Professional Profile: Jan Dawson - Ask Ontario

Jan Dawson is the Project Coordinator and a Virtual Reference Librarian for Ask Ontario (http://www.askon.ca/) which is a project of Knowledge Ontario (http://www.knowledgeontario.ca/, new website launching soon!).

As Jan describes, “Ask Ontario is Ontario’s virtual reference service and is available to all Ontarians. We have public, public-french, college, and university services which are provided by librarians from respective sectors from all over the province who collaborate to provide 45 hours a week of chat reference service to public library visitors and over 60 hours a week to post-secondary students.”

Describe what your job as the Project Coordinator and a Virtual Reference Librarian entails.

The askON Project Manager and Project Coordinator are currently the only two positions at askON and we do the work of several people. It is a very fast paced, dynamic work environment. I love it! As Project Coordinator, I oversee operational issues and perform duties such as: scheduling over fifty partners in the collaboration; monthly askON Staff Newsletter; askON Intern program; askON practicum placements; operational assistance with both the chat vehicle and the staff portal; staff accounts; training and professional development; virtual askON courses; presenting at conferences; and oh ya--working on the service as a VR Librarian! As well, I'm overseeing a pilot project called askON CALL where we are inviting our visitors to Skype within the chat interaction. Stay tuned for our reporting and findings to be presented at OLA's Super Conference in February 2010!Regarding my role within Knowledge Ontario, I sit on a Social Media committee where we've hired a consultant to work on our social media strategy. We are also getting ready to launch our new KO website in the New Year and I will assist with the development and maintenance of this site. Other than that, KO staff keep each other abreast with emerging technologies and innovative ideas in the library world and beyond! It's a wonderful, dynamic, and inspiring team that I'm so proud to be a part of.

Describe your educational background.

I have a Music degree from Mount Alison University and I got my MLIS from McGill University.

Describe your first job as a librarian or information professional etc. and subsequent career path.

This is my first job as a librarian and I feel incredibly lucky to have it. I’m still smitten and have recently celebrated my one year anniversary with askON. It’s been an incredible experience, working with over 600 wonderful people in the world of libraries. Everyone is kind, professional, and helpful. I love this profession.

How did your information training and background prepare you for the job you now have?

Alongside my MLIS courses, I did a lot of extra-curricular work. I co-planned a “Web 2.you Workshop” with a classmate and two alumni of McGill’s MLIS program which I’m thrilled to see has become an annual event.

What advice would you give someone who is currently doing his or her Master in Information?

Get involved with at least one professional association and be as active as you can. Also create opportunities for yourself. Maybe you have expertise in a certain area and can plan a workshop with your cohort. There’s lot’s of funding out there for these projects.

What skills and experience should they be building up at this point, if they would like to work in this specific field?

Multi-tasking; Collaboration; Communication; Resourcefulness; Opportunism; Information Literacy; Customer Service Excellence; and various other hats that information professionals wear! We do it all!

Any general advice for new information professionals?

Seek out opportunities. They don’t just fall on your lap. Yes, the economy is difficult at present, but BE PRO-ACTIVE. Use this time to write that article you’ve been meaning to start or start your own VR service for your peers (I think that’s what got me my present job!).

What helpful lessons did you learn early in your career? Do any of them still apply today?

I’m lucky to have a fantastic Manager/Mentor. Her motto is “honest and kind”. If you take a breath and think about what that means when dealing with challenges, you will always be successful. I think I will carry this with me for the rest of my life.

Professional Profile: Amra Porobic - Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC)

I recently met with Amra Porobic, the Manager of Library Services at the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) to discuss her position, her career path, and her role as a solo librarian. Amra is also the chair of the SLA Toronto Chapter Solo Group. The discussion we had highlighted several interesting and important points about challenges faced by solo librarians, the ways Amra’s SLA membership has contributed to her job and skill set, as well as her beliefs about information needs in the future. The Insurance Bureau is a national trade association serving insurance companies who sell car, home and business insurance, and Amra operates out of its Kennedy/Martin Library. She also works at a branch office of the IBC library one day a week.

In her current position, Amra serves a very diverse client base. Her in-house clients are lawyers, economists, policy-makers, public relations officers, statisticians, investigators, and vehicle engineers. Outside clients include brokers, adjusters, law firms, consultants, government officials, students, libraries, and the public in general. As a solo librarian, she performs collection development and maintenance, reference and research, legislation and media monitoring, web content development, and staff training. Amra finds that her position as a solo librarian provides her with freedom in the workplace, from prioritizing tasks, to proposing and trying new approaches within her library and organization. As such, she is currently developing a framework for the strategic advancement of the IBC library and is advocating for a change in areas such as electronic records management and enterprise content management.
Amra did her Master’s degree in Library Science at the University of Sarajevo over twenty years ago. She was a part of the first generation of students in that university’s program. Prior to this, having post-graduate degree in librarianship was unheard of. Her B.A. was in comparative literature and librarianship. Before the establishment of the Master’s program, Amra’s 4-year B.A. earned her the title of librarian, and she began working following its completion.

