIS careers I teach for the University of Denver, and found them both to be great resources. This new book will be especially helpful to students (and those considering a career direction change), however, because it provides real-life specifics of nearly 100 different types of LIS work.

Shontz and Murray’s “day in the life” contributors draw from public, academic, school, and special libraries; consortia; LIS faculty; library vendors; publishing; associations and agencies; and nontraditional (personal librarians, entrepreneur, information architect, competitive intelligence analyst, etc.). Most profiles include a brief intro, a “day in the life” run-through, pros and cons, how one would get a job doing the type of work described, and a list of related resources.

One of the biggest challenges in knowing what career options might be of interest to LIS students and professionals is trying to figure out just what, say, an information architect, does all day. Shontz and Murray’s book is a great place to start answering that question.

Not too long ago I had a chance to connect with Christian Gray and have him explain the wonders of social networking to me. Having a conversation with Christian is somewhat akin to being hit with a tsunami of information: not only does he talk that fast, but he knows that much. So I’m happy to report that for those of us who tend to absorb information at a somewhat more, shall we say, moderate rate, the July issue of Searcher magazine features the first of three articles on online social networks by Christian and Mike Reid.

The series is titled “Online Social Networks, Virtual Communities, Enterprises, and Information Professionals.” Part 1 leads off with a past-and-present overview of these tools, and does an excellent job of explaining and classifying the various types of social software and their strategic application. The article’s list of nearly 100 notable social networking websites will help you start exploring this increasingly important aspect of information work, and the glossary will help you explain it to others. Watch for part 2 of this Searcher series, which will feature user case studies and stories, in the August issue.

There are some LIS professionals that, given the opportunity, I always read: Mary Ellen Bates, Stephen Abram, Rachel Singer Gordon, Karen Schneider, Pat Wagner, and a handful of others. I also keep an eye out for anything written by Jamie Larue, because I especially like one aspect of his approach to public librarianship, which I will loosely paraphrase as “get the hell out of the building and into the community.” (Okay, in his defense, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard Jamie swear…)

For nearly twenty years, Jamie has been the Director of the Douglas County (Colorado) Libraries, and in that role writes a weekly column for the local newspaper. Recently he talked about the job of today’s reference librarian, and discussed the concept of community reference as provided in Douglas County, noting that “the idea was as radical as it is obvious: people with questions may not think to ask a librarian, so the library needs to send the librarians to the people.”

This has involved reference librarians working with town planners and local business people, participating as information advisors on community projects, and creating “iGuides,” or pre-packaged collections of information that link to “things we know are of value – items in our physical collection, articles in the electronic journals we subscribe to, related websites, and many other things that might never have occurred to” community members.

Although I’m not a public librarian, I believe this sort of “take the initiative” thinking has value for all LIS professionals regardless of their working environment. We can’t wait for our constituencies to come to us; they may not realize what we can do for them, what value we can add.

So it’s imperative that we leave the building, both figuratively and literally, and go to where our users/clients/communities are – we have to connect with their world, rather than hoping they will be smart enough to connect with ours.

Infonista… an individual who, armed with an insatiable lust for information and an MLS degree, sets out to ply his or her skills wherever they may lead…. Passionate advocate who understands information as a strategic asset for individuals, organizations, communities, and the world…. Change agent whose strongest weapon and most gentle persuader is information…. Information scout, navigator, and strategist.

Welcome to Kim Dority’s blog, a place to highlight ideas, articles, books, presentations, resources, and other cool things I come across to help you create a terrific LIS career. Infonista will build on the ideas in my book, Rethinking Information Work: A Career Guide for Librarians and Other Information Professionals (Libraries Unlimited, 2006), with the goal of helping you design and then achieve a resilient, rewarding career. I’ll also be looking at the LIS profession and where it might be heading in the years to come - a key consideration when trying to figure out what opportunities may emerge…or be created.

I look forward to hearing from you!