 Welcome to this information services today webinar on today's information professions. This webinar addresses content from Part 2, Information Professions, specifically focusing on chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9. This webinar is part of a 10 webinar series representing the diverse authors and topics of the second edition of my book, Information Services Today and Introduction. As the editor, I am thrilled to be presenting this webinar series in conjunction with my textbook, Information Services Today and Introduction. Hearing directly from the contributing authors as they reflect and share their insight on today's information landscape is a unique opportunity to glean from their experience both the opportunities and challenges that lie on the horizon. In this article from Community to Technology and Back Again, Havens states that libraries have been and still are centers of knowledge and resources for tens of thousands of communities. They are the hubs across which networks of learning connect millions of users and all kinds of scholarly activities. Part 2, Information Professions explores the changes in specific information environments, including those that serve students through school and academic libraries, members of the community through public libraries, and clients through special libraries and information centers. Chapter 6 through 9 address both the similarities and uniqueness of the different types of information organizations where information professionals work, including school libraries in Chapter 6, academic libraries in Chapter 7, public libraries in Chapter 8, and special libraries in Chapter 9. Each chapter highlights the organization's environment, including their physical and virtual spaces and the diverse and unique communities they serve. Each chapter also addresses the specific competencies needed for successfully meeting the needs of its users. Of tremendous value to this book are its contributing authors. These authors were specifically chosen for their expertise, passion, and commitment, not only to the field of information science, but also to the professional development of tomorrow's information leaders. I would like to now introduce the panel of authors for this webinar. Mary Ann Harlan is an assistant professor at San Jose State University School of Information, and she is the coordinator of the teacher librarian program. She has extensive experience in public education, including many years working as a teacher librarian and in middle and high schools. She is the author of Chapter 6 on school libraries. Todd Gilman is librarian for literature in English at Yale University and a part-time instructor in the School of Information at San Jose State University. His book, Academic Librarianship Today, was published in 2017. He is the author of Chapter 7, focusing on academic libraries. Pam Smith is the director of anything libraries in Adams County, Colorado, north of Denver. Through her leadership, the public library system went from being the worst funded system in the state of Colorado to one of the most recognized library brands worldwide by creating an entirely new service model. She is the 2017-18 Public Library Association President and is a member of the Working Group for the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries. She is author of Chapter 8, focusing on public libraries. Michelle Macias is government law librarian with the Department of Justice Libraries. She previously worked as the chief librarian of the Civil and Criminal Division Libraries at the Department of Justice. Macias has over 25 years of library experience working in government libraries, including in the Executive Office of the President, the Defense Technical Information Center, and the Department of Interior. She is co-author of Chapter 9 on special libraries with Crystal McGaradis, Scott Brown, Jan Knight, and Joyce Fidesco. There are six key themes for the second edition of Information Services Day, an introduction. Chapter 6, 7, 8, and 9 address four of those key themes. These chapters all provide a state, overall state, of the field beginning with the history of the information organization and key influencers to forecasting future trends and issues that will require information professionals to remain forward-thinking. They also address how libraries and information centers will remain valuable entities in their communities, but to thrive they will need to remain creative, innovative, and technologically advanced. Additionally, they address new competencies, roles, and opportunities for information professionals. And finally, they address challenges and key issues of the field and for the sustainability and essentialness of information organizations. So Marianne, Todd, Pam, and Michelle, what is your interpretation of these themes and how do they specifically relate to your chapter's content? Marianne, let's start with you. So I think the themes about where school libraries are today and the ways that they've transitioned are that they're very learner-focused. In specific, the new AASL standards, which just came out, talk about learners and they talk about learners as a whole, not just the students that enter into our doors, but that they are the teachers that we work with and the community that we are a part of. And so it centers itself very much within part of the community. There are also, one of the things I think is happening around school libraries, and I see this across a lot of different library information environments, is the complex nature of literacy. And that goes to the nature of being learner-focused. The focus is changing to interdisciplinary. And I just put a few of those types of literacies up there as far as information media and information and community technologies, literacies. These are practices that involve disciplinary literacies from all types of different disciplines and you sort of knowledge structures and bases that are part of those. And that's very much a part of the way school libraries are focusing today and the ways they see themselves fitting in to communities. And they really are future focused towards building partnerships so that it's not just the school library, that it's part of a larger community. And it's not just the school community, but how we interact with, say, universities