As part of Keeping Current, staff members share the latest library developments gained from professional meetings in the previous year. We also invite you to an in-person Keeping Current event at 10:00 on Wednesday, October 24, in the DMC Multipurpose Room.
Alice Rhoades
I attended the NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group) Annual Conference this past June (6/8-6/11/18). Besides participating in meetings of the Membership Services Committee, I attended a number of presentations and user group meetings. Some of the most informative were those involving other libraries that had transitioned to Alma. The Users Group meeting, in particular, was very useful in identifying which areas had caused problems and which did not, and which types of pre-migration cleanup projects had proved most useful. Another presentation detailing how cataloging works in Alma’s Folio environment was also very enformative. Some of the other meetings of interest involved how subscription cancellations affect e-journal access and current and upcoming metadata issues.
Sue Garrison
This year I attended ALA Midwinter and Annual as co-chair of LLAMA’s Practical and Applied Management Committee. Along with my co-chair we met with the full LLAMA LOMS committee and proposed a name change for our committee which was accepted. Our new name is LLAMA Leadership & Management. I met with ALA technical staff to create our committee’s web page on ALA Connect. Our committee now has a space to store meeting notes, capture documentation procedures, and share other important information with current and future members.
At Midwinter, a session entitled “It’s Your Future: Get Ready for it Now!” presented by Caitlin Williams, was not only engaging, but also filled with useful tools, activities and resources. The presentation inspired me to head over to the ALA Store and pick up a pack of their Center for the Future of Libraries Trend Cards http://www.ala.org/tools/future/trends, which I will use with my team to discuss the impact of trends in libraries and their effect on careers. I’m always noting recommended resources and titles at the conferences, and this conference netted me a monograph that my team selected for their fall read The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. We’re just beginning to read it and hope to have some insightful conversations.
Two sessions at Annual were very relevant with our LSP migration…”Managing Change (and an ILS migration) like a Get out the Vote (GOVT) Campaign” and “The Fundamental Aspect of Library Project Management.” Both shared some great tips such as organizing staff to lead change based on their level of interest (similar to a government campaign), recognizing that you have: 1. Leaders, 2. Highly Supportives, 3. Undecideds , 4. Apathetic/Somewhat Unsupportives, and 5. Actively Unsupportives. The motive here is to move the individuals up in numbers by engaging higher numbered individuals with lower numbered individuals. Two book titles that were suggested from these sessions were Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager and Creativity Inc, and again, many great tips about how to manage a major project implementation including using FreeMind and XMind to plan a project and Office Timeline www.officetimeline.com (for PowerPoint), for scheduling and tracking. The PM session emphasized that innovation requires flexibility and trust, collaboration with other organizations, celebrating small victories along the way, calculating risks, and making it safe for the team to take risks, crafting and sharing impactful messages and reports, empowering stakeholders to get involved, and clearly and regularly communicating the status of a project.
