 Wrap up in summary of the 2012 ARL Fall Forum, remarks by Wendy Pratt-Louget. Okay, well, so here's the instructions I was provided. It says, Wendy will provide a summary that ties all of the threads of the forum together and articulate a big picture, and then world peace. So how many of you remember Garrett Morris from Saturday Night Live? I'm not going to do the Garrett Morris news for the hearing impaired, which is to say the same thing and say it louder. I'm going to hopefully be able to extract something from these very rich presentations. So I think what we started with yesterday was this notion that we've hit a nerve. Something's in the air that there's enough ferment that things are changing, and I hope the program, I know the program, has given you some food for thought as you return home. But what is really prompting this sense of urgency? You know, we've heard about disruptive technologies. We've heard yesterday a little bit about economic cycles. And, you know, is it really different this time? A reasonable question to ask. Is it pace of change? Is it the cohort problem that some of us are getting a little gray, that there's a tsunami of retirements? Is it the number of things we have to worry about? You know, the MOOCs, data curation, or you could insert your favorite worry. And the ARL Fellows panel yesterday dealt with scenarios, and I think one of the takeaways for me was that apparently most of us in director positions aren't all that worried about it. We're alarmed about the future. But I would suggest maybe it's just that we've all become extremely good poker players and that we know how to sort of weather some of those mind-boggling events in our environment. We do sense emergency, though. And I think we know they're financial stressors. We know that there is accountability pressures. I think my colleague and Kenny yesterday mentioned, you know, the specter of the Bain group coming in and doing all sorts of assessments of efficiencies and spans and layers and all of those things kind of gives new meaning to the phrase Bain of our existence. We may question why they're coming in or what they're doing, but nevertheless the motivation is valid, right? That there are inherent in bureaucracy, some inefficiencies that creep in over time. There is some validity to some of the questions that are being asked of higher education. And Susan Gibbons characterized the urgency as really an imperative for deep change, an imperative of something more systemic, more enduring, something that we heard in various dimensions of change during the course of the last two days. And I guess I would summarize that urgent message as, first of all, we need to harness the stressors, exploit the opportunities, however unanticipated they may be, and really leverage the kind of core strengths that we have. And we had ample examples of that. So what I want to share with you in some overarching themes, four themes. One is a little bit of a sense of what we heard about landscape, what we heard about our organizations and talent, what we heard about leadership, and that was certainly there as well. And then finally a little bit about what I'm going to call translational science, although I'm not sure that's probably an appropriate use of that word. And I want to give you some takeaways and then, like any good ending speaker, I'll give you a lot of questions as well. So first something about the landscape. And we certainly heard about a lot of forces at play. And John Seely Brown challenged us to think about the lenses with which we look at our environment. So I'm going to offer you three lenses that I'm going to then try to weave through some of the commentary. The first relates to the kind of interrelatedness of the forces that are at play, that there isn't really one single force that we heard talked about. And my former colleagues back at the University of Michigan School of Information used, when they became an iSchool, the Borimian Rings as a logo. And I wish I had three hands to show you what it looks like. But essentially, the three rings, it's a mathematical kind of construct, that if you take them apart, they dissolve essentially, but they're so interrelated that it's often used as a kind of symbol of strength and unity. Well, Michigan used it as a way to talk about the alignment of activity to enhance knowledge communities. And the rings represented, and we heard this echo today in Dean Liddy from Syracuse, people, information, and technology, where you might paraphrase that too as behavior, content, and technology. I think it's a useful lens to think about because, oops, I touched something I shouldn't have just a minute. Unless I want to see my photo library, which I don't think I do, or an itinerary for a candidate. There we go. Okay. It's a useful concept to think about the relationships in our domain. How does technology change an individual's work? How do we think about how information architecture changes technology and when we try to exploit it? Or how do individuals impact each other? So there's no one force there, but it's those three interconnected and inseparable elements in this lens. And it helps us to understand, I think, the multiple dimensions of change. And a small footnote I would add that I think School of Information's use of that visual was a really important and useful strategy of telling the narrative, again, to quote John Sealy Brown. So questions from that lens. Think about how do we explore the interrelationships of the forces in our environment? And how do we pay attention to them? The second lens is a quote I want to take from a computer scientist, and this is actually from the beginning of the century, the 21st century, a guy named Hal Bergall. And he writes, by 2100, our current view of electronic publications as copyrightable artifacts will be viewed primarily as a historical allegiance to a pre-participatory, non-interactive, essentially dull and lifeless era of publishing it. An era in which one thought of digital libraries as a collection of linked things rather than articulated processes and procedures. I love this quote. You know, to me, it's capturing fundamental change that we've talked about throughout the last two days. And that is the shifting focus of our work from products, publications, to processes and workflows. And I think we heard JCB echo that too in talking about moving from stock to flows. Remember he used that concept. And indeed he forecast something even more dramatic with a quote about no fixed canons of text, boundaries of disciplines, only paths of inquiry. It's a pretty profound kind of paradigm shift to think about. So questions I take away from that lens is how do we move from this paradigm or product to thinking about supporting the processes within the academy? It's a big question for our libraries. The third lens I want you to think about. Our opening speaker, Dr. Shemente, talked, challenged us to engage within the new university. And he was really getting at the sense of all of the things that have been bubbling through the conversation all week here at ARL and talking about MOOCs and efficiencies, all sorts of things. And the quote I want to share with you to think about engagement is one that comes from Lark and Dempsey. It's a little old, now it's from 2006. But he writes, where attention is scarce, the library needs to provide services which save time, which are built around user workflow, and which are targeted and engaging. And this means that the library will have to shape its offering in the digital environment more actively. Simply aggregating resources is not enough. These resources will be shaped and projected into user environments in ways that support learning and research objectives. And again, I think a really nice way of bringing home that shift from product to process but also to think about it, what