Women Who Tech TeleSummit 2012

I first heard about the Women Who Tech TeleSummit back in 2010, after reading a blog post by librarian Bobbi Newman. I have been trying to expand my professional development to areas outside of librarianship, so this affordable ($20!) and accessible virtual conference seemed like just the ticket. And I was not disappointment.

Mostly, I attended the sessions relating to startup culture. Half the time, I had no idea what was going on. Awesome! That almost never happens at library conferences. But it was really neat because I was so intrigued by the things I didn’t understand. I feel like I’ve been exposed to an entirely new vocabulary and I’m definitely going to be investigating some of the speakers’ recommended resources. As someone who dreams about owning her own business someday (there, I said it), it was inspiring to hear from this dynamic, creative, tech-focused group of women. It was also interesting to listen to the discussion with my ears bent library-wards… à la Brian Mathews’ recent “Think Like a Startup” whitepaper. Lots of possibilities for applying these principles within higher education and librarianship.

I definitely recommend attending the 2013 Women Who Tech TeleSummit if you can! Below are my notes. Do you have any thoughts on startup culture or how it might be applied in your field?

Funding Your Own Startup
Amy Errett (Maveron Capital), Amanda Steinberg (DailyWorth), Joanne Wilson (Investor) & moderated by Pemo Theodore (EZebis)

• Can you have an idea funded? It’s difficult – you need proof of concept to gain traction. Business is 1% idea, 99% execution.
• You usually have to give something for crowd-funding models (not equity, but a product) so it might not work for something like an online media company. Music, arts, consumer products have been successful there (i.e. Kickstarter).
• CircleUp just launched 6 weeks ago. Depends on the amount of money you want to raise, but at least crowd-funding gives people options.
• Understand the character, values of the people who are investing with you. You will live with them for a long time. Investments go through cycles of good and bad.
• Entrepreneurs often don’t think they have the luxury of being picky about investors, particularly in the early stages when they are just excited to be funded.
• Focus on revenue to have negotiating power. Quality of business model and financial model are very important. Investors have their own agendas.
• (Steinberg recently got a $2 million investment) Now looking at ways to segment her audience at DailyWorth (daily email about money geared to women), launching CreateWorth, hiring more people. Bridge between financial services and women.
• Required reading on start up culture/entrepreneurship?
  • Anything by Brad Feld
  • The Next Women Business Magazine
  • Women2.0

Harnessing Your Power
Elisa Camahort Page (BlogHer), Lynne Johnson, Susan Mernit (Oakland Local) & moderated by Jill Foster (LiveYourTalk)

Professional purpose & one critical decision that has shaped you as a leader?

• Journalism background, technologist, critical cultural thinker. Wants to bring those things together in her profession. Shape young people, is overjoyed to see them surpass her. Critical decision: To start blogging in 2000/2001, lead to her being seen as a leader on and offline (Johnson).
• “hyperlocal site” Oakland Local. Critical decision: thinking about non-traditional career paths, what work would utilize her strengths and be rewarding to her? (Mernit)
• Creating opportunities for women. Critical decision: took a job in an industry she knew nothing about, was confident about succeeding or failing, then moving on to something else (Page)

• What does asserting your power mean within the industry you’re working in? Context/culture matters. Know what battles to pick. I will always pick the battle for the customer, for the user. Back down when it will truly demoralize your staff.
• Learn to understand group dynamics and how to harness that power for the greater good. Confidence is very important for a leader. Taking risks enables self-confidence, absolutely.
• Engage others, bring them in on the conversation, listen to their ideas.
• