Last weekend I attended the 2009 CLA Conference in Montreal. Although I’ve already reviewed some sessions that focused on tech/people intersections, I haven’t given a good re-cap of the conference as a whole. And I don’t think I’m willing to start now that a full week has passed  since the conference ended. Many other bloggers, far more eloquent than I, have already written about the weekend so it would be just as well to look them up. Instead, I’m going to render my experience into three broad categories. We love the number three, especially when categorizing and listing things, so it should work out well in the end.

1. The Tech.

I’ve written a few times about the tech conversations I had already, so I don’t want to beat a dead horse much longer except to say that CLA 2009 confirmed to me the fact that technology and social media are great tools to help people but remain secondary to the relationships we have with our communities. I’m more than happy to start a Twitter account for any organization I work with or for, but I’m going to use that Twitter account get in touch and keep in touch with the organization’s community and not just because Twitter’s cool. The People Factor remains essential to librarianship.

2. Copyright in Canada.

Copyright is a bit of an academic interest and pet project of mine, so I made a special point to attend several sessions dealing with copyright legislation, debates, and struggles in Canada. Bill C-61 may have fizzled out in Ottawa last year, but it was only by the mechanics of Parliament that it did, and we can be sure that the next iteration is in development and soon to hit us over the head again. Tony Horava at the University of Ottawa and Olivier Charbonneau at Concordia University both gave good talks that reminded us of the current lie of the land and hopefully reinforced the fact that the status quo is not good for any one or any organization. Whether you represent a culture industry, Big Media, or the average citizen, you are likely demanding and expecting change regarding copyright, digital use, and fair dealing. More librarians need to become informed about the byzantine frameworks, policies and debates going on about copyright and then get vocal on this issue.  To do so is not just to act in the interests of the profession but also to act in defense of our civil rights.  Both copyright holders and copyright users have rights and privileges under the Copyright Act, and we must see to it that ours are not eroded.

3.Librarianship and Leadership.

Our profession (let us all reserve judgment on the “whither a profession?” debate) is rather fortunate relative to other fields in the culture industry. We are part of an organized, international group of managers and leaders who know more than a thing or two about preserving and promoting the cultural, social, and intellectual interests of our communities. But the proper administration of LAMs demands more than an expertise in virtual reference, government documents and cataloguing. Our profession, privileged as it may be, needs to “take care of its own” and improve its ability to manage its resources. What’s more, I’d go so far to suggest that it’s not enough to lead only our institutions.  Rather, we must “use our skills for good” and play a larger, leading role within society. As librarians, we have a developed expertise in the organization, dissemination and use of information, and as a profession we owe it to ourselves to use this expertise to improve the communities in which we live. By developing and nurturing our profession’s leadership skills, we stand a greater chance of not only strengthening our cultural institutions but also leaving an indelible mark in society. I may only be at the start of this new career in information science, but I know enough to applaud initiatives like the National Summit on Library Human Resources that was held in October 2008.  When we consider the future of the profession, we must consider how we’re going to govern it and why we’ll govern it in such a manner, all the while reminding ourselves to question how it will fit in with and shape society at large.

That’s enough pontificating for one evening. Carry on.

At the ETIG pre-conference camp at CLA 2009, a couple people suggested that what the library world needs right now is something like Google’s 80/20 time to kindle and kick-start all of our imaginations onto new and wonderful projects. It’s hard to be against such a proposal and frankly, I’d love to see it done in any workplace I do (or will) set foot in. 80/20 time would be a boon to any organization, be it library science or googlizing the world – sign me up and count me in.

I’ve been giving some thought to how 80/20 time could meaningfully work, though. A friend of mine works – in spirit, if not in hours – in an 80/20 labour situation. He decided to take on an MPA while holding down his full-time position. To facilitate this, he played around with the length of his lunches and the time that his days began in order to ensure he always had Friday off to get some school work done. Three years later, he finished a two-year degree with a thesis in hand. That took a lot of hard work on his part, but since his organization was willing to bend, he came away with a lot more practical knowledge that has been useful to the workplace since.

Whether any 80/20 time would be spent on professional development or on developing little side projects that might turn into bigger projects for the organization (e.g. like how the Gmail side-project turned Google from a simple search engine to a social gathering space), the logistics and the evaluation of the outcomes are outside the bounds of the everyday work experience. How does one plan for a certain number of individuals to accomplish new goals that on the surface might appear tertiary to the organization’s main focus, and then how does one judge the work when its complete? The former takes skills, knowledge, and experience in strategic planning and management, of course, but the latter requires faith on the part of leadership. Organizational leadership would have to sit back and understand that for the long-term health of the organization and its professionals that the side-projects would have to be allowed to both stumble and succeed over time. After all, one is going to get dirty when playing in a sandbox.

