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Congratulations Solo Division Award Winners – Dan Trefethen and Jill Strand

Posted on April 16, 2013.

Two longtime Solo Division members will be recognized by SLA this June at our Annual Conference in San Diego.

Dan Trefethen will receive the John Cotton Dana Award, SLA’s highest honor. Dan is an Analyst at the Boeing Company, and has served extensively within SLA, including SLA’s Board of Directors and as SLA’s Treasurer. Dan was Chair of the Solo Division from 1993 to 1994. We all know that it’s tough to climb the ladder as a solo, so we’re very proud to acknowledge your accomplishments and this much deserved award.

Jill Strand will receive the ProQuest/Dialog Member Achievement Award. Jill is Library Director at Maslon Edleman Borman Brand. She has served many positions in the Minnesota Chapter and has been a Solo Division member for over ten years. Jill is Chair of the Annual Conference Advisory Council for this year’s conference and you can see her tooling around one of the beautiful Minneapolis lakes on a motorcycle in the promotional video for the conference.

Congratulations to you both!

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Great Reasons to Attend the Annual Conference

Posted on March 15, 2013.

Our next guest blogger post comes to us from Jill Strand, an SLA Fellow and Chair of the 2013 Annual Conference Advisory Council. Read on for some excellent reasons to attend our upcoming Annual Conference.

My first job was as a solo librarian charged with creating a library for a unit of a retail corporation. Despite having just graduated from library school, I only had a vague of idea of where to begin. The Solo Division quickly became my “tribe” offering suggestions and support on everything from inexpensive web-based catalog to ways for reaching out to a diverse patron group.

Connecting with these new colleagues via email was fun but it paled to meeting them in person at my first SLA Annual Conference in New York. From the cab ride into the city to the ride back to the airport several days later, I started developing relationships with an incredible group of information professionals. In sessions, at receptions, grabbing a cup of coffee or touring the United Nations, there were so many smart people to engage with – they worked for newspapers, financial corporations, universities and government agencies. Armed with a stack of business cards and a notebook full of ideas, I headed back to the office ready to put as many of them into action as I could.

That was in 2003 and I haven’t missed a conference since. It is hard for me to envision not being able to make those connections, soak up new ideas at sessions, renew existing friendships and forge new ones. While I’ve been fortunate to have at least some support from my employers most years, that hasn’t always been the case and even now I have to make a case showing the value of my attending. Knowing that many solos (and others) don’t receive much if any support or may be experiencing other financial challenges, the Association and Annual Conference Advisory Council has worked hard to ensure that the conference adds value during every moment and even re-structured the schedule to make it easier for folks to leave a day early and save a night’s hotel. Details of these changes are available in an earlier blog post by Council member Ann Koopman. We also brainstormed a few creative suggestions for how members could save funds to make conference attendance less of a financial burden.

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How did “Success Stories” and “Suddenly Solo” inspire you?

Posted on August 10, 2012.

Solo Division President Patrick Clapp gathered his thoughts after moderating two panels sponsored by the Division – Success Stories of Solos” and “Suddenly Solo.” Check out his thoughts below, and please let everyone know how the conference programming inspired you by leaving a comment.

The Solo Librarians Division hosted several programs in Chicago at the 2012 Annual Conference for the Special Libraries Association. While moderating two of those programs: “Success Stories of Solos” and “Suddenly Solo”, I took notes and presented my observations as summarizing and closing statements at the end of each panel discussion. In tandem to that activity, the board of the Solo Librarians Division would like to re-energize our blog as part of our commitment to increasing off-conference benefits to our division membership. To start off this initiative I would like to recap my concluding remarks from each panel.

“Suddenly Solo: What to do when suddenly it’s just you” was meant as a starting point in a conversation surrounding the grim reality of lost headcount and the not so grim reality of a new solo position. The panelists were Gabriele Hysong from Rolls-Royce, Kati Arzeta from CH2M, and Brendan Thompson from Gnarus Advisors. Our panelists had excellent advice to offer. Your mileage may vary with what you are allowed or able to enact from the following suggestions, but there is merit to every one of them.

