Archive for June, 2014

Disruption, Alignment, and Embedded Librarianship at the SLA Conference

June 15, 2014

I thought the session on embedded librarianship at the SLA Conference last week went very well. It was a 90-minute session, so I used the first 30 minutes to explain the format and introduce the topic; and the remaining 60 minutes were devoted to small group discussions (three 15-minute segments) and closing.

My presentation is on Slideshare at   by the way.

There were about 60 people in the room when we began the group discussions, and over 50 remained at the end. That was too many participants, and too little time, for the classic knowledge cafe conclusion of having every participant make a closing statement. Instead, I set up a couple flip charts and put out some sticky notes, and asked everyone to write down their closing comments. Several people spoke up to request copies of all the comments, and there was unanimous agreement that I should post them. So, here they are:   .

I think they will mostly make sense even if you weren’t at the session. I’m thinking about analyzing them; maybe coding and grouping them. But I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, so I hope you’ll post your own comments and responses.

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Quotation of the Week

June 13, 2014

I just read this yesterday. It’s from the Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2013; specifically Charan, R. (2013) “You Can’t Be a Wimp: Make the Tough Calls.” Harvard Business Review, 91 (11), p. 74.

“In the boardroom of a company whose most profitable division was directly affected by Napster, the online music service, the CEO and directors debated for roughly an hour about how to kill Napster. After all the brouhaha, one quiet director made a simple but incisive comment: ‘No law is going to prevent social change.’ He recognized that the consumer was being liberated and the industry was about to go through a radical shift.”

I wish that the vendors of academic and professional content would absorb that insight. In particular, the managers of the Harvard Business Review don’t seem to be reading their own stuff. They continue to cling to their traditional business model and to impose extraordinary restrictions on the use of their material.

Embedded Librarians at the SLA Conference

June 1, 2014

Next up, the SLA Conference in Vancouver. I’ll be leading a session on embedded librarianship, “Disruption, Alignment, and Embedded Librarianship: Connecting the Dots, and Avoiding the Traps” on Sunday, June 8 at 1:30 p.m. The session is 90 minutes long, and you can count on it that I’m not going to talk the whole time. Instead, we’ll use most of the session for interactive small-group discussion modeled on David Gurteen’s “knowledge cafe” format. So, if you’re going to Vancouver, please come and participate!