in our area, how we work with the public institutions in our areas, how we work with parents and business communities in our area and all of that in terms of trying to build something where we're community-centered. And then finally, I think the biggest issue for school libraries is how we provide equity. Thank you very much, Marianne. So Todd, what are your thoughts? Hi. In academic libraries, the current trends are an emphasis on information literacy and technology literacy, evolving scholarly communications models, which includes digital humanities, otherwise known as DH, open access libraries as publishers, especially libraries posting open access journals. This is motivated by technological and economic disruptions to the publishing system. There are also new outreach models, which involve embedded librarians. There are new roles for librarians, such as research informationists, which are librarians who help scientists conform with data management requirements for federally funded research, and then scholarly communications librarians who help the publishers publish on campus. And then there's a big change in philosophy about collections. So the real emphasis now is on access versus ownership, because nobody can afford to collect everything. And that has motivated changes such as patron-driven acquisitions rather than buying everything in sight in the hope that someone is going to use it. Thank you very much. Pam, what are your thoughts? So I think you're going to see some similarities of the topics that we're talking about in public libraries. We are moving away from collections being the center, I think, to really focusing on people and learning. So transactions are really important. We're important, just checking books out and keeping our materials organized and on the shelf. And today it's really about the people when they walk in. 21st century public libraries really focus on 21st century skills. We're still the anchors of our community. And going back to our origins with Ben Franklin and the initial idea of a sharing library, we were actually doing a conversation in the community last year. And I had a customer say or a member of the discussion say, I think you're really going away from what Ben Franklin originally thought you should do. And I had to chuckle because we're very much the center of our communities. We're still circulating materials and sharing materials, but we're very much focused on people. We are all about collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity, which relates directly to 21st century skills. Our library professionals, our roles are shifting. And the things that we have to be adept at, we have to have people skills, technology skills, community relationship, building skills, partnership. So our focus is moving outside the library. And I think we're all going to be talking a little bit about that. And then transparency and accountability to our citizens and governance are key. I think that in today's age, we have to be very mindful and people are looking to make sure that we are transparent. Everything that we do, our transactions are above board and we are held accountable to our communities and we're providing excellent value. And I think that that spotlight probably because of government and governance and things, skepticism happening today, public libraries have to be even more aware of how we appear and our communication and relationships with our government structures. Thank you very much. And Michelle. Thank you, Sandy. So the three key themes I'm going to talk about are training, competencies and mission support. And so at the Department of Justice, we take two things very... We think two things are very important, professional development for our staff and training for those that we support. So I currently head the Workforce Development Committee and this is a committee where we recently worked to review competencies and we enrolled the staff to help us do that and now we're teaming with the Professional Development Committee seeking ways to ensure that we get the training we need. But again, it also comes to serving those that we work with every day because technology is changing so quickly, we have new resources all the time, electronic resources. Being able to teach those skills to our patron base is extremely important. So we develop and deliver training programs and provide instruction on the fly. The other thing I just want to cover is mission support. In federal libraries, one of the things I can speak to is that, unlike I think some of the people we've heard from already, it's really important for us to be able to capture the work that we do and convey that story to the people that hold the purse, if you will say. There's been a trend in special federal libraries that we've seen over, oh gosh, I've seen over the course of my 25 years where we are downsizing space, staff, et cetera. And so being able to convey how the work that you do supports the mission so that you can ensure viability and survivability is critical. Thank you very much, Michelle. That's an interesting point. And I think maybe Pam was alluding to some of that too in terms of the transparency and providing value. I think that that's an interesting point that you're making. I don't know, Todd and Amirian, did you have anything that you wanted to build on that or Pam? I have to say it's such a part of my thought process in terms of having to ensure that we are clear about our value in terms of advocacy because depending on the state you live in, there's jobs are being lost or have already been lost. But I don't think of it as a trend. I just think of it as something that is realistic and has been since I've been in the profession. So that's interesting that it kind of came out in terms of accountability and transparency because for me it's just an automatic. It's just something I've been doing since I went through the program at San Jose State. I would just say that there definitely isn't a greater emphasis on assessment and accountability and I'll talk more about that as we go on. Great. Thank you very much. So let's now direct our attention to today's information landscape. The first edition of this book came out three years ago and as we've been talking about there's been a lot of change in the field and the change in the