it means for the roles that we fulfill. And I could argue that what we project into user environments is not just the content anymore, but it's ourselves, it's the expertise. So the questions that I think that lens raises is how do we adapt our resources to be truly engaged? How do we figure out what that workflow is? Do we need anthropologists or do we need to inculcate those skills within our staff? So the second big theme I want to talk about is organization and talent. And Kathleen DeLong yesterday noted that the seeds of our future staff are already germinating. She was referencing, I think, that next generation of professionals. Clearly the iSchools can help play a critical role in germinating those seeds of talent and teeing up the kinds of issues that we need to address. But frankly the seeds of talent may already be germinating in our organizations. So a lot of what we heard also is about nurturing those seeds. What's the fertilizer? What's the right climate? How do we harvest that talent? So a key challenge I think we heard about is how do we help staff understand the kinds of forces and change that are at play? How do we help them understand those S-curves that JCB talked about? Now John C. LeBron also talked about designing evocative experiences that prompt change in our beliefs. And he stressed the use of engagement and participation in coming up with the solutions. We heard really good examples today about that. The UCLA experience of shifting focus to be more outward looking to take its plan and move it from a process to a document. Strategies of focusing positions using interns a kind of disruptive force, much like Xerox Park did. The creation of new centers that make very visible the priorities. In a way, in that sense the facility becomes the narrative, if you think about the way that word is used. And also we heard about being responsive to processes in the academy and supporting the full life cycle of research. Kind of getting in the flow, which is what Lorcan Dempsey was talking about. So a question I think is how do we exploit our assets, our collections, our space and our expertise. And UCLA again gave us some really good examples. As did Saskatchewan, but in a different way. I loved the description of the culture as being akin to pulling a rusty nail out of wood. And I could see many of you kind of visibly kind of cringing and put the gloves on. But it's an interesting tidbit that they offered us. First of all, do we all have a sense of the baseline cultures in our environment and fabulous that they did that first to get a sense of the change over time. And their three year people plan had some wonderful ingredients of developing leadership, collaboration skills and communication. And also thinking about that notion of personal development plans, how many of us have them? If we want them in our staffs, we ought to have them ourselves as well. I'll just share on a personal note in looking at the similar kinds of plans we've gone through this past year. They resonate very much so with what we heard from colleagues at other institutions here. Thinking about knowledge development, leadership training, building assessment capacity, and thinking about how we build that repertoire of working in groups and working across organizations. The third theme, leadership. And I think a number of our speakers talked about leadership not being just positional. It's not the people that have director in front of their name or manager or supervisor, but it's everyone from the circulation clerk to the U.L. And Jaren Cudder Brown offered that interesting graphic about, he distinguished between dramatic change, which was revolution to organic change, which was rejuvenation to systemic change, which was reform. And he said the real challenge is figuring out how to pace that rhythm of change. To me that's a leadership role. And we heard about several styles of leadership today. Gary Strong talked about the repertoire of nurturing a responsive organization and building capacity to ensure that every individual understands where the library is going. Jill told us about Saskatchewan's the impact of a new leader and what it meant when her clear message was one of a values-based conversation. And I would just add three other leadership strategies that weren't noted explicitly, but I think can have a profound effect. One is something I tend to call the Wicked Witch of the West technique, which is thinking about these things have to be done delicately, that really having a sense of what the sensitivities of an organization are when affecting change. The second is the value of small wins, the Carl White approach. And we heard a little bit about that today too in looking at big data versus small data. And lastly, the leader as a master communicator, the storyteller, the value of narrative and sharing the vision. And I think our last panel give us a taste of a different kind of leadership. How do new specialists offer both new services, but also how do they become internal change agents? And similar to JCB's story about those two individuals at the Xerox copier, that notion of rubbing elbows while you're problem solving, bringing specialists together can have a very instrumental value within the organization. So the last theme, and I called it translational science, but maybe it's translational art. How much talk these days about translational science? And it's really just that sense of exploiting data to bridge disciplinary interests, kind of informatics themes. But much of what we're talking about today is also translation, from theory to practice, from leadership to organization, from libraries to the users. So I think translation is an important role we have to think about. Indeed, TK referenced the importance of being a polygot, working toward collaborative solutions, but being able to speak in different conceptual frameworks. And JCB offered a different take on translation. Excuse me. The need to have a meta-narrative for our organizations. He highlighted how important it is to have a compelling narrative about our roles, something that's strategically ambiguous. I think we all loved that phrase. Something that's positive, that is to say champion and aspirational. I think the iSchools have an opportunity to help us with translation. And I am losing my voice. So I'm going to leave you with a few final questions. And a call. How do we transform and convey our classic roles in light of everything that we've heard about? How do we create new capacities? How do we incorporate the constant transitions? And what is the organizational action to translate these changes into action? So we heard about several strategies. Appreciate the trends. Exploit them. Engage staff in understanding the landscape. Create the narrative, whether it's a story or a visual. Value the disruptions, whether it's a budget cut, which can be a good thing sometimes. New positions. And truly invest in the organization. Invest in changing the culture. And invest in germinating the seeds of talent. Whether they are the ones that are already there in our organizations or the new cohort that we're trying to recruit. So when Jim Neil introduced our last session, he closed by saying, no one goes home from ARL hungry. And I hope we have addressed your appetite to learn. Peaked your taste for change, perhaps with some new models or menus. And finally motivated you to create a movable feast, if you will. That is to say, go home and share it. So I want to close by thanking all of our speakers, all of you who have put together this wonderful program. And all of you who have participated and who will sustain. I hope the dialogue back home. Because you are very much a part of shaping our organizations and our workforce and certainly our collective future. So safe travels. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.