San Andreas Chapter

"Career Agility: The Brand is You"

by Alison Finch

Advocacy, professional development, and networking highlighted in this talk on the "Resilient Career."

San Andreas Chapter's first breakfast program of the year got off to a great start on April 9th with this timely presentation (PDF) given by Cindy Hill, Affiliate Associate at Outsell, Inc. and founder and president of Hill Information Consulting Group, and by Christian Gray in charge of Business Development at Reprints Desk. Lee Pharis graciously hosted the event at Exponent's Menlo Park headquarters.

The talk spanned a variety of topics from identity management and personal branding to LinkedIn best practices and social networking etiquette.

• How do you ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn?
• What is the risk of identity theft?
• How should you manage your LinkedIn connections?
• Are there examples of effective LinkedIn profiles for librarians/information professionals?

The "Resilient Career" is one that is agile, opportunistic, and sustainable. Cindy and Christian demonstrated how librarians and information professionals can use Web 2.0 tools to develop

• professional portfolios
• visibility
• a community of colleagues

Cindy and Christian encouraged information professionals to start building their own reputation, to push their boundaries and reach out to people beyond their immediate circle of colleagues and friends, and to explore professional options. Christian Gray showed a "before" and "after" page SLA and former San Andreas Chapter member Jeanie Fraser developed.

LinkedIn Recommendations

• Use the Summary section to develop an introduction to who you are and what you are passionate about and remember to include important keywords that search engines can find.
• Use results-driven examples of past accomplishments but be careful not to use proprietary information.
• Invite people
• Search and surf. Search for hobbies and favorite past-times to see who might also share your interest in peregrine falcons, for example. Social networks are about people. Have fun with this!
• Consider adding a photo and remember to include your activities outside your day job.
• Turn on some of LinkedIn's applications such as SlideShare, TripIt, Company Buzz, etc.
• Look at Groups and add some.
• Consider using LinkedIn answers as a way to position yourself as an expert.

Rocky Mountain Chapter SLA member Kim Dority has written and presented on career agility for information professionals. Christian had arranged to make several copies of her recent book "Rethinking Information Work" available which were then raffled off at the end of the session.

San Andreas Chapter's own Jean Bedord contributed her poster, "Building a Web Presence from Domain Name to Website" and offered helpful suggestions for librarians and information professionals wishing to build an online identity.

The message was start marketing yourself now before you need to start looking for another job. These are difficult times but sites such as LinkedIn offer opportunities to take advantage of the power of networked relationships to get your name "out there" and to let a larger circle of potential employers and colleagues know who you are and what you can do. Cindy Hill's parting comments were to anticipate, look for opportunities, enjoy the ride, and remember that career development is a continual cycle.

Did you attend this session? What did you think? Please feel free to post your comments to the Blog.

SLA Twitter Directories

SLA has announced two Twitter directories available through the Innovation Lab's wiki at  http://wiki.sla.org/display/SLAINNO/Twitter+Directory. Member login is required.  One directory is of SLA Members and the other is of SLA Chapters, Divisions, Caucuses & Related Groups.  The lists do not necessarily represent all SLA members and groups who use Twitter, but it is a first effort to aggregate a directory for those who wish to share their Twitter information with others.  SLA Members are welcome to add their names to the list. Directions have been posted on the wiki pages.

The "starter list" was compiled by Karen Huffman, Chair-Elect of the Knowledge Management Division, from responses to a March 2009 survey of SLA members and units.  The idea for compiling a list of SLA members and groups grew out of seeing other Twitter directories of lawyers, knowledge managers, government groups, etc.

Leslie Fisher

2009 President, San Andreas Chapter SLA

leslie.fisher@gilead.com

The Silicon Valley Archives

Leslie Berlin, the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, was the guest speaker at the February 25^th Solo Librarians meeting hosted by Eric Kristofferson at St. Jude Medical in Sunnyvale. 

As well as being the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, Leslie is a columnist for the New York Times, and author of the book, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.

The Silicon Valley Archives is housed in the Special Collections of the Stanford University Libraries. To study the origins and development of Silicon Valley in detail, researchers require access to primary source materials. These records are the building blocks of the history of the Silicon Valley. The Archives have been part of the Stanford Special Collections since 1983.

Included in the collection are the papers and artifacts of:

Ampex, Apple Computer, Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard, the Homebrew Computer Club, several industry associations, Varian Instruments, and the Whole Earth Catalog.

In addition, the papers and artifacts of individuals who have strongly influenced the Silicon Valley are in the archives, including:

Douglas Englebart, Andrew S. Grove, Robert Noyce, William Shockely, and Fredrick Terman

Leslie described the workings of the Archives and how donations of papers and artifacts become part of the collection and are made accessible to researchers through the Stanford Libraries Special Collections.