Amra has a rich and diverse work background. She began with an entry-level contract job at a public library, then moved on to a research institute library, a national and university library, a hospital library, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (as an information officer). She immigrated to Canada in 1994, joined a co-op program, and gained her first Canadian experience while volunteering at the Ministry of Community and Social Services Library. Her first paid job was with the Library Service Bureau, an agency that sent its staff to about 50 law firms around GTA to maintain their non-staffed libraries. For 6 months, she worked two other jobs beside LSB (one with Princes Margaret Hospital Library and the other was an indexing job worked from home, for the Canadian Periodical Index with Gale Canada). When she joined the IBC in 1998, she continued indexing for Gale for a while.

Amra believes that membership and participation in an association like the SLA was crucial in her career. Two of her jobs were actually the result of networking at SLA events. She is also a member of the Insurance and Employee Benefits Division, TALL, CASLIS, and AIIM. Amra uses the SLA website resources for planning group meeting, for her own continuous professional development, and to educate her organization on web 2.0 tools and information management risks.

It can be difficult to volunteer time for the association as a solo librarian, but, in Amra’s experience, volunteering will make one try things they otherwise wouldn’t dare; it can be very rewarding and make one’s job more fun. Solos in general have a great desire to meet and share ideas, but a lack of time can make things difficult. Amra tries to counter this by responding to their needs and offering events with interesting topics.

Amra believes that the learning she has undertaken since completing her Masters degree has helped keep her skills sharp and up-to-date. Services such as webinars, Click University programs, and the Professional Learning Centre’s courses have been helpful in this, although finding time for them was a challenge. Amra has been diligent in encouraging her fellow solo librarians to explore the SLA resources. In order to maximize resources and save time, she invited members of the Solos Group to pick a webinar of their choice and report back to the group. Amra in particular has found courses in electronic records and content management, records retention, and taxonomy useful in her work. She also subscribes to numerous listservs and follows the blogs and tweets of “gurus” in the library field, finding it to be a quick and easy way to keep abreast of new trends and ideas.

Amra has a wealth of advice for students and new professionals, particularly as a solo practitioner. For new information professionals, a solo position can be intimidating. The employee will be expected to be proficient in all library practices, as well as in conducting needs’ assessments, news monitoring, database searching, and e-records and content management. However, this method of learning through trial by fire can suit dynamic and flexible graduates. She finds that several skills are necessary for a position at any stage of one’s career. Time management is fundamental for solos, with the ability to prioritize and plan the daily tasks essential to serving the organization’s many needs. She also finds several non-library tasks to be a very exciting part of her job. She has studied tools such as RSS feeds and Wikis and then helped other staff grasp the concept in order to be able to use it at work. She follows discussions on Facebook and LinkedIn and provides quick summaries for relevant staff members to show them how to benefit from relevant social media, as well as which pitfalls to avoid.

Amra believes that enterprise content management is emerging as an important issue for many organizations, and that the skills which underlie it will be important for students and new professionals to develop. With business information now created and stored electronically, an ability to manage this content, as well as to develop and implement a taxonomy, will be crucial for new professionals. As these enterprise content management endeavours tend to be large undertakings, involving the input of many departments, knowledge of project management practices is another recommended skill. In addition, knowledge of legal research and resources is important in this area, and for many other tasks, particularly in regards to the Sedona principles and e-discovery rules. Amra also cannot stress enough the importance of people skills in all work settings. Being able to read the culture and social atmosphere of your work environment, and adjust your personal communication style to suit that environment, is crucial to one’s progress and to that of the library.

My interview with Amra revealed much about the challenges, and also the opportunities, that face a solo information professional within an organization. The role of her SLA membership during her career, in both keeping a connection to the library field and providing opportunities for collaboration and skill development, speaks to the ability of the association to allow information professionals to improve their skills and their role in their organization. The tips and strategies Amra uses to update her skills, collaborate with her peers, and increase her relevance within her organization are important to all information professionals, whether they operate as a solo or not.