field of library and information science is constantly happening. So what are some of the key changes as they relate to your chapter's content that have occurred since the first edition came out three years ago? So Marianne, we'll start with you. So and this might go a little bit to what Todd was just talking about in terms of the increased attention on assessment. But I think what there is is definitely a much more deeper understanding of a need for flexibility and responsiveness to our world. It's impossible to talk about the last year if not the last three years in terms of information literacy and school libraries and the types of literacies we're teaching about to not talk about media literacy and the emphasis on fake news but just the ways that social media has impacted the channels for information and what that means in working especially with youth. And so there's this flexibility in terms of the types of skills that we're teaching to make sure that they're skills and practices that can respond to what is immediately in front of us. I think the issues around equity are incredibly important and I see a lot more focus and issues on these changes. So just some ideas about information deserts and the ways that net neutrality has a potential to impact learning in particular but certainly geographic equity issues. And then there's just these pedagogical trends that are again swinging back into the center of our focus in education which would be things around student center learning. This sort of comes out in maker spaces, the DIY movement. All of those things are impacting the ways school libraries deliver services and how flexible they are in delivering those services so that they are not there, there are institutions that shift and change as their communities have needs. Thank you, Marianne. So Todd, what are your thoughts? I don't think there's anything new under the sun completely but I would say that I have noticed a greater and ever greater emphasis on service overall. And the way that that is playing itself out is through a greater emphasis on the liaison model of outreach and the outreach in general has become the sort of buzzword along with service that you don't, the idea that you don't sit passively waiting for somebody to approach you about a question you go out there and you do what you can to encourage people to make use of your services. So that's the chief thing. Then the thing that actually is brand new is the new ACRL framework for information literacy. So getting to the question of information literacy and technology literacy and all the evolution that is happening there. So there's a greater emphasis on active learning rather than passively receiving information, looking at information more critically than in the past. So challenging an individual's understanding of information, not just the librarian standing up there and telling them what they need to know, making them more actively engaged to have a deeper understanding of their information environment around them. There's also an ever increasing emphasis on digital humanities, which is one of the changes to scholarly communications models. Another one is open access. So making things as freely available as possible, publications so that the world has a more equitable access to the products of research. And then as I said earlier, libraries taking on the role of publishers in the wake of the devastating financial crisis that has been really decimating the academic publishing industry for decades. Libraries are finally really stepping up to the plate and there are 30% more members of the American Association of American University Presses that are now reporting into libraries as they're sort of their institutional overseer than there were even five years ago. And then finally, the idea of collections as a service. So you don't just collect, you collect, you collect as a way of meeting the immediate needs of your constituents. That's a new thing. Even in the great libraries, the Harvard's, the Yale's, and along with that, one example of that is that you have a patron-driven acquisition. So you don't buy books unless somebody has a need for them. And then also cooperative collection development, the sharing of the burden of collecting across consortial groups. So groups of libraries working together. Thank you, Todd and Pam. I think public libraries are feeling a lot of pressure to move quickly, to make decisions quickly, to be more entrepreneurial for sure. And something that over the last couple of years, the library as the place of civic discourse, I think is becoming even more important. Our forums that libraries are hosting where people can come together and have conversations because it's becoming increasingly difficult to have civil conversations in society today because of how discordant things are. And so the library is that safe space where you can come together and explore ideas and talk about things in a civil manner. We had a conversation about the Vietnam War in conjunction with the ALA Ken Burns PBS TV series and we had a moderator and we had a room filled with about a hundred people, most of them are Vietnam vets, but also a fair number of people who would have been protesters during the Vietnam War. And for people to have that opportunity to talk about something that is a national wound in a way. And we really haven't talked about things, was a way for the library to open doors for people to get information in a different way. And in a way that everybody walked away, I think feeling good about it. We didn't solve anything, but it was an opportunity for people to feel like they were being heard. Definitely the interactive programming is something that is so critical to our success today. It's not just getting off to have a program where people come and listen to somebody. You come and you actually learn. And so the STEM programming, the STEAM programming, the interactive programming, my illustration is a program at the Skokie Public Library in which people are learning how to tie knots. And I think this is something that's an offshoot of years and years ago or in another generation, you might learn some of these skills from your family, your grandparents, your neighbors. And today you're learning those things at the library. So informal learning is very important to us. And we