 Good afternoon. We're going to jump into a prompt start. We're a minute behind and They give us a 30-minute slot for a 90-minute conversation But we'll take it. I'm just excited that we're actually talking about library skills Because we talk about all of these initiatives these exciting projects, but we never asked who's qualified to do it and so it's time to finally have the conversation and And we're excited to be here with with colleagues who have been doing a lot of this work within their organizations Breaking the news to a lot of our colleagues that though you may have signed up to manage books and information your job is actually to manage people Gotcha And so for those I haven't met my name is Tony zanders. I'm the founder and CEO at skill type I'm joined today by Keith Webster from Carnegie Mellon Karim Bugita from stony Brook and we want to talk to you about the topic by the name of to increase or decrease capacity The what how and why of 21st century library skill development. I'll start us off today with some remarks after five years of working with libraries around the world on developing a data-driven skills strategy within their organizations and The picture that I want to paint is that even though Everyone's up in arms around the impact artificial intelligence will have on our lives on our livelihoods on our organizations If we zoom out for a moment Every four or so years. We are in the same up in arms There's something new If we look at this timeline, I'll try to read through it at a high level for those in the back all the way back to 2004 when web 1.0 was coming into the picture and Libraries weren't able to just count on patron counts coming through gates But now all of a sudden we had to figure out a way to reach people that weren't physically coming in this was very Deviation from how we traditionally conceived of the library and our work and the skills we needed to do our work But now we can't imagine a library without a website The same goes for around the 2012 mark when most of our systems were now hosted in the cloud or on the way to be hosted in the Cloud we no longer own things we were now licensing and subscribing to things this changed the Skills we needed to do our work We needed to now negotiate with third parties to figure out these subscriptions and even 10 years later we're now still doing that work with the big deal and managing open access initiatives and Same things around 2016 we know the social justice movement that swept the United States in the world and This again all of a sudden Changed our work it changed how we work it changed how we relate to other people We're now needing to be trained in areas that again. We didn't realize it was something we even signed up for I Won't say the the the word here next to 2020 hopefully we don't have to hear it much more But the pandemic that swept the world moved our jobs to hybrid or remote and All of a sudden we have to reconceptualize. How do we do our same job? But without the same tools And so hopefully you're starting to get a sense that even though now we're talking about generative artificial intelligence We can't focus on the buzzword of today or the trend We have to actually start to develop a framework for how do we decide what skills should we be developing and recruiting in our library and Rethink the way that we do that so going away from the what we're training on and how do we decide and This is the work that we've been up to at skill type for the past five years And so before the pandemic we gathered a group of nine libraries to ask this very same question We've become so analytical now about managing our collection We know every statistic almost cost per use how many clicks and downloads so and so forth But it's about time. We became as rigorous about our organizations and That was really the vision was to become sort of more rigorous with What it is that we do how do we describe our work? How do we articulate that work to our stakeholders across campus? And no longer relying on human resources to do that bidding for us Oftentimes they don't know what the library does actually they look at us as Appeared to the facilities department or athletics We're just a business unit that has to make sure we do things by the books aside from that. You're on your own and So this is something we believe that must be ensourced into the library and as a library leader Your job is to manage people and those people are going to be managing the information So as I close up my remarks, I want to talk a bit about the skill type philosophy around this area Even if you aren't using our software, this is something that can be adopted from a philosophy level We can't again focus on the trend of the day because in three years There's going to be another trend that shakes up our job and changes what we do First it's important to develop a clear sense of what your library needs and To document this in a way that is visible to everyone. So remove information asymmetry Don't let employees play a guessing game around. What is it that are the priorities? We have because most folks aren't in the provost council meetings Most folks are not in those committee meetings where decisions are made. So we need to become better at communicating those needs We can't expect telepathy. That's not a skill. We have getting on the platform Next It's one thing to know what that North Star is but Where are we today? What skills and capacity do we have right now? It's one thing to know everyone's job title It's another thing to know The sort of position description and the percentage breakdown, right? That's what HR tracks but it's another thing to know who's capable of doing what on a Thursday morning and Is that information at the ready? Not just