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On brand and other tips
July 2, 2008

    


Along with Doug Johnson, I spoke at the SIGMS (NECC's special interest group for media specialists) breakfast yesterday.

A number of people asked for a written version of my remarks.  Here are my notes, which may or may not, match the audio tape:
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You made a very conscious choice. 

For some of us, not attending ALA, where everyone speaks our library-land language was a sacrifice.
But nevertheless, as you do everyday of the school year, you ventured out to learn and collaborate with partners in the larger school community.

Your membership in this SIG and your attendance at NECC sends a powerful message.  The message is that librarians are partners in your school’s technology integration team.   The message is that you are your school’s Chief Information Office (CIO).   (I know Mike Eisenberg uses that term, but I wonder if I started using it just around the same time.)

The message is that you know important things and that you bring important things to the table. 

You are modeling who you are, and who we are, for many others who may never venture into a non-library conference, a national, or international event.  You are modeling the role of the teacher-librarian for others who may not have seen anyone like you before.

And you are making this choice at the most exciting time ever to be a teacher-librarian and at the most critical time for the school library universe to define itself.

This little session is about tips and I have six.

1. See the big picture and let others see you seeing it.  It’s about learning and teaching.  It’s about engagement. If you are seen only as the one who closes up for inventory, as the book chaser, and NOT as the CIO, the inventor, the creative force, you won’t be seen as a big picture person. 

No one will like you. 

No one will play with you.

Make your picture big!

2.  Have a vision. Do you look ahead for what is coming down the road? Are you scanning the landscape?  As the information and communication landscapes continue to shift, do you know where you are going?  Do you plan for change?  Not for yourself, not just for the library, but for the building, for your learners.  Are you really leading? What does the information professional look like today?  Ten years from today?  If you do not develop strong vision, your vision will be usurped by the visions of others. You will not be able to lead from the center.

3. Write/share/scream.  No one will know what you are doing unless you report it.  Do you share, document, report?  I photograph everything.  I video everything.  (See my cute new camera!) My annual report regularly shocks Central Office. My interim principal said, "I’ve never seen a document like this—my annual report--ever before from a teacher." Report professionally and loudly even if no one requires you to.

If it not noisy, your library may be like a tree falling in the forest. Make some professional noise.

4.  Create.  Invent.  Play. Our new tools came with no rules.  No handbook for pedagogy.  These new tools require a playfulness, a willingness to take risks. These tools provide us a sandbox filled with shovels and pails. We can build castles and share our buckets and shovels as we play with new friends.

Or, we can choose to leave the sandbox for the others to build and create. 

What we can now create overwhelms me. What form might a pathfinder or a reading list take?  How can we use these tools to reinvent literature circles? Book reviews? Booktalks?  Promote the wealth of our collections?  How will you reinvent collection to better meet the needs of learners for just-in-time content?  How will you creatively present and share it onsite or remotely? How will you adjust the way to guide learners in building and sharing knowledge?

And now, two perhaps more time-specific, items:

5. Coping with ubiquity.  No, learning to love it. 
Ubiquity changes everything.  In one-to-one schools, students may visit the library less frequently. In such environments, in all modern, truly relevant environments, library must also be ubiquitous.  Library MUST be everywhere. Librarians must teach everywhere, in and outside of the library. And I think we need to redefine library.  We must be ready to scale our instructional voice, as well as our resources. And we must make libraries just for me, just in time, all the time.

Teacher-librarians must find a way to be a window on learners’ desktops.  To own a small piece of that precious screen real estate. We must present ourselves as a real, caring adult who knows the students, their teachers, their learning and recreational needs, their curricula, their need to create. 

Library space, off- and online, is for the whole information fluency process; for displaying, for archiving the information and communication work of the whole school; for organizing collections that look far different from those I once collected.

6. Brand!  What I think we need to do now, and what I am working on right now with a virtual parade of new administrators is trying to demonstrate my brand.

Nike is a brand. Coca Cola is a brand. ProQuest is a brand. eLibrary is a brand. Linworth and LMC are brands.

What is the brand of the teacher-librarian?  What are your specialties, your areas of expertise?  What do you bring to the table in 2008?

I am not sure we clearly articulate our brand to our colleagues, our administrators, ourselves.  And I am not sure I have all the answers.

But, here's what I am thinking:

Our schools are now far more crowded with faculty and support professionals.

The reading coach also does books. The technology coach also does integration.  In our state, high school technology coaches are now funded (in part) by the Classrooms for the Future grant.  I hear scary stories from other schools, about cuts relating to perceived overlapping interests and duties.

The training for our technology coaches is impressively extensive and continual.

And I worry that librarians who choose not to seriously (and voluntarily) train or retool themselves in the same way, are doomed to obsolescence in relation to technology integration.  Technology integration is directly connected to integration of information and communication skills to our new standards. 

So, what is your brand and how do you present it?
My brand, the library brand, is connected to my philosophy--a library philosophy.  (In Yiddish, my mother would have called this a library kop, or head.)

The new standards describe our brand as dispositions and as common beliefs.

At its most essential element, here's what the teacher-librarian brand means to me--I help learners learn; I help teachers teach.  But that is vague.  Other coaches, other teachers and administrators, do that too.

Among other things:
The library brand is about information ethics and intellectual property.  It is about respect for artists and creators. It is about understanding the copyright/copyleft and it is about interpreting evolving concept of fair use.  If this is our brand, are we all following the work of American University and Temple as they create a new code of practice?

Among other things:
The library brand is connected to intellectual freedom, and to translating that critical value to the online world. Ours may be the only voice that helps ensure fullest possible physical and intellectual access to online tools and resources, to advocate for equity, to promote open source alternatives, to prepare full pathfinders for information needs.

Students must learn to evaluate information in all media formats.  We must guide them in an increasingly complex world, to make information decisions, to evaluate all their information choices, including books,  blogs, wikis, streamed media, whatever comes next.

Collection looks different these days.  I must collect RSS feeds and teach students to push information to their own information portals. I must collect wikibooks, and ebooks, and audiobooks, and streamed media, as well as galleries of student work--knowledge products that are shared for the entire learning community.  And I must lend flashdrives and digital cameras and laptops.

Communication is the end-product of research.  I know I need to teach learners how to communicate creatively and engagingly for new audiences.  We have a whole new realms of 2.0 possibilities as well as new ways to make a difference, to participate as digital citizens.

Information/media fluency is my mission, and my curriculum, and my brand.  The new, very fat standards are my brand.

Are we all representing the library brand well?
I don’t think so.

At a recent conference I attended, I asked the audience (95% school librarians) if they understood Creative Commons licenses.  Shockingly few had even heard of it.  They no longer own this part of the brand.

Last week, during my mandatory hands-on sessions on integrating 2.0 tools with value to the library program, several participants at the out-of-state conference balked.  We don’t have to know this stuff.

They are absolutely misrepresenting the brand of an information professional in 2008.   It’s not just about the technology reluctance.  It’s about their reluctance to learn. 

Retooling and continual learning represent our brand.  Your presence here is part of an effective business plan to market our brand. 

While we’re here we represent a brand.  Go out there and represent. Wear as many of these SIG stickers as you can!

Posted by Joyce Valenza on July 2, 2008 | Comments (6)