concentrate more and more on learning in the library. And then lastly, community partnerships. We cannot go it alone and we're not the experts. And so bringing in experts and talent that we don't necessarily have or working on projects collaboratively in our community in conjunction with other folks at the table, I think is becoming incredibly important to public libraries in the success. It's not just about the library being successful, but about the library being part of the success of the community. Thank you Pam and Michelle. So for today's information landscape, if I look at just the past three years and these years and where we're at today, I actually would have a broader view just because three years in government time seems to move rather slowly. But one thing that we certainly are faced with is a diminishing budget. And I've heard people say over the past years, and I think it's true, you can't do more with less. You just have to do what you can with the budget that you have. And we have figured out several ways to do that. One of them is actually has to do with where I'm sitting today. I was a manager on the staff in Washington, D.C. and was relocating to the Denver area coming back home after many years in D.C. And because we were on a hiring freeze, one of the ways we solved not being able to replace me was actually to make me a full-time virtual employee. So that's just one of the ways that we've dealt with that. Over the past 10 years, our staff has gone from 100 to 60. So you can really see where this is definitely a trend that's impacting us. We still do a great job. And then back to something I spoke to earlier, ensuring the viability of the library. One of the ways we've done that is we created our own SharePoint Reference Tracker to track the reference that we do. So we would have information, statistics, the types of questions that we're answering in a way that we can now take that information and make it into a group. Conversation and create reports with it so that we can tell people what it is that we exactly are doing for them. And an increase in electronic resources, I'll speak to that a little bit more in the next slide, but I'll just say that it really has had a big impact in the legal world. So there's less print that we can need to sort of store our warehouse. And then, again, speaking to ensuring value for taxpayers, we really need to be sure that what we're doing is value. Like, are we following our mission? Are we doing what we need to do? And are we doing it in the best way that we can with the dollars that we have? Are we organizationally efficient? Thank you, Michelle. It's interesting to hear all of you talk about your different types of changes that have happened in each of the different environments. I was wondering if you had any comments or questions or observations that you would like to make based on what we just were talking about. So I'll jump in. I've heard patron-centered collection development in academic libraries, and that's something that's critical for public libraries as well and has been for a while, but it's becoming even more important. As you know, it's impossible to collect everything. And so sharing is also important for us and making sure that we have our collections that are focused on the things that are most interesting or most interested in our particular communities. We have to focus and narrow our scope. I think that the idea of value is something that's critical for public libraries as well. We have to constantly be helping people understand what our values are and the value that we bring to the community. And it's our responsibility to be articulate about that. Thank you, Pam. I was really struck by that too. I mean, and I think each one of you talked about it in a different way, but it was there in terms of the outreach and the connection with the community that you're serving or that you're working with. And that communication of that value, I think really came through. Any, Todd, did you wanna say something? So the emphasis on service is a direct result of that because before it was okay that you just had this building full of stuff and now you have to show people all about it and tell them all about it constantly because otherwise you're not really demonstrating value. Thank you. Excellent. Well, why don't we move on then? So now let's direct our attention to the future. What trends or emerging issues will impact the field of library and information science as it relates to your chapter's topic. So thinking to the future, what do you think is gonna happen? So Marianne, we'll start with you. I really think that there's this issue of equity and I know I've mentioned it in the previous two slides, but it's just becoming a much bigger deal, particularly in public education, but in general. And recent concerns around net neutrality changes have only emphasized this, but as you see what's happening in schools, in suburban schools, in richer schools, you have one-to-one initiatives, where every student has access to a computer, you have better broadband services, you have libraries that are staffed, whereas if you go into schools in poor communities, you have understaffed or not-staffed libraries, you have old technology, and I think it's a real problem. So this equity issue around underserved communities and underserved schools is a real problem. I think one of the trends that you're gonna start to see is how we build global partnerships and how we make the world a little smaller for our students by building those global partnerships. And one of the things, and I think we saw this in what was being talked about in the last section around what's happening in public libraries, this idea of doing things, this idea of being able to complete and practice versus the knowledge that's given to you. I know for sure you see that in the ACRL framework for information literacy. It's starting to, I haven't wrapped my mind yet around the school library standards that just came out in November, but I think you'll see it there as well. So what, so that literacy is doing, not just knowing. Thank you, Marianne. Todd, what about you? The real emphasis, the real coming emphases are, in terms of new directions, data management in all of its forms, especially to do with digital resources. There's definitely an emphasis on