The Further of Information Professionals—Seize the day

Information Outlook, May, 2000 by Lucy Lettis

An aging baseball pitcher once said, "Never look back; something might be gaining on you." I'd like to suggest another reason not to look back: It makes it that much more difficult to go forward. And forward, at least for our profession, is the only way to go. I know I may sound like a trite politician speaking about the new millennium, but I've learned two interesting things about clich[acute{e}]s: They're almost always true, and we tend to ignore their messages.

Sometimes we ignore the need to go forward because it is so safe and comfy right where we are; if that's your situation, it's hard to insist that you move. But while you are stationary, remember that when a duck sits, it becomes an easy target, and from what I have read and heard lately, information specialists can all too easily find themselves prey for certain kinds of hunters. So sit if you feel safe, but while you do, do look back, because if something is gaining it may well be someone with a gun, and then it's time to move.

One major move that I see for all our profession is transitioning out of the academic cocoon of our university training and into the world of the businesses we serve, making our only basis for action the question of whether it serves our corporation. We must discard activities in corporate libraries that don't benefit our organizations. In every move, I suppose, one takes something along and leaves something behind: In this move we must take all that our excellent teachers taught us, but leave behind any sense we may have developed that we are nonbusiness professionals, exempt from the concerns of competing, cooperating, taking chances, making money. One of the failures I believe I see in some information centers today is that they focus all too myopically on themselves, without considering what they must do to fit into the bigger picture of the firms they are to serve. Some information center managers and information specialists are more concerned with being good librarians than with being effective contrib utors to the business. I fear that some librarians take the "special" of SLA to mean that we are different, not just from our colleagues in academic and public libraries but also from colleagues in others areas of our firms; we approach our work not with the standard business and management methods of our fellow workers but with a sense of difference, as though we are apart from (and of course above) them and the ways in which they work. Consider for example the way we too often talk to our clients--and why do we sometimes call them "patrons"? Is it because we anticipate being patronized? Is there another profession that calls its customers "patrons" instead of "customers" or "clients"?

Sometimes I fear we may talk to our clients or customers as though we were patronizing [underline{them}], using a little nice librarianship jargon we rather hope they won't completely understand, leaving us erudite but incomprehensible. What do we hope to achieve, for example, by telling the CEO of our organization that our research has produced forty-six "records"? What's a record" to him? Are we offering him an Elvis collection? Bach's greatest hits? Let's use words our clients understand--and where possible, always a business word.

Let us, too, struggle gamely with the love I assume most of us have of books. Books are wonderful things, but we must face the fact that their importance in our information centers is, compared to other information sources, fairly low. Nevertheless, my reading tells me that if we examined the book budgets of information centers across the country, we would still find disproportionately high percentages set aside for low-use books, and too much time given to cataloging them. Let's reserve our love of books for our home shelves, and use our professional time and money only on sources that offer maximum benefit.

And while we're at it, let's abandon that paradigm so linked in the public mind with librarianship: the popular idea of a librarian's predilection for control. The paradigm for today's information professionals has shifted from a mode of gathering, collecting, and protecting data to today's mode of choosing, evaluating, organizing, and distributing information for maximum sharing potential. As information professionals, we should not be controllers; we should be purveyors. Of course this doesn't mean let the customers take the CD-ROMs home (at least not for keeps), but it does mean we need to see ourselves as more interested in being suppliers than controllers, and to be sure that others see us that way too.

Many people who enter our profession tend to be tactical and task-oriented rather than strategic. We often have a very technical orientation, meaning we tend to intellectualize facts rather than to sell ideas. This is a tendency we all need to be conscious of. We need to learn to be better salespeople.

On the subject of selling, let's turn to the reports we write for our senior management. When you analyze your activities for them, don't write tedious reports of how, for example, you have streamlined some tasks so that they can be done by fewer people (though it doesn't hurt to let such a fact drop in casual conversation), and don't report on acquisitions and circulation statistics. Instead, fill your reports with productivity, with usage, with the ways your information center is prepared to provide, is providing, and has provided knowledge to all members of the firm who need it, giving them the information edge. The tester of usefulness has always asked, "What have you done for me lately?"; he rarely asks, "How did you do it?" He may well ask how much it cost, but in your annual report don't focus on such things as cost of acquisitions or equipment; let these items stand in the budget document only, for to emphasize them elsewhere is to invite cuts. And to emphasize them elsewhere is to take time away fro m our main concern, the distribution of information and the transformation of information into knowledge.