The meeting was attended by several archivists and there was a great deal of Q&A between Leslie and the audience.

More information about the archives is available at http://svarchive.stanford.edu/main.html .

 

Eric Kristofferson

ekristofferson@sjm.com

Information Ethics Update

More than 40 Ethics Ambassadors and unit leaders attended the Ethics Summit held at the June 2008 annual conference.  Participants listened to presentations from ethics experts Christopher Bauer and Barbie Kaiser before forming small groups to brainstorm items for an Association values statement around information ethics.  The PR Advisory Council reviewed all of the output for common themes and selected the following top five values statements best reflecting the Association's core mission, values and objectives:

• Making appropriate use of other peoples' work (e.g. intellectual property) whether created within our organization or externally.

• Transactional Integrity: Acting with honesty, fairness, and in good faith in serving and providing value to customers and negotiating with vendors.

• Respecting the privacy and rights of individuals and organizations in use of e-mail and online discussions and provision of information on user actions to management.

• Educating our constituencies on good information-seeking behavior appropriate to the type of decision being made, legal use of the information and using authoritative information sources.

• Diversity, cultural inclusiveness, respect for differences (e.g. making our sentiments known when we feel that material may be used in a manner harmful or hurtful to any given group.)

Based on input from the SLA Board of Directors, it has been decided that it would be best to launch an international event promoting the value of our profession in the fall of 2009. 

SLA is in the process of appointing an Information Ethics Advisory Council, which will continue the initial work the Ethics Ambassadors began in 2008.  The charge of the Council and a list of its six members can be viewed at http://www.sla.org/content/community/committe/ethics.cfm.  

Those of us involved in the ethics initiative are excited about the possibilities for this leadership role in educating SLA members about information ethics and working to bring this issue to light as one of importance to the business and academic communities.

In the meantime, after hearing some of the suggestions at the Ethics Summit, the PR Advisory Council has come up with the following tools and ideas.  They expect that the Information Ethics Council will add to these as well as come up with new and useful resources for members.

• Information Ethics Blog:  http://sla-divisions.typepad.com/ethics/.  This is open to everyone, including members.

• Ethics Discussion List:  This is currently the main source of information and updates with the Ethics Ambassadors.  At some point, I hope that this discussion list is opened to all members to serve as the main means of discussing ethical issues members encounter.

• Bi-Weekly Info Ethics Poll in SLA Connections:  Plans are in the works for a bi-weekly poll question in the new Information Ethics Corner in SLA Connections.  This will be how we will gather statistics such as how many member organizations have an information ethics policy or how many members have been asked to do something they considered unethical in obtaining information. 

• Additional Tools & Ideas:  SLA is looking into creating a short form and/or list of questions Ethics Ambassadors can use to gather member input on details about ethical dilemmas they have faced in the past.

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about ethical issues in providing or obtaining information for your users, please contact me.

Wynne Dobyns
San Andreas Chapter Ethics Ambassador
wdobyns@netgate.net

SJSU Colloquia Spring 2009

The School of Library and Information Science at San José State University is pleased to invite you to attend our first Colloquia event for the Spring 2009 semester:

Bill Somerville, Executive Director and Founder, Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, presents:
"How Do You Find the Philanthropic Doorbell?"
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Time: noon - 1:00 p.m.
Location: SJSU campus, Clark Hall 322

Maps and directions to the SJSU campus can be found at http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/slis/maps.htm.  Presentations are free, wheelchair-accessible and open to the public.

If you cannot attend this event in person, we also videotape each presentation.  Links to an Internet webcast (streaming video), an RSS feed, and an iTunes Portal podcast (usually both audio and video versions) will be posted to the Colloquia: Spring 2009 calendar web page at http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/slis/colloquia/2009/colloquia09sp.htm#feb0409 about a week after the event.

Report on Information Ethics Town Hall Meeting

July 28, 2008

Download this report in PDF

Sixteen Chapter members attended the Information Ethics Town Hall meeting on Monday, July 28.  Before introducing the evening's speaker, Wynne Dobyns, the Chapter's Ethics Ambassador, summarized an explanation of ethics as standards of behavior that tell us how we ought to act in the many situations in which we find ourselves.  These are well-based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what we ought to do. They are the rules you follow even when no one is looking, the sum of your guiding values.  This requires, of course, that you have consciously thought about and identified most, if not all, of the values by which you live.   That may be our first challenge.  Acting ethically requires consistency between our ethical standards and our actions.  It also requires that we continually strive to ensure that we, and the institutions we serve, live up to standards that are reasonably solidly based on standards of right and wrong and rules derived from those standards. 

