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Librarian as translator

Published May 27, 2011 conferences Leave a Comment
Tags: associative thinking, cla2011, librarians

Building on my previous post, I found another analogy that I had scribbled in my notes (from way back in February 2007). Scrawled across the top of my piece of graph paper was “Librarian as translator.” I kind of like that. Think about translators for a minute: What skills do language translators need to do their jobs? Translators need skills like:

Ability to use translation strategies: translators need to be able to rephrase idioms and other figures of speech and still capture the spirit of the original communication.
Cultural awareness: translators need to be aware of the cultures on both sides of the translation.
Knowledge of terminology in specialized fields: translators have to know the jargon (or at least know how to negotiate it).
Ability to use the tools and rules of translation: translators have to know which tool (e.g. dictionary, software, etc.) to use and how to apply proper grammatical structure.
Ability to deliver on time: translators need to understand the urgency of the work (and need to deliver competently).

As I scan the bullets above I like what I see. I like the idea of librarians as translators in the Information Age. This is just a short post – you could definitely push this analogy a bit further.

If you’re interested, I paraphrased the above list from here.

Librarians are like detectives…

Published May 27, 2011 conferences Leave a Comment
Tags: associative thinking, cla2011, conference presentation, generative analogies, librarians

This past week I’ve been preparing my presentation for the Canadian Library Association conference in Halifax. My topic is “Librarians are like detectives and other generative metaphors to rejuvenate the profession.” I’ll admit my title is a bit of a mouthful, but the idea is pretty simple: generative analogies – and other types of associative thinking – provide new insight, new possibilities, and new pathways.

My contention is that we need to be more expansive when we start trying to define exactly what we (librarians) do and what we bring to the table (wherever that table happens to be). I feel like we tend to be quite self-limiting as a profession – and yet if the CLA keynote by Frank McKenna is to be believed, we have a lot to offer the knowledge economy.

Generative analogies are not about wordsmithing a definition of librarianship; they’re about striking a bold and broad vision of the profession. In my session, I plan to challenge the participants to push their associative thinking. For example, how are librarians like dentists? What might we learn from dentists? I’m curious to see what the group comes up with.

CPSI – Buffalo – 2010

Published July 4, 2010 conferences , innovation Leave a Comment
Tags: buffalo, cps, cpsi, IBC, innovation, osborn parnes, staff training

Last week I had the incredible opportunity to attend the Creative Problem Solving Institute Conference in Buffalo, NY. I must admit when I first heard about CPSI, I was intrigued, but I didn’t know what to expect (after all, I usually attend library conferences). But now I can say that I’m glad I took the opportunity to go. Even though I spent the week in a downtown Buffalo hotel eating more fried food than one should eat in an entire year, it was the best conference experience I have ever had.

When you’re a CPSI virgin like me, it is recommended that you spend the week in the Springboard program. Springboard is an initiation / indoctrination into the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) methodology first developed by Osborne and Parnes, and promoted by CPSI. When I first heard that I was going to spend five days going through the ins and outs of what looked like a relatively simple model (complete with colour coded circles and diamonds), I was less than enthused; however, I’ve come to realize the method behind the madness. While the elements of CPS seem like commonsense, when I look at typical practices in our organization I realize that they’re not.

My Springboard class was filled with different people from very diverse backgrounds (e.g. research and development, consulting, advertising, education, communications, etc.). For me, the highlight was our Springboard facilitators. Dan, Nancylyn, and Joan demonstrated some of the best facilitation I have ever seen – I can’t believe how they managed to build a team in five short days and get us performing the process like we were pros.

Robin Bergart and I were also at CPSI to deliver a session on our Innovation Boot Camp project. Despite having an 8:00pm start time and some heavy concurrent competition in that slot (one of the presentations featured wine tasting!), we had a a good group of people. Follow these links to see the slides (PPT) and presentation summary (PDF) from our session.

While the conference had some uneven patches, I came away challenged, inspired and changed (insert “drinking the Kool-aid” reference here). I’d recommend this conference to anyone. As I go through my notes from the week, I’ll probably be blogging more about it in the coming months.

LOTW – Calgary 2010

Published July 2, 2010 conferences , innovation Leave a Comment
Tags: information literacy, innovation, LOEX, lotw, Mount Royal

This summer I was fortunate enough to attend the LOEX of the West conference in Calgary, Alberta. As a first time LOEX attendee I was impressed with the tight community that has developed over information literacy and instruction. Aside from having to sleep in residence, the experience was very enjoyable – and Calgary is always a fun time.

Randy Oldham and I presented a session called “Innovation: The language of learning libraries” based on our Innovation Boot Camp experience. If you’re wondering how our proposal on innovation and creative problem solving practices was accepted to a conference on instruction and information literacy, you’re not alone. At first glance, we seemed like an odd fit for LOTW, but in reality I think our ideas dove-tailed nicely with the themes of the conference (and thanks to Margy and her team for seeing those connections too).

We wanted to emphasize the importance of creative thinking to the success of our organizations. Too often, libraries–especially academic libraries–get complacent and, as a result, we begin to lose relevance (and maybe some credibility). For us, the key to turning this around is innovation (an admittedly hazy term). In our session, the audience had the chance to taste a bit of IBC (we had them doing forced associations and building straw towers), but we also wanted them to leave with feeling that they could adopt some of our simple creative practices to their own contexts. In other words, we weren’t talking directly about information literacy instruction – we were talking about the innovative processes (and staff training initiatives) that lead to better instruction and, by extension, better student learning. Hopefully, people take some of our ideas and run with them.

If you want to know more, you can follow these links to the slides (PPT) or a summary of the presentation (PDF).