SLA
members are viewed as leaders and innovators in the information
professional field, but how we present ourselves may influence our
employers and clients more than we think, Anne Caputo, SLA
President-Elect, recently told New Jersey members.
Caputo was
the featured speaker at two SLA meetings on Oct. 7, one for students at
Rutgers, and later at the annual joint meeting of the New Jersey
and Princeton-Trenton Chapters at IEEE in Piscataway.
(Photos from Ruth Wolfish and Eric Schwarz. Story continues below photos.)
Caputo spoke about the profession in general, and more specifically about SLA's Alignment Project. The Alignment Project is meant to
help members demonstrate their value to their clients and
organizations.
She
spoke on the eve of the SLA Board of Directors' decision to ask members
to change the name of the 100-year-old organization to the Association
for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. (Members will get their say when
they
vote online, starting Nov. 16 and ending Dec. 9.)
The
name Special Libraries Association has been a handicap because "hardly
anyone except us knows what it means ... most of us are not librarians
... and what the heck does special mean?" Caputo said. The
association's founders chose the name as a placeholder and would be
astonished that it's still being used a century later, she said.
SLA
members have about 2,000 different job titles, and many of them do not
include the word "library." It's important to recognize that "we have a
unique set of knowledge and capabilities that no one else has. ... We
should be the czars and czarinas, kings and queens of the information
world," Caputo said.
Information professionals should not
undervalue themselves and their flexibility, Caputo said. She gave two
career examples: a recent job listing and the beginning of her career
in 1976.
A recent Monster.com posting for eBay/PayPal appeared
under the job title "Research" and used that word three times in the
posting, though not "library" or "librarian." The job, though not
entry-level, calls upon many skills that librarians and information
professionals possess, and pays $115K.
Speaking of "Ks" (as in
thousands), Caputo noted that she didn't know what the term meant when
she graduated from San Jose State University with a library science
degree. She began her info pro career in 1976 at Lockheed Martin in
California, as a customer service trainer for the Dialog database. The
fact that she was "articulate, frank and honest" helped her land the
job amid a recession in California. (The other qualifications that
impressed her employer: She was a woman who had been a teacher and, in
high school, the Oregon state debate champion.) Her starting pay was
$10K, and she's had only two employers since then, Dialog and Dow Jones
(though both have gone through ownership changes).
Caputo is Dow Jones'
Executive Director of Learning & Information Professional Programs,
which is a marketing role. She's never worked in a library, though her
librarian skills and SLA connections continually help her.
"For
the rest of your professional life, you'll never find better friends or
mentors (outside SLA)," Caputo told students. "People in competing
companies will help each other. It has given me the smartest mentors
I've ever known."
Other associations for information
professionals (such as in law and medicine) that use the term "library"
in their name "may be watching us (SLA)" in order to determine whether
changing their name will broaden their appeal. "We are losing jobs and
we are losing libraries. We need to attract more people like us."
Caputo called SLA's Alignment Project a $1 million investment and noted
that it was funded several years ago using part of the proceeds from
the sale of the the association's headquarters in Washington, D.C. (The
association moved to a more modern building in Virginia.) The money
funded external validation of the association's research.
Part of that research was "dial testing" where executives record their
sentiment (positive or negative) throughout a speech or presentation by
turning the dial up or down. Caputo and several other SLA
representatives scored much higher than an actress when they all spoke
the same script about the information profession. The actress received
the lowest scores when talking about info pro topics because she lacked
passion. "You can be the most passionate deliverers of the message
because you believe it," Caputo said.
In Caputo's presentation below, some of the images on the SlideShare presentation include light scratch marks that did
not display on the original file. For an alternative download please go
to http://bit.ly/2OQfpQ.
