Information Today’s new conference on social networking & collaboration inside the enterprise has an exciting program planned for New York Hilton, September 27-8.

Experts and practitioners discuss how to put collaboration tools to work in a business environment and turn them into strategic assets that can contribute to increased productivity. Hear noted authors, researchers and practitioners:
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Director, Rochester Institute of Technology Lab for Social Computing, & Visiting Researcher, Microsoft Corporation; Esther Dyson, Editor, Release 1.0; Mark Levitt, Research Vice President, Collaborative Computing, IDC; Deb Wallace, Co-Author, Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage; Dave Pollard, Consultant, Meeting of Minds, Former Chief Knowledge Officer, Ernst & Young and Author, How to Save the World Weblog; Liz Winfeld, Co-Author, The Web Conferencing Book; Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, Inc.; Stan Wasserman, Professor, Indiana University; Denise Going, Manager, Enterprise Information Management, Indian & Northern Affairs, Canada; April Moore, Project Manager, Collaboration, SAP; Tim McMahon, President, McMahon Worldwide Management; Michael Littlejohn, VP, IBM Business Consulting Services; Denise Robinson-Gravatt, Director, Technology Development, Pfizer; Giovanni Rodriguez, EVP, Eastwick Communications. Discussions focus on current research about collaboration in the workplace, how to build the business case for deploying new collaborative tools, how to prove the value of new collaboration tools, and how to determine which tools are suitable for enterprise use.

My good friend and colleague, Stephen Abram, VP, Innovation for Sirsi, travels and speaks to more people in the information and knowledge communities than anyone I know. He is a voracious reader, a lighthouse thinker, a prolific writer and speaker. Check out his articles, talks, and other resources or simply link to it from Abrams Articles in the “Check These Out” to the right of this note!

Can you believe it? It’s time to start thinking about Computers in Libraries, March 22-24, 2006 in Washington, DC. The theme is Managing Digital: Innovations, Initiatives & Insights.

We now live, work and play digitally. Some of our key resources are created digitally while others, including physical libraries, books and, most importantly, people are not digital. Others are born digital. How do we reconcile, and manage, the digital and non-digital so that our work flows cohesively? How do we keep a personal touch in a virtual world? How do we plan for a successful, productive, future with many complex challenges and opportunities? The conference theme, Managing Digital, focuses on digital initiatives and innovations in all types of information enterprises, tools and techniques for enhancing user-friendly digital work flows, mining and archiving “born digital” data, information discovery and visualization methods for dealing with large digital databases, supporting digital communities, and more. Participate in the most comprehensive conference for library and information professionals interested in technology to discover the insights, strategies and practices that will allow us to manage computers, libraries, digital information, and people in a cohesive and productive way. Check out the the call for speakers at the Information Today web site, and send in a proposal to speak — share your innovations, initiatives and insights.

One of my many blog mentors, Steven Cohen, LibraryStuff.net, and I were discussing “about this site” pages the other day and he sent me a great example from Amanda Etches-Johnson’s Blogwithoutalibrary.
And it includes a link to a long list of libraries with blogs. Fantastic! Thanks.

Ernie Ingles, Vice-Provost (Learning Services) & Chief Librarian, University of Alberta, and founder of the Northern Exposure to Leadership Institute, talked at an Education Institute teleconference this afternoon about “Key Practices in Developing Managers & Leaders“. He referred to himself as one othe individuals who has been toiling in the “bibliographic vineyards” for quite a while. Great term!

Ernie defined leadership as taking the initiative and getting things done through others. His definition of management, structuring your own activities and those of others while co-ordinating resources and operations.

He talked about the 8 R’s Research Study on the future of human resources in Canadian libraries which is being launched at CLA in June. It has 300+ pages of analysis and recommendations about managerial and leadership competencies. It will be available online at the CLA web site later next month.

In our knowledge economy the study examines opportunities for librians and issues of recruitement, retention, remuneration, retirement, rejuvenation, restructuring and a couple of other R’s! Results are based on 1300 surveys to institutions/libraries (filled out usually by Human Resources or senior management) and 8500 to individuals.