I don’t think a cynic could work with the concept of 80/20 time. If one is more likely to say “give a man an inch and he’ll take a mile” than, “teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for life” (*), then the thought of giving staff time to work on their own projects might not ever work out. 80/20 – in any organization – requires a healthy dose of faith and optimism on the part of the leadership for it to succeed.

(* – I know the metaphors don’t match. My point is that for 80/20 to work, a certain amount of time and labour-hours must be freely given to the staff. There can’t be reservations about this, and it must be given with excitement for what the time might bring to all involved.)

Some big names within the LIS blogosphere have lately been talking up LIS schooling, which is a matter close to my heart. When Karin Dalziel posited the question that every LIS student should gain a comprehensive knowledge (or at least an understanding) of programming and Meredith Farkas countered that only a baseline is required since the MLIS/MLS leads to so many different fields and career paths, I asked myself why management and leadership hasn’t been cited more often as an essential part of the LIS curriculum.

I know that any post on LIS education will reflect the writer’s own schooling: my own LIS programme has informed my belief that organizational theory and leadership is essential to the information professional and his or her degree. Accordingly, I believe that the fact that an LIS graduate can enter so many different fields validates Meredith’s argument that LIS graduates must be professional jacks-of-all-trades in an info-rich society. Although Karin’s argument that programming is a vital skill in our tech-savvy culture is valid and should not be overlooked, I believe that we can’t underestimate the need to teach professional librarians how to manage people and spaces and how to formulate budgets, policy frameworks, and mission statements. You can add my voice to the chorus of individuals who demand that management and leadership theory must take a larger share of the LIS curriculum. In a workplaces where non-professional librarians are able, if not expected to complete tasks once assigned to the professional librarian, LIS professionals should distinguish themselves by their ability to not merely work with information, but to lead the information environment.

I don’t mean to situate these thoughts into a typical professional/non-professional dichotomy so much as I mean to highlight what our capabilities could be if organizational behaviour and change management were rooted in the LIS curriculum. We work in environments today where non-professionals can do many of our tasks. These tasks include cataloguing, reference work, and yes, programming. However, as LIS professionals, we have an obligation to ourselves and to our colleagues to not only understand these tasks but to also to efficiently bring together the people who perform them in order to meet and exceed our information organizations’ goals. Even though library and information science may focus on the management of information resources, at its core is the management of the people who use and maintain these resources. All of our information – our books, our manuscripts, our databases, our records – become nothing more than zeroes and ones or scribbled lines on paper if we eliminate the individual from the equation. If anything, LIS professionals must be specialists in the management of people and their interaction with information itself.

One might suggest that I’m splitting hairs by focusing on information and people as opposed to just information, but I see it as a different perspective that affects how we perceive our profession and ourselves. The LIS professional should not necessarily be adept at building a website or database since the organization can hire or contract the services of some one who has a complete undergraduate training in such a field. Rather, LIS professionals much be adept at organizing, managing, and leading people to make the entire LIS environment a better place. We must not only be able to converse with the individuals who are specialists in their tasks, but also the end-users of our physical and virtual spaces, our fundraisers, governors and directors. LIS professionals require first-rate people skills to rally an information organization’s stakeholders and yield effective change.

I don’t think that library and information science is centered on the website, database, or catalogue. Rather, ours is a field focused on the network of individuals who interact with information. Some of us work on the back-end of a system to ensure it is well-maintained while others help users navigate these systems to find the information they are looking for. Still others are in constant communication with governors and directors to ensure that funds are used appropriately to ensure that the information organization’s goals are efficiently met, if not exceeded. Should not an MLIS education demand its students to be able to interact on all points of this network? Obviously, my view is that it should, and that this ability to lead should be the emphasis of the MLIS degree.

So let the MLIS student learn how to program. And give the MLIS student an opportunity to take advanced study in this area, or any other area such as records management, information literacy, or business intelligence. But let the core knowledge of an LIS education be management and leadership methods tailored the information organization. LIS professionals do not merely manage information; they also lead teams of people who work with information. Whether we are sitting on a biweekly acquisitions committee, a quarterly space committee, or an annual budget committee or review to a Board of Governors, we require the people skills necessary to advance the aims of the our organization. Our profession’s value to society is limited if we can only communicate to ourselves.