for me as a leader, but for the people actually doing the work How do we sort of? Take the competencies we have and kind of expose that in a in a way. That's accessible Again Wednesday at 2 30 p.m And lastly put these two different data sets into a model that lets us see where the gap is And so in this fend diagram you'll start to notice There is some overlap between what we need as an organization and what we have but it's actually What we're missing that where the training needs to focus today? And so that's not how it happens traditionally traditionally It's sort of a while while West people can raise their hand and say I want to go to this conference I wanted this workshop and if you have budget left in your allocation, you know, you can go for it But there's a more strategic way to go about this especially during a day when there's a talent shortage We may not get approved for the job posting that we want to get from HR We may have to get in line behind Athletics or admissions or another another group and so how do we control we control work with what we have and Focus that that reskilling enough skilling effort in a more strategic way, and it's really about looking at that that that Delta and so That's the one message I have for folks today is to again not get distracted by the trend Azure But to start to understand this is the 21st century every four years or so There's going to be something that changes our job And so we have to develop a new framework for for describing our work and defining it That can sustain whatever the next trend is going to be because there will be another I'd like to hand things over to my colleague Keith for his remarks Okay, thank you Tony, and I see what Cliff meant about being dazzled by the lights It's impossible despite your comments about the trend Azure to think about jobs and skills today without reflecting upon the long-run impact of technology and Whilst many of us have been talking about this for a couple of decades the emergence of generative AI applications and especially things like chat GPT has turned technology from a Tool into potentially a virtual co-worker and this changes the nature of skills Profoundly and there are a few of us from Carnegie Mellon at an event in Seattle last week and one of my colleagues a Professor from our College of Humanities and Social Sciences I thought some some things up really nicely. He said I can carve nice sentences But chat GPT can do it better. It can code better than me. My skills have lost value in the past year and If you reflect upon that, it's really quite a profound way of thinking about things and I can begin to tease out a couple of potential futures for the impact of AI on Professional and knowledge-based work. The first is maybe a more efficient version of what we've had for some time professionals will use different types of AI to streamline and Optimize their traditional ways of working what the economists would describe as technology complimenting their work The second future is a different proposition in this case increasingly capable systems will take on more of the tasks that we associate with these traditional professional roles and The economists here would talk about substitution AI or its variant will substitute for professionals in their work My sense is that over the next decade at least we will see these be realized in parallel But in the long run, I suspect the second of these two propositions will dominate We will find new and more efficient ways to solve the sorts of problems that we traditionally were hired to solve in our professional roles and Many professionals think of their work as monolithic we talk about jobs. We think top-down. I do a job and That encourages us to imagine that the only way that new technologies can affect the work of a professional is to Substitute for their job in its entirety in a sudden and disruptive way Many people talk about the impact of AI on our jobs But maybe we need to think about this a little bit differently We need to think about professional work being broken down into its composite tasks and activities and then Figuring out which of the tasks that exist in a professional's role are not terribly complex They're relatively routine and can be automated accordingly and therefore I think it's important to think bottom up bottom up in terms of tasks Rather than top-down in terms of jobs Entire jobs will not disappear in an instant But new technologies will change the sorts of tasks that people do in their work Some tasks will still require our traditional skills others will require different types of people or no people at all I don't anticipate that technological change will lead to mess unemployment But instead to substantial redeployment there are abundant new roles to be done and abundant opportunities to identify skills that we can develop and work with Fostering these new skills will be essential for institutions to thrive in the future and that will require a shift in Organizational culture management philosophy it will require us to support enhanced professional development and evolve our approaches to workforce recognition and career progression Once complex technologies such as coding and analytics web design and automation are now accessible to non IT workers I tried this at the weekend. I asked chat GPT to write me some code for our To do some statistical analysis and it did it in seconds. So it is really Opening up opportunities for those who are not sophisticated IT experts to leverage technology But few of us in our organizations have a programmatic approach to ensure that our employees can exploit these opportunities and that is leading us to potentially competitive disadvantage digital technology initiatives and a focus on the