Although the study indciated that there was no shortage in the supply and demand of librarians, library capability is in decline and there is a need to revitalize our profiles. The following were the 10 top ranked leadership competenceies that are important and also difficult to fill:
leadership potential
flexibility and responsiveness to change
able to deal with workload
innovation
technololgy skills
people skills
managerial skills
communication skills
deal with and work with different user groups
entrepreneurial skills

Many of these can be addressed through training but others are behavioural. There were some differences in this list from different types of librariess — academics listed workload lower but innovation higher in their rankings and those in special libraries or without physical library spaces were more pragmatic, and had more concerns more around response to change and worklaod issues and ranked them higher.

Indiators for demand from all respondents showed that the needs for leadership and management skills are higher than in the last 10 years and will be higher still in the next 5-10 years. Another strong theme in the study reflected the desire for more
project opportunities where librarians could demonstrate their leadership skills more than in their regular activites/jobs. Ernie suggested that we may need to restructure our work to provide more project and less bureaucartic activites.

He talked about innovation, socialization & the “info gap or death valley”. Innovation is an important part of leadership landscape, and we librarians are good adapters and adopters but not necessarily forward thinkers in looking at new approaches. Studies show that most innovation comes from those under 45 years old. The average age of our library school grads is 38 and most innovative activity takes place 12-18 years after post-secondary training. So that is why we have a professional death valley and really need to be looking at the innovation gap in context of libraries. A challenge for all of us.

Steve Arnold closed the first day of the Enterprise Search Summit with a look at the search landscape with references to his book, The Enterprise Search Report. He emphasized that search needs more than a box, and pointed to a great page powered by Endeca. He talked about clustering technology — and mentioned Vivisimo and soon to be coming technology from Google. He went on to mention Googlezon (have you seen the clip yet? If not join us at Internet Librarian in Monterey, Oct 24-26)and his work on Googleplex in which he says, “Google will be the next generation platform to take over from MS”. We’ll see!

Robert Joachim, Information Systems Engineer, MITRE gave a meaty presentation about intranet search at his organization including the different software and approaches they have taken. He talked about how search at MITRE has evoled with using the Google Search Appliance.

Karin Schneider of Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals talked about their challenges, their use of federated searching and clustering, as well as how they worked with Vivisimo’s clustering engine.

Gareth Lodge of Voca had some great strategies for sorting through the many search vendors and choosing a solution, or more a partner, for search in your organization.

One of the best supplier talks ever! Short, snappy & full of content. Just heard Lee Phillips, Fast Search Technology, give a 10 minute presentation, Search in the FAST Lane, at Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summit in NYC. He talked about their platform oriented program for enterprise search and the fact that enterprise search platform architectures need to have
* openness
* a pipeline for modularity (to allow mix & match for processing content)
* radical scalability
* feature extensibility (so future ideas can be incorporated)
* transparent administration (for IT, libraries, analysts, decision-makers)
I liked his comments about technology and market innovation as well as how intranet clients’ core application is workflow and there are so many hidden areas on the desktop. He reminded the audience that “all the technology in the world wouldn’t mean anything if you can’t walk in your customer’s shoes.”

He also challenged the audience to describe their organization in 10 words or less.
Can you?

Who would have thought of comparing finding information with bovine examples?
Lou Rosenfeld asked yesterday, “Why is there a beef chart providing so much information on beef cuts and not one for areas in our enterprises?” He opened Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summit in NYC, a 2 day event with great speakers and top search software companies. In his presentation, Findability for the Enterprise: A Roadmap, he talked about what’s involved in top-down navigation, bottom-up navigation, search and guerilla information architecture (IA). He discussed how roadmaps work for education, planning, design, and mind control –”distracts from ‘redesign thinking’ in favor of continuous improvement.”

Check out the front page of the Ontario Library Association web site for two workshops being produced by the Education Institute and being held in Toronto on Saturday June 4th

An Interactive Learning Forum
Driving Performance for Increased Success
REBECCA JONES, Dysart & Jones Associates
STEPHEN ABRAM, Vice-President for Innovation, Sirsi Corporation
DONNA SCHEEDER, Director, Law Library, Library of Congress

and in Calgary, Wednesday, June 15th
New Strategies for Solving Problems
A one day interactive learning forum
Dave Snowden, Director, Cynefin Centre
Mary Lee Kennedy, Executive Director, Harvard Business School Library & Managing Partner, Cynefin N.A.
Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones Associates