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!

Soon to become members’ only, the calendar is available on the SLA Solo site at http://solo.sla.org/calendar-of-learning/

The Leadership Training Series webinar, “Strategic Planning at the Unit Level,” was recorded and is now freely available to all SLA members on the leadership training webinars site.

• Direct link to full recording: http://www.sla.org/podcasts/Leadership/Strategic_Planning_Units_March_2013.wmv
• Direct link to slides only: http://www.sla.org/PDFs/leadership/Strategic_Planning_slides.pdf
• Use http://www.sla.org/content/resources/leadcenter/leadtrain/leadershipwebinars.cfm to choose from ALL the recorded topics

Following up on A.J. Million’s post on alignment, our latest guest blogger post from Amra Porobic and Ulla de Stricker speaks to communicating value.  Read on, and don’t forget to sign up for their April 16th webinar.

On April 16, the SLA Solo Division is sponsoring a webinar (click here for details) presented by the undersigned, Amra Porobic and Ulla de Stricker.  As the title suggests, the webinar is a pragmatic approach to the challenge so many solos experience:  How to demonstrate value to those who make the funding decisions.

We teamed up to distill some key messages for solos challenged by the tension between offering the ‘right’ information services to knowledge workers on the one hand and addressing the perceptions of funders on the other hand.  The foundation of the webinar is an acceptance of reality:  In a changing work environment where practices we may not find optimal are nevertheless the norm, we must adjust and adapt.  We focus on some strategies that may prove helpful – not to mention sanity preserving.

We begin by discussing the changing work environment:  Such impacts as staff turnover, downsizing, new technologies, outsourcing, and social media (to name but a few) are producing an understandable attitude of “good enough must do”.  Constrained budgets are forcing reductions in availability of content all the while expectations of access to free information vastly overestimate their quality (we are not talking about reputable resources such as PubMed).  More problematic still is the pervasive perception that all university graduates are competent researchers; the challenge here is that recent university graduates may have a difficult time discerning the shortcomings in free resources – after all, the university licensed databases were also free to them.

Then, we look at our own realities:  In a framework of the risk of our positions being eliminated altogether, solos must – for example – spend valuable time determining how to render professional information support without access to key resources previously funded.  In addition, solos must constantly keep up with new (cloud, mobile) technologies in order to understand clients’ requirements.

Our recommendations are down to earth:  Focus on the clients’ reality and forget what we learned in library school!  For example, we suggest a focus on key decision makers’ perception of priorities and in accordance select a few key activities:  Push key alerts (not necessarily articles, but “in the context of your project X, you may wish to be aware of Y”); accept that today’s knowledge workers cope in their own ways; distinguish between clients needing personalized service and clients capable of self-service; and pioneer the introduction of services or tools influential clients would find valuable (even if it is something as simple as assistance with configuring tablet access to information).  The key theme is to be a business and project partner, not just a content custodian and service provider.

To send attendees off to a creative future, we discuss impact.  Statistics of usage may – but often do not – correlate to business impact value.  We offer suggestions on the need for soliciting business impact statements (not the same thing as kudos for great personal reference service):  How did our content and service offerings impact decision making, productivity, competitiveness, and other key performance aspects?

We are proud and excited to present our collective wisdom.  Join us on April 16!

Our next guest blogger post comes to us from A.J. Million, the Chair-Elect of SLA’s Transportation Division. A.J. says…

At the 101^st Annual SLA Conference in New Orleans, I remember making fun of the previous year’s alignment project. That it was a step better than 2009’s name change vote was beside the point. Leadership was trying to convince SLA’s membership to make changes, and aside from never being told why these efforts were undertaken, their façade of techno-jargon turned me off.

Having spent the past year and a half working with colleagues to develop a Toolkit so transportation librarians can better show their value, I’ve seen the error of my ways. SLA, I’m sorry! The Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals (ASK Pro) may have been a bad name, but your alignment project was a very good idea!

In “Proving Your Library’s Value: A Toolkit for Transportation Librarians” (.pdf), my colleagues and I developed a practical resource to move beyond a reliance on calculators and studies of public and academic libraries. With a focus on transportation libraries, we sought to help practitioners “value package” library services by tying them to their parent organization’s goals, mission, and vision. We built a free tool to help libraries align their work with decision-maker needs.

Nevermind that our focus was on transportation. One of our most interesting findings was that many of the fundamentals of proving value are universal; they apply to all libraries. And, how is this the case, you might ask?

To be succinct, it’s difficult – if not impossible – to prove a return-on-investment (ROI) without explaining how you support your agency. Say your library generates goodwill among the public by hosting, say, Girl Scout meetings? If you work for a private firm, they might not care. They’re probably not getting a cut of those cookies after all!

Hundreds of examples exist, but my point is that if a library’s goals differ from that of its parent, the library runs the risk of being seen as superfluous. Aligning to stakeholder values ensures that management cares about what your library offers. Only after doing this can a library reliably prove its worth.

On March 25^th, the Transportation Division (D-TRAN) will be hosting a free webinar to discuss our Toolkit and how it can apply to most, if not all, libraries. Times are still tough and budgets are short. Members of the Solo Division are encouraged to attend, and far more relevant content will be covered. So sign up, dial in, and join us from 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm Central Time (1:00 to 2:15 Eastern / 11:00 to 12:15 Mountain / 10:00 to 11:15 Pacific). We’ll cut through the jargon and hopefully give you a leg up next time that the budget cuts fall.

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A.J. Million is the Chair-Elect of the SLA Transportation Division. He’s a Doctoral Student at the University of Missouri and big believer in short biographical sketches. You can find out more at: www.amillion.us.

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