workforce Are the top two library priorities? I would argue and the intersection of the two talent and technology is what is increasingly thought of as digital dexterity as Our operations become more digital the digital aspects of most jobs are accelerating And I think it's a safe bet That the importance of having the ambition and ability to use technology for better outcomes Will continue to grow for everyone in our organizations The combination of technology acumen and open mindset and agile behavior Delivers the highest level of digital dexterity and we know that individuals with high digital dexterity Are more likely to launch and deliver innovative programs initiatives and services There's a clear responsibility for those of us in leadership roles We need to ensure that we recognize reward and encourage advanced levels of digital dexterity We need to encourage skills development and data literacy to do this We have to allow and encourage every single employee to take the time to develop these skills The sweeping changes in work models driven by the pandemic continue to have significant impact as Tony already indicated They've granted many of our colleagues more flexibility in where when and how much they work and we've seen this Drive greater effort promote engagement and it certainly helps us to attract and retain talent The pandemic shift driven shift in work models was unexpected and sudden And I'm sure it's going to have a permanent effect on skill strategies going forward Amongst the trends that I'm seeing at the moment You know and these are trends that are in flight and therefore the people in this room People who are in a position to understand influence and drive the trends already are aware of what's going on We're trying to work even faster to accelerate many aspects of our work to cope with growing demands For example to support open science data curation Open a open AI as an opening AI not the the company We're leveraging hybrid work environments. We're automating processes where we can and We are trying to think about how we will leverage AI how we're going to use analytics to help our teams in our libraries in our IT organizations to meet our strategic directions So from the perspective of that big picture thinking and let me turn to how In our library. We're thinking about these things. We recognize the importance of onboarding and continuing training Even using lip guides and Tony tells me that He can do it better for us than these lip guides Which those there are a number of people in this room who have worked for me or who work with me and they know My views on lip guides critical thing is the investment in our people and We want firstly to give everyone in our team that sense of agency the chance to develop their skills We give every single employee a personal professional development fund this year It's two and a half thousand dollars to support their attendance at conferences to pay for memberships or webinars or training activities But this year on top of that we've set aside a separate fund for anyone who's pursuing training in AI because we see that as So absolutely critical. We need to be ahead of the curve not playing catch-up and this gives you a sense of how we communicate that to our teams Every week our professional development coordinator sends out a newsletter of training opportunities and again a particular focus in AI But we do recognize that we still do other things as well During university breaks we bring together our team We close the library for a day and the world hasn't stopped turning we were able to get away with it This is a sample program from the fall break in October where we pulled together everyone for a morning of Plenary sessions and hands-on experimentation and then in the afternoon some parallel sessions on different themes Side who I saw lurking around somewhere ran a great hands-on session on generative AI These were some sample questions that we encouraged people to try out You know, we don't want this to be a complex scary thing Imagine writing a menu for a dinner party or planning a weekend in a city of your choice These are the sorts of things we want to do to offer easy Approaches into learning how generative AI can work and I felt obliged in case Tony felt That I'd forgotten about skill type that we are very pleased to partner with skill type Some of my team are deeply engaged with the platform and we are encouraging everyone to reflect upon that So with that I'm going to hand over to Karim to give you the Stony Brook version Thank you, Kate and Tony So I don't have slide but I will put I'll create slide with the results I'm gonna share with you today. Okay, sorry Okay You know who I am so I'm gonna start with a question actually there was a movie a new movie it was out just three days ago Title is leave the world behind. Have you seen it? Netflix? You should It's great movie. Actually it's produced by Barack and Michelle Obama And it has tons tons of symbolism includes and I was seen it in kind of skills based lens and You have It's the stop in the movie by the way kind of an apple apocalyptic movie around like and AI and other kind of Cyber security and everything but you see like how would you survive? With skills tech and life skills Generation millennial Gen Z boomers. It's a very very very telling so I encourage you to to see this movie After it was filmed on Long Island by the way where I live and it has really really good scenery Come to Long Island. I'm hurrying to by the way so Next item We had with with Tony and the sage technologies Matt Hays, I think Matt Hays is here Hi Matt. So the sage technology did a great study around kind of skills within the library library world and One thing was surprising to me is that the disconnect between library administrators and staff So guess what was the top one library administrators skillset that people need to develop? Okay, it was a live guides seriously Staff was kind of 10 or 12 including data digital scholarship That's embarrassing like how you see that disconnect. We're talking professional development actually Leaders need professional development more than staff so So What's gonna happen if we don't do abscaling I shared with social media study that you pen and why you publish it in March But CNN invite them like a month ago around What's the impact of AI on on jobs? title is How will language modelers like judge a BT effect occupation in industries and library jobs Were among the top 20? with teachers Everyone who's working with creation Including historian artist, but the top one is telemarketers, which is interesting So why is that this was the chat GPT effect before it was totally different before? Like librarian teachers were like, okay I mean there was a study seven or eight years ago where library were kind of yes We're survived 50 percent. No, it's more than 50 percent So if we don't do what we should do Then what's gonna happen? You know the results Some trends actually complementing what Keith said One of the last LinkedIn report is that Less remote jobs, which is interesting in terms of studies research studies peer review. They were Planning like remote job will stay forever. No, it's not That's interesting so we're back to face-to-face and also the Credentialing in higher education. That's our bread and butter. We do credentialing and Now employers are not asking much 30% of jobs don't require credentials anymore They're doing skills-based hiring That's the whole thing our business Our business has centuries. We do the same thing credentialing credentialing Even though we try micro credentialing But now it's different game and we're not up to that yet in Term of where I am now stunning Burke University before Rhode Island and also George Washington University Professional development was my top priority. No matter what I never cut professional development budget That's important because oh We can cut here and there no if you're really serious about the rest killing upscaling you maintain your budget no matter how and Actually upscaling is also almost finished with our strategic plan and we have a whole section around that one It's called reimagining the way we work So that's it the last thing actually in term of trust score libraries have a high trust score with people That's a good thing. So we need to capitalize on that. Thank you Yeah, I believe we have a few minutes for comments questions Keith and Karim. Hey I'm kind of curious about we talk about this in the profession that we need to do this Once they're employed But what do we we're not talking about the deficit that's happening at the ALA accredited Programs, can you speak to that? Oh, I can start Where do you want me to start? There's about 63 accredited iSchools in North America and I Guess I'll summarize my feedback just with a presentation I saw at the Charleston conference with a panel of iSchool directors a few years ago and the presentation was Them describing the steps it took to update a curricula with a new topic or a new area and 30 minutes were spent walking through the bureaucracy of Changing the curricula with a new area of focus that everyone agrees we should be focusing on But there were 12 discrete steps in Votes that needed and in consensus that needed to be drawn Just to get it into the course approved into the curriculum let alone Start to promote it and market it and that was my eye-opening moment that the infrastructure that exists today to Determine what we should be training on in an official way Has become obsolete The pay set which changes occurring has now exceeded it and so It's no one individual institution's fault. It's not ala's or any person's fault We can give credit to the system and for what it did but we can also acknowledge that things have changed Since then I'll maybe say a couple of words, but I'll be diplomatic 20 some years ago I led the development of the body of professional knowledge for the British version of the ala and That was even more bureaucratic than Tony just described Updating a curriculum in a university which for those of us in universities. We understand how long that can be I think it begins with the profession articulating what are the skills and competencies we require Not tomorrow, but over the next 20 30 40 years, and I'm not sure that we completely have an Articulate vision of that So there are problems all around and I do think that that's some of what I was saying about moving away from thinking about jobs and thinking about skills and Maybe we you know We almost set to one side the notion of credentialing and we think about us as employers Developing the skills of our team and you know, I do look at the curricula of library schools on Both sides of the Atlantic and I wonder It's an easy thing to pick on and I know I will offend lots of people But how many of tomorrow's professionals will ever practically catalog a book? you need to understand the intellectual foundations of information description and organization, but there is a gap between that and the practical Skills that only a handful of people will require. So it's a very messy complex thing We need to move on perhaps from an obsession around accredited programs and I don't just level that at Librarianship, it's true of many professions. We need a risk assessment I'm not suggesting that physicians necessarily can just turn up with a knife and cut the risks there are much higher we need to really take a Sensitized risk management approach to the impact of professional