Explore remote opportunities – Do not constrain your bandwidth to what you are able to handle with local resources. If you have a former co-worker who has to move away or remain homebound, you may be able to acquire a few hours of work from them each week in a remote capacity.
Find a student intern or a contractor – Hiring a temp or an intern provides them with valuable experience and allows you to delegate routine tasks. It is how I cut my teeth on the profession and I credit the Solo that showed me the ropes with giving me a true grounding on how to be a librarian (Thank you Sylvia!)
Gear rentals can be a revenue source – This is definitely not for everyone, but if you are in an environment where renting audio/visual or computer equipment to other units is a possibility, you might be able offset some of your library’s expenses.
Talk to your managers – Communication was a major theme for the panel, as it should be for any Solo. You have to have a connection with your customers or you won’t have any champions when it comes time to defend your budget.
Get educated and get connected – Know what your company does and how it does it. Hand in hand with communication is awareness of your environment. You have to know what your company creates, sells, enables, buys, etc. And that leads directly to the next point:
Use the language of your environment – Do your customers say “journals” instead of “periodicals”? Do they speak in acronyms? The faster you can speak their language the faster they are going to see you as one of them.
Do not let the perfect get in the way of the good – I put two stars next to this note when I wrote it down. This is one of the best takeaways I gathered from the entire conference. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be the most amazing, shiniest thing ever made…but it better be good. As a Solo, time management is one of the most critical skills you can develop. Solos wear all the hats. A laser beam focus on perfection will detract from the necessary goal of “making it good”.
Go with what you know – Along with the “many hats” theory of the Solo life, each of us has special skills and talents. Use them all and use them all the time. It’s all a system of interconnected parts: time management, communication, talents, etc. Of course you should learn new things and expand your horizons. But when you are getting started, when you are trying to gain momentum and altitude…start with what you know.
Only you know what is best for your library – It is your library. You know it’s pulse, you know it’s rhythms. Don’t take it in directions you don’t think it should go. Stand up for what you know is best for your environment.
Trust your instincts – Over the years I have met hundreds of librarians. They are all amazing and talented people. It isn’t everyone that hears a calling to this profession. Your mind is built and trained a certain way. Trust it. Your instincts are probably right.
Find backup – Being a Solo is a challenge. Burnout is a serious threat to your ability to be happy and provide for your customers. Find backup. Maybe it is a patron that is always around who you ask to cover new employee tours while you are at a conference. Maybe it is a co-worker in a completely unrelated role willing to step in from time to time to help out. Find them and deputize them before finding a fill-in becomes critical.
Talk to other librarians and ask them questions – One of the biggest assets we have as members of the Solo Librarians Division is the List-Serv. I met more new solo librarians, more “I think I am a Solo” librarians, and more “I am an Embedded” librarians at conference this year than any other year since I was a first-timer. Every one of them latched on to the floatation device that is the List-Serv as a shining beacon of help on a dark night.
Join the Solo List-Serv – This was my next note and although it goes hand in hand with the previous one I wanted to post this link: http://www.sla.org/content/community/lists/index.cfm
Remember your basics – Reference, Cataloguing and Research. Those were my basics. How to find it, how to record it, how to report it. Your basics are probably slightly different but whatever they were, there is a reason we refer to the skill set with the words foundation, fundamentals, and basics.
Simplify your environment – The example the panel gave was about complex call number systems. If you do not need LC call numbers in your library, if they aren’t the language your customers use, and if you are willing to accept to consequences of your choices, you don’t need to use them. The point, however, was to find ways to make your library less complex for your customers and your workload.
If you can bill 40% of your time, you are paying for yourself – Obviously this point is not for everyone, but it gave me an interesting metric to examine. Justifying the library, establishing ROI, and making value visible are goals tied tightly with communication with management. In the billable world, this seems like a great benchmark to hit.
Establish friend of libraries relationships – Again this point will work differently or not at all for some. There are organizations out there who will work with libraries to provide resources and options for some essential services. For your library it might be the NIH or it might be a local consortium. Explore your neighborhood and see who is out there and who is a friend.
Be responsive – One of Guy Kawasaki’s points from the keynote was “Drop Everything” in response to requests coming from above. In truth, you should be responsive to all of your customer’s communication with the library. It takes many forms and it translates into workload at different rates for different environments, but if you aren’t responsive, you lose an opportunity to establish a connection. Down the road that makes everything more difficult.
Know your customer’s schedule – In step with knowing the language of your environment is knowing when your customer is: heading out of town, having a recurring meeting, prone to walking past the library, hosting guests, giving tours, approaching deadlines, etc. Execute well on this point and your customers will think you have psychic powers.

And those were the major bullets of the session for “Suddenly Solo”. The themes revolved around communication, outreach, responsiveness, time management, and an awareness that you are not a Solo in a vacuum. One of the most interesting things I heard during the panel, however, was the phrase: “Solo Librarians: We Do Everything.”

I believe this is true, but I also believe that our strength comes from the network of Solos held together by our division. Thank you for reading. I will return next week with the wrap-up from “Success Stories”.

-Patrick Clapp

Solo Librarians Division Chair

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