a student assessment, which I mentioned earlier briefly, to really determine what the outcomes are. That you can't just, it's not enough just to assess what you have, how good a teacher you are, but you have to assess how good the result of that teaching is. And a new emphasis, therefore, on pedagogy and the results of pedagogy, recognizing different learning styles, making sure that the staff demographic matches the community demographic, so that students feel that they are being talked to by people that they can relate to. There's definitely a broadening scope of scholarship at various levels, as we've had to deal with the retrenchment of resources devoted to scholarship, so different things counting as scholarship. We have creation of digital archives now, working with big data. And then, like I said before, the library is working at becoming publishers. And then finally, on the technical services side of things, we have changing description tools and increased metadata needs and metadata data about data. So we have new formats, we've left behind the machine readable, the mark record, the machine readable cataloging record in favor of things that are less cumbersome to use that can describe resources. First of all, more expansively, so deal with multiple formats, but also can get books and other media into the catalog more quickly. So we've got the RDA, which stands for Resource Description and Access, FERBER, which is the functional requirements for the geographic records to bring, let's say, every iteration of the title Hamlet together under one record, and then other non-mark metadata schemas. We have evolving, could you, yeah, there you go. Evolving outreach models, we've got embedded librarians going to where the students and faculty are rather than expecting them to come to us. Research informationists that we mentioned, I mentioned before, these are the people who, librarians who help scientists comply with data management requirements, given issued by the federal government in exchange for federal funding for research. Changes to pedagogy in terms of our being, locating librarians inside course shells, like in Canvas, the librarian is now present in Canvas so that he or she can be where the students are. We have new curatorial activities involving digital preservation, so making sure that we don't lose access to ephemeral material, pre-material that is here today and might be gone tomorrow, and that analysis of data, archiving web collections that are maybe here today gone tomorrow. And then finally, making everybody into a, you know, cross-training people, so making positions that are flexible across departments. A greater emphasis on computer skills, everybody has to be super computer literate these days, and therefore also, as you might expect, more specialized. Thank you very much, Todd. Pam, what about you? So in some ways, this might sound like more of the same, but community issues really are driving library, public library strategy. We cannot make, we can't make our strategic decisions internally. They need to be connected with our external factors. And our projects, programs, collections are influenced by the needs of our community. This slide, the image on my slide is a summer school lunch program that's happening in public libraries or after school snacks that we work with local partners to be able to help ensure that the kids in our communities have nutrition. You see the libraries working and providing GED programs. Something that's been prevalent in the last year is the opioid situation in libraries being trained on how to react to that, on social workers in libraries, so that we're better prepared to actually connect customers with resources in our community. And so each community is different, and each community makes these decisions based on each library. It makes these decisions based on the needs of the community. In my own community, our Adams County is the eighth fastest growing county in the country, and our community is asking us to be a catalyst for innovation. And so that's something that is an awesome ask, and it aligns with our own energy and passion and creativity, but that's an unusual ask, I think. And shifting perceptions of the library, I think we still have a very strong brand, which is the book brand. However, libraries do that and so much more. And so it's our responsibility to help our communities understand our expanding role and impact in our peace of that success measure, our quality of life that we're offering, and how important we are to the success of the community and residents wanting to live in a particular community is dependent upon the library, but we've got to talk about ourselves in different ways. Then lastly, we're all talking about governance and funding. Again, this goes back to accountability, but in public libraries, our governance structures are varied, and some I think we need to really examine governance and what type of governance structures could we, do we prosper in? Can we do our best work? And then clearly funding, that accountability and value. And I think libraries have to work faster and harder. We have to be more innovative and we have to prove our worth over and over again. Thank you very much, Pam. And Michelle, what are your thoughts? So again, it might sound like I'm repeating myself and in some ways I am, but I'm gonna speak to diminishing budgets, a smaller footprint and increase in electronic resources and forecasting future trends. So, and I have covered the topic, certainly of diminishing budgets, but another way that we're working around that, as far as staffing, I've already mentioned my move here, but other ways are having staff who are cross-trained in areas that are maybe outside their area of expertise. So having catalogers who are now working with the web team, having catalogers have a bigger contribution to collection development, those kinds of things, really looking at collections. One of the unique things we do at the Department of Justice is we help our patrons, and by patrons I mean our litigating division, so our civil division, criminal rights, et cetera, they have a large budget for publications that they keep in their division sections. And so we, through an arrangement, will purchase those publications on their behalf. But when we do that, we're also saying