21st Century Skills for Librarians

Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In their new book, The Innovator's DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gergersen, and Clayton M. Christensen build on the idea of disruptive innovation to explain how and why the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world are so successful.

Attendees of the "Play, Learn, Innovate" Symposium on June 7-cosponsored by OCLC and Library Journal-came to get a glimpse of how playfulness and game-like programs and activities might stimulate interest in patrons and innovation among the staff. What they got was a two-hour primer on how a shift away from content consumption may offer libraries a new role in fostering user engagement and promoting creative output. More than 1000 users registered for the session, with some 500 attending live.

(Culture and Climate for Innovation, Pervaiz K. Ahmed. European Journal of Innovation Management. Bradford: 1998. Vol. 1, Iss. 1; p. 30) Shared by Culture of Innovation group.

Link shared by group organizing activities for the library goal, Be a culture of innovation.

Eric's current comments about his "old" posting: In a slightly dated LITA-hosted blog posting [1] I addressed this question, and below are snippets from my reply: 1) XML - XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy. 2) Relational databases - Libraries love lists. 3) Indexing - Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating search, especially considering today's user expectations regarding relevance ranking. 4) Web serving - Increasingly people expect to acquire the information the require for learning, teaching, and research through a Web browser. 5) Programming/scripting - Finally, you will want to "glue" all of the above technologies together into a coherent whole. Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend themselves better to server-class operating systems such a Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is challenging in itself and not readily applicable to librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the desire to learn, and the time to do it.

Since we've written our report, we may not be sharing new articles. I thought you all would be interested in this one anyway.

Since the report isn't totally completed (i.e. I haven't finished my part), I have been fretting about whether/what we should do to update it. A lot has come out since we last met. Do others have thoughts? My mother is in hospice as of Wed. night and I am in and out right now. Melinda

Reiterates findings we've discussed such as a risk-tolerant culture.

A new take on asking patrons for input about the library. Ask for project ideas, not just opinions about services.

"It's time for younger librarians to claim the future. I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good time for strategic change. Yet when I clicked through to the program, I was sorely disappointed. The program is oriented toward library directors talking amongst themselves. In the growing string of strategy meetings and whitepaper collections coming from research library organizations, I see many familiar names. While I find these individuals to be brilliant, thoughtful people, I don't believe much will come out of their talking amongst each other for another day. Library leadership has been discussing emergent roles for libraries for over a decade."

In his 12 strategies to make libraries "fit" Bell, among other things, talks about smart innovation and gives examples of companies who weren't so smart.

Did you all see The Chronicle Review's question to scholars and their answers about what will be the defining idea of the next decade? From the titles of their responses it looks like a wide range of ideas.

Quick read with good ideas about how to help today's college students.

Note footnote 5: 1. Bourg Chris, 2. Coleman Ross, 3. Erway Ricky, Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2009), www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/2009-07.pdf

Yes, this call to action list is helpful. Thanks for linking footnote 5. Linda

After discussing ALA 2010 Annual, the article delves into recent ethnographic studies at various Illinois universities. One interesting finding - generation Y students support "traditional library services and roles," such as staffing the reference desk.

Broader than I expected with opportunities for law and museum librarians.

In 2008, WebJunction received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a set of competencies for those managing public access computing in their libraries. As a follow-up to this work, we developed a full Competencies Index for the Library Field, which outlines the full spectrum of library practice. The Index was published in 2009, and since July 2009, we've been using this index to help us identify the topics library staff most need to develop new skills or support around. WebJunction's Competencies for Libraries outlines recent research we've completed in this area.

Good site to be aware of. Thanks!

RLG's new report. If you can't read it out, check out p.18 about what libraries need to do to create their own futures. The information about data overload summarized on p.5 is also important.

"To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone."

Requires signing up with Wharton, but I've read similar statements elsewhere. I could see how trying to get agreement from a group might stifle innovation, but many times throwing out an idea to a group creates a synergy and improves upon the idea. Sorry I can't see all their points without signing up.

Excerpt: "Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Wideners collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Googles massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform."

If you are rushed for time and can't read all the articles, be sure to read this one.