What do we do, though, when there is pressure from colleagues, our users or our managers to do something we feel may not be right or we think is downright wrong?  These situations provide the challenges we face in striving to act ethically.  If doing something, or even not doing something, doesn't "feel right" by our own standards, it probably isn't.  The only thing one cannot do when aware of an ethics problem is to do nothing.  After getting the facts and evaluating options from an ethical perspective, one must intervene or one becomes part of the problem and bears some of the culpability for the consequences. 

The evening's speaker, Geoffrey C. Bowker, is the Executive Director, Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University.  The Center's mission is to research and promote the use of science and technology for the common good.  Geof's main current research interests are in the fields of classification and standardization: in particular asking how these play into the development of scientific cyberinfrastructure.  His book, Memory Practices in the Sciences, published by MIT Press in 2006, was awarded the prestigious 2006 ASIS&T Award for "Best Information Science Book" of the year, judged to have made the most outstanding contribution in the field of information science.

Geof focused on three main points of discussion:  releasing information, massaging the truth and librarians as ethics ambassadors.  He began by stating that we often no longer know who knows what information or what they are doing with it, since information is no longer stored in archival boxes and cross-correlated by those who knew something about the subject matter at the time it was stored or by studying it afterwards.  Instead, surveillance is being used to gather data that is mined in many ways.  There is increasing pressure for primarily public and academic librarians to release information about their users, the users' records and the print and digital material they have used.  He referred to the report, "American Library Association (ALA) Announces Preliminary Findings of Study Measuring Law Enforcement Activity in Libraries," American Library Association, June 20, 2005 http://www.ala.org/ala/pressreleases2005/june2004abc/lawenforcementstudy.cfm (Document ID: 159984).  Gathering this information is legal but unethical by professional standards.   Fighting this kind of information gathering is made easier by the presence of the profession's strong ethical standards.

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam

By Karen Takle Quinn, Ph.D.

Roam, Dan. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.  New York: Portfolio, 2007. (ISBN 978-1-59184-199-9)

Dan Roam is the founder and president of Digital Roam Inc., a management-consulting firm that helps business executives solve complex problems through visual thinking.  His 2007 book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, was published by Portfolio.  Its goal is to teach readers how to solve problems with pictures using visual thinking.  Every chapter supports and illustrates Roam’s central idea that "Visual thinking is an extraordinarily powerful way to solve problems and though it may appear to be something new, the fact is that we already know how to do it." (page 31).  According to another visual thinking advocate, Robert E. Horn, words and pictures have been combined to improve human communication since the invention of written language.  This was especially "notable in the culture of Ancient Egypt." (Horn, Visual Language, 1998, pp.25-26).

We all have problems when communicating with someone who does not speak or understand our language.  Roam found that even when you learn to speak their language, as he did with Russian, visual thinking pictures are still especially useful when trying to share ideas with clients.

Report on the Virtual Tour of the SLA Website

SLA Chapter Cabinet Chair Libby Trudell and San Andreas President-Elect Leslie Fisher gave a tour of the SLA website on March 17th, with a brief overview of the San Andreas Chapter blog by Bulletin Editor Steven Kaye. Thanks to Thomson Scientific for sponsoring the webinar.

People who were unable to attend can review the tour at the following sites:
[Note:  If you do not have the webex viewer application already installed, you will be prompted to install it when you click on the first two links below.]

stream recording or download recording

Web 2.0 Awards 2007

Hundreds of Web 2.0 sites have been rated, ranked, and awarded into 41 categories by SEOmoz. Categories include Business, Marketing, Mashups, Social Networking, among others. Click on awards for the full listing (thanks go to Karen Takle Quinn for sending me the link!)

If you’ve used any of these sites, please respond to this posting with your comments and opinions – it’d be helpful to Chapter members!

Claudia Cohen can be reached at claudiarp02@yahoo.com

SJSU SLIS October Colloquium Series

The School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University is pleased to invite you to attend our continuing Colloquium Series featuring SLIS faculty and invited guests, as they address the challenges and promises of our rapidly changing profession.  Presentations are free, wheelchair-accessible and open to the public. 
 
Our October 2007 speakers are listed below:
 
Beth Gallaway
YALSA Serving the Underserved Trainer
Title: Gaming by the Numbers
Monday, 8 October 2007
Time: noon - 1:00 p.m.
Location: SJSU campus, Clark Hall 322
 
 
Dr. Dan Fuller
Assistant Professor, SLIS, San José State University
Title: Can Statewide Digital Libraries be Sustainable in K–12 Environments?
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Time: noon - 1:00 p.m.
Location: Fullerton campus, Room PL 68
 
and

Joe Matthews
Lecturer, SLIS, San Jose State University
Title: Determining and Communicating the Value of Your Library
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Time:  1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Location: Fullerton campus, Room PL 68