to them and educating them, hey, look, you've got this particular item, but this is available in these different electronic resources and in the library, et cetera. So it's trying to help not only the library with their diminishing budget, but the entire department with diminishing budgets. A smaller footprint, certainly at the department, we have, like most government employees have been asked to downsize, and we're currently doing that. Then another way that we can deal with that is just making sure that the money that we're spending for the resources we have really are what we need, and we are somewhat turning to that model of just in time, but for us it's a little bit harder with legal resources to do that. But we're finding ways that we can do it within what resources we have available to us. And by that, I mean just a lot of the money and resources to do things like eBooks. Even an eBook is a big challenge in our technology environment. So that along with the increase of electronic resources, we have been able to move away from large, large print collections of legal resources that take up a lot of space into smaller footprint. And then I think forecasting future trends is something that one can't necessarily just do, but it's a skill that you learn through a lot of different ways. If you've got a staff, for example, we have an emerging technologies committee, and we look at the different types of technologies that are out there, and we try to figure out what we can use within the confines of our organization because we have challenges like security. We have challenges of the budget. We have challenges of being an organization with over 100,000 people, and how do you manage implementing any new technologies? And if you're the only entity within an organization that large that actually has access to everybody in the department because everybody else is siloed in these old sort of organizational ways of being, but yet that really can't change. How do you try to implement some of those future trends and do so while understanding that there's just only so much you can do, but try and be creative to do that? Thank you. So you've all outlined some really interesting future challenges and opportunities for the field. I wanted to open it up to you to see if there was anything more that any of you wanted to add or build on. If you heard something that made you think of something that somebody else said, like to open it up. I just wanted to comment on something Pam said in terms of something we've all said, which she talked about having a strong book brand but that we do so much more. And I thought that was a really interesting way of phrasing this because we're talking about what our trends are in future watching and Todd talked about providing services, like it's not just enough to have a building anymore, you have to teach people how to use them Michelle just talked about that with electronic resources and certainly I've been learner focused. And yet there is this sort of traditional branding that at least three of our information but I think all of our information environments have and this idea of not losing that while being future focused and thinking about how to bring those ideas together is I think a really important thing that we need to struggle with in our discipline. Yeah, I would add that the two of us talked about cross training and I think that that speaks to a diminishing emphasis on staff from the past. We're going to see a lot of many fewer paraprofessional positions I think in libraries because so much of the work has become more efficient and automated. And I'll talk about that in my next section too about just how to be competitive and make sure that there's a job for you. Great, thank you. So something that I often say is merging innovation with tradition is that we have this rich, wonderful place in our culture which started as a book culture and now it doesn't necessarily need to be format-based and we're expanding on that. So all of us are innovating but all of us are anchored to our origins and our traditions. Thank you, great. Well, let's move on. So now we've addressed the changes of the past few years and some of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead but at the core of the information landscape are the people who work in these organizations providing services to the communities that they serve which leads us to focus on today's information professional. So what advice do you have for the new information professional to meet the needs of tomorrow's information landscape? And based on your area of expertise what are some of the key competencies information professionals will need to succeed in meeting the needs of their communities and organizations that they serve? So Marianne, we'll start with you. So I think the key thing is being a master learner and by that I just mean that you're always learning you're always looking at the ways that people learn and how that shifts and what that, so that you're always a part of that. And I will say, I always say that being a school librarian hasn't changed that much since when I entered the field 20 years ago but some of that is because I entered the field with this idea that I was a learner first and there are a lot of things that have shifted and you have to continue to be learning. So if you're gonna stay on top of the trends and be future thinking and see how things are changing that's really, really important that that is the way you see your position in the world. The second is that you have to be information literate. I actually prefer the ACRL frameworks I think to what I see out of the K12 framework for information literacy now they don't even use the word information literate but it's really important to understand information to be an information scientist to understand how it's created and how it's circulated and how we experience it because that will help you be a master learner and to me that's what's really important and just really finally, I do honestly think that being a school librarian is the best job in the school building. So if you're that, if you get that job you should enjoy it because it's really fun. Great, thank you, Marianne. So Todd, what do you think? I'd just like to emphasize three sort of qualities that you should have for the to be fully prepared, fully