practice going wrong and train accordingly Thanks, green a question related to the framing of this Talk your talk the panel is called to increase or decrease Capacity, but I I don't think much was discussed around the decreasing capacity I was wondering if somebody could clarify what that component of this was supposed to be sure. I think Keith just mentioned it You know around cataloging There are certain traditional functions within our org chart that If you ask why do they still exist today? And again, I'm talking about the function on the org chart not a person just to draw the distinction And the answer will be some version of well, we've always done this We've done it this way. This is this is what we do and so to increase or decrease capacity is really a nod to You know interrogating that question Should we continue to do this because we always have should we do less of it? Should we do more of it? Should we outsource this to a third-party vendor, which we've done with ILS is in library service platforms And but not just allowing a third-party to ask that question for us But this is this is the work of the library to make the decision Prior to someone else making it on the library's behalf whether at the state appropriation level or at the university level So that is a bit more context. So it's about prioritizing the skills not decreasing the staffing So just just to clarify. Yes Thank you Decreasing staff should not have come across at all. I think everyone's quite to quite increasing the funding increasing Professional development and re-skilling. It's more. It's less around how many people we need more But what should we be doing? Less of what should we be doing more of although to be fair? You did recognize earlier not to I'm not trying to put words in your mouth But just the idea that given that there is less opportunities to staff There is also component where we need to be more efficient with the staffing and ensure that they have more skills amongst those We already have I'm not arguing against you, but just to add some nuance to that In fact probably in favor of your argument. Thank you for the clarification just to add to You know whenever I Got this question from staff always, you know I've been doing AI for a while now like What's the impact are you going to fire us? I? Got this question literally because there is AI anxiety and I will say no My goal is not too far you guys and even if I want I can't and it doesn't make sense at all You have to keep people with worry or you're centred So this is why upscaling and rescaling is extremely important We won't won't get more more people actually there will be long term will be decreased in staffing Because the those kind of technician level will go slowly slowly with the exception of a special collection and museums But we'll have few people but like more experts and more expensive people But in term of and we have this trend for like for the last 30 years It's going down. It's going down. It's not gonna go up and sometimes even when you have a job because you need I'm hiring now and they have to sometimes combine two three jobs to create one Because AI is expensive data people are expensive So that's the trend we're going into the same thing when we moved like from in term of collection management from You know print base it to the to the east side. So it's same but on a larger scale and Let me just say briefly I think that the the allocation of resources in academic libraries has shifted and will continue to shift We are let's be candid and longer the primary provider of scholarly content for our communities And that gives us an opportunity steadily to adjust budget allocations From content to people and over the past decade. We have increased our headcount in our libraries We're spending more on salaries and on skills development because we are shifting from being a collections based institution to being a Skills and service based institution We are hiring more and more faculty in the libraries to collaborate with researchers around campus That is our future business model. So rather than decreasing capacity it's increasing capacity And I hope you'll agree with that and tell my provost because he keeps complaining about our growing headcount but it's absolutely critical to the future of the academic information enterprise in a research university and The Department of Labor estimates that there will be a seven percent increase in information professionals by 2030 and they may Seek to adjust that with with artificial intelligence, but those are the latest numbers from the Census and from the Department of Labor's website Any other questions? Well, I think the people are voting that we were not out of time Hi, I'm Francis Malloy from Union College, which is a small liberal arts college in upstate New York and I Struggle with this whole staffing issue in it because I agree. I think that you know what I've been doing my whole career is Skilling up people and you know turning staff positions into higher level positions for the past 40 years and what I'm finding in a smaller liberal arts college is they that my boss really doesn't understand that That expertise those various expertise that it's not just well you have 27 staff Francis really can't somebody just shift over to you know, build your IR No, it's a holy totally different skill set than teaching instruction So I'm just curious if you have a report or somewhere that I can Like how do you how do you explain that to your your provost like is there a port out there or something? That would help me just kind of say here read this, you know There's an entire literature review we can provide But I'll we are out of time and happy to connect offline. Thanks everyone for your attention today