Professional Profile: Ulla de Stricker - de Stricker Associates

Ulla de Stricker's name may sound familiar to iSchool faculty, staff, and students - her name is often plastered on posters for resume help and various workshops offered here. However, what you may not know about Ulla is she is the founder and President of de Stricker Associates, a consulting business which serves a variety of clients in addressing "challenges in intellectual capital, corporate memory,

business and scientific intelligence, library services, and communication", as stated on her website. She is also an accomplished public speaker and writer, having penned Business Cases for Info Pros: Here's Why, Here's How (2008), and Is Consulting For You? A Primer for Information Professionals (2008).

Please describe your current position.

De Stricker Associates works with organizations facing challenges of information management of any kind. In tailored projects, Ulla and her associates work with clients in private and public sector organizations to address the interplay of people, tools, content, and organizational practices in a wide range of typical information and knowledge related scenarios.

She explains that many organizations may be reluctant to invest in the resources needed to better manage their information, possibly leaning to solutions that are on the surface less costly (as in having no system at all), not knowing that they may "pay" dearly later through loss of productivity, risk of error, and so on. She emphasizes that the cost of uncoordinated practices or workarounds - invented by creative knowledge workers - may be many times the cost of "getting it right" in the first place. That said, "getting information right” does not mean buying expensive software (as an example). There is no one correct approach - appropriate information strategies require an understanding of what will work best for an organization depending on the information related needs of its employees.

How did you get your start in the information profession?

You could say that Ulla is an “accidental” librarian. After having completed her Masters in Jewish American Literature, she contemplated the giant hill she'd have to walk up to the nursing school in the icy Montreal winters and compared that option to the across-the-street library school. This easy choice put her into an area of studies she became very passionate about.

After completing her MLS at McGill University and working there for two years as the Assistant to the Director of the School of Library Science, she was hired by Micromedia/DIALOG (Toronto) when she called and told the manager "you can't do this without me" (Ulla laughs and attributes that phone call to youth & inexperience). Through the 1980s, she ran DIALOG's Canadian operations and held other posts at Micromedia; she was then headhunted to work for a Canadian unit of Thomson, building electronic publications. In 1992 she made another decisive move, walking into her boss’s office to quit her job, but promising to finish the current projects and offering to come back the next day as a consultant. With her employer’s support, that's exactly what she did - and thus her consulting career began.

What are some helpful lessons have you learned during the span of your career?

Ulla explains that at the time she had started her own consulting business in 1992, her name was already known. How? Ulla notes that she has always made a point of contributing; her article writing and involvement in professional associations and conferences allowed her to establish herself and show people what she was capable of doing. Going the extra mile - for example offering talks to local groups when she was traveling across Canada anyway - gained her the essential credibility that turned out to be so helpful for being an independent consultant. She stresses "it was not deliberate - it's in my nature to be generous with my time for my colleagues - but it worked out to my great favor that for 16 years as an employed person, I worked in my spare time too. As an example, I set up a program of courses at Ryerson, wrote a book with a US colleague, and so on. To this day I continue - I am active in several professional associations and speak regularly at the U of T Faculty of Information!"

What advice do you have for new graduates?

Ulla explains that our profession is unlike the "well understood" ones. Let’s say your cat is sick - you automatically understand that you must go to a vet. There is no equivalent "oh, I need an Info Pro to help with …” understanding in society - information professionals' skills are a mystery to many. That's why it is so important for us to be on a continual mission to shed light for others about what our profession can offer.

Ulla encourages Information students and new graduates to start thinking about themselves outside the traditional “librarian” box. With the way the field is changing today, it is crucial to focus on how the skill set we have achieved through our education here can lead us to opportunities we may have overlooked.

Bottom line: Join the appropriate associations and get yourself noticed. Volunteer galore! Write for a local bulletin! Offer tutorials in something you know well! You may start by holding the registrar function, taking signups, handling payments, and handing out name tags at an event, but in the end, every exposure counts.

For More Info:

Through her Information & Knowledge Management blog, Ulla shares - in substantive posts - her commentary and insight. Check out http://destrickerblog.typepad.com/ to discover aspects of your profession you may not have come upon until now.

Please visit http://www.destricker.com/ for more information on de Stricker Associates.

Professional Profile Series Coming Soon

Are you interested in finding out more about what kind of jobs are out there for special librarians in the field? Keep your eyes on our blog because coming soon we will be posting the first of our many Professional Profile Series interviews. This profile series provides students with an opportunity to gain a better understanding of what is involved in a career in special libraries. This provides a great opportunity for students to learn from professionals working in the field today how they got to where they are. These profiles will continue to be posted throughout the new year. Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to learn more about special libraries and the career opportunities they present from the people working in the field.