armed for the future further your education, get trained in pedagogy and work with the digital world, digital collections. So going back to furthering your education in the academic libraries there are fewer and fewer positions now than ever before this lack of emphasis on staff but there are still positions and they're very good ones to be most competitive for them you should try and get an additional master's degree. I think that I've been pushing that for over a decade and I think it's still really important. Recognize that the MLS programs as good as they are have way too much that they have to cover for all the different information environments that their students are going into. So you cannot just assume that you will learn everything you need to know in your MLS program you have to continue to educate yourself in any way you can. And just recognize that there's just greater competition than ever before for fewer positions than ever before. Second, get trained in pedagogy. Pedagogy, learning to teach and practice teaching is what we will be called upon more than anything else. When everything else becomes automated as it eventually will, the human factor will still matter in the sense of our ability to reach students through our web interfaces and through our personal interactions and that all happens through instruction in pedagogy. So get some training in instructional design, get some practical teaching experience if you can. And then finally, digital collections are what's the future? We're going to, while we're still collecting books we have to, and we will continue to collect books, the digital world is taking over. So learn about metadata, data curation, digital preservation, web archiving, learn about open access, learn about copyright, learn about intellectual property. Thank you very much, Todd. Pam, what are your thoughts? So public librarians, our roles are evolving into and at my library we call our librarians guides because our relationship with our customers is to help people along their quest to understand where they want to go, what adventure they're taking, what skill they want to learn. And then we walk side by side to help them find their path or the information that they're looking for. And so we expect again at my library for people to be wizard genius and explorers, which is very high expectations to try to live up to. Our competencies as we move into the future, and I think it's actually here, is that we need to be connectors. We need to be relationship builders. And so the personality skills, the affective skills are even more critical today than they've ever been. Professor John McKnight talks about libraries and we talked about libraries role in the abundant community and the library's ability to make those connections in our community so that people find each other or people find the, not only the information, but the people who have the information on our community. So we're those connectors, collaborators. Again, our world is a place where you have to work in a team environment. And so in order to be successful, we have to learn how to be a team player, both in our community and within our own library system so that we can bring out the very best in our teams. Curious and continuous learner. You've got to, just as Marianne said, we've got to always be learning. And as leaders in the profession, we've got to model that learning. When we hire people, we look for people who have that natural curiosity because I think that creates that sense of that endless quest for always having an interesting life and to create that spark in the community and to create that sense of possibility within our community as well. Thank you very much, Pam. So Michelle, what do you think? So yeah, I think we can all agree at level of learning. Similar to Marianne, I entered this profession just because I have always loved learning and I'm still learning today, so embrace that. One thing I heard today and I liked, or I actually read this on a blog, was the terms reskilling and upskilling, which I thought was an interesting way to describe ways that both organizations need to make sure they're viable, right? So they need to make sure that they're helping their employees do that and also as a librarian or really in any field, it's just so important to continue to learn. The other thing is professional development. I can't speak enough about professional associations and just what they can do for your career. It's a place where you may not be able to get the skills that you're getting, that you want to get on the job, but it's a place where you can certainly get them outside of your job, but yet still within the profession. And certainly reading library literature, but also I encourage people to read a wide variety of literature because you may have a discipline that, for example, for me, it's as a law librarian, but reading when it comes to sciences and medicine and anything I can get my hands on that somewhat interests me, the environment outside of what I'm already know is really, I think, important and it helps bring value not only to your knowledge and the knowledge you have, but also to your environment where you work in some way. And then I think obviously blogs are another way. And I can't say enough for just being flexible because life is changing so quickly now. We've got to be able to bend a little bit and compromise and be willing to change. And then one thing I'd like to point out is as somebody who's been a manager and been in a hiring position, I can't say enough for an enthusiasm for the profession, being enthusiastic about what you do is really important. It conveys a lot of different things. And then for me, the professional competencies that I see are communication. As Pam mentioned, you have to work in teams and everything we do at the Department of Justice Libraries really is in a team environment unless we are answering a question one-on-one. So to be able to communicate well, not only with the people you work with, but with people throughout the organization who may not have the same language as you, and to be able to figure out how you can communicate with them and being really patient about it too. And maybe you need to learn a different way to communicate. Obviously, reference and research, that's a large part of my job and actually the biggest part of what we do for the litigating divisions at the department. And collection development, again, it's traditional, but it's changing in so many ways. And just being able to continually learn about the new resources that are out there, being able to see what resources are important to your clients and what you'll need to be sure that you can give them what they need. Training and outreach, I can't say enough for it. We teach classes on legislative history on some of the work we do, like finding experts, researching experts, vetting experts, that kind of thing. But also developing training that really focuses for certain sectors of your population that you serve. Outreach, we have a marketing team. I mean, it's critical to reach the people that, for us, again, you heard me mention earlier, we're sort of siloed. We don't see each other, all 100,000 of us, and we don't all come to the library. So how do we make sure that we're getting to the people that are out there through our outreach? And the management of web and internet content, I can't speak enough to it. We have a large virtual library presence that has been developed like most libraries over the past 20 years, but that content, it's a big part of our job managing that and making sure that when people come to our website, because they are all out throughout the US and people abroad that they can get what they need somewhat and maybe in some ways more than somewhat from our virtual library. And then the impact of technology, I mean, obviously it's just huge and being sure that you understand technology, you implement it as much as you can in your everyday life and just integrate those tools as best you can. And then just touching on copyright, just understanding those laws and how they relate to your work and your organization because they can be different depending on where you're at. Thank you, Michelle. So you've all raised a lot of interesting points and about competencies that people need to be prepared for. One thing I was struck by, and this I think all of you touched on this a little bit was related to a lot of soft skill type of competencies, being a good communicator, being a good relationship builder, being flexible, being enthusiastic. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you envision people being able to develop those or cultivate some of those kinds of skills and be able to demonstrate that. I can answer that. I think one way that if you're a new librarian in the field, you can do it is by taking small steps. Like if you've got a team at work that's coming together for a specific task, like developing a succession plan or marketing, I think that's a good safe place to start. One, figuring out how you're going to be as a team member. And then two, taking on leading a team. I think a lot of it has to do with personal interest too though. You really need to be able to explore what that means to you. So if that's reading, if that's taking classes, if that's trying out different ways of being in the workplace and communicating, of course be a little bit careful there in the workplace. But I think having an interest is really important because it is just a skill that we're all going to need. And we've always needed it, but it's become even more important because we're communicating in so many different ways too. We're not just talking to each other. We're IAMing, we're emailing. We're working in closer proximity with each other. And so, yeah, I'll stop there. I would like to just add that I've been involved in an initiative with a group of librarian peers and a consultancy to try and define what will make the librarian of the future of say 2023, the academic librarian involved in teaching and learning. And what we're trying to do as a result of our efforts is to come up with a tool that can be used as self-assessment tool that can be used, that can be administered to employees, but that can also, that employees can have their supervisors use to assess them. So it's sort of that kind of 360 evaluation. So you assess yourself, do I have these confidence? Am I friendly? Am I, you know, am I responsive? Am I good communicator? And you assess yourself and then maybe your supervisor assesses you and says, oh, you know, well, you were right about this, but in my opinion, this could use some work. You're even better at this than you thought is other thing and that sort of thing. It's interesting that you brought that self-assessment up because I was gonna say one of the things I think is really important is reflection on your skills and strengths and weaknesses and how those play out. And I was thinking along the lines of developing relationships with mentors to help you with that self-assessment or reflection. And that's a really important way, I think that you develop those skills as you're working through and becoming a stronger professional. I think that hospitality is a word that we don't use in libraries often enough, but I think paying attention to hospitality and how we make people feel. So we don't talk about feelings or when people walk into our library, that sense of ambiance, but I think how we make people feel and how we support each other in developing hospitality skills, which is one of warmth. And that's something I think that working as a team and celebrating when you create that environment and when one of your colleagues actually hits it out of the park when you have a particularly difficult situation. But I think hospitality and warmth and feeling is really important for us to think about as a profession. Thank you very much. So I'd like to thank Marianne Harlan, Todd Gilman, Pam Smith, and Michelle Macias for joining us today in this webinar on today's information profession. I'm very grateful that you have participated and shared the advice that you did in this webinar and also made the contribution to the book Information Services Today, an introduction to the listener. I'd like to thank you for joining us and I hope that you gained a deeper understanding of some of the changes and challenges and opportunities that are within the field of Library and Information Science today. For more information, please also check out the online supplement of additional materials. There's a lot of additional information there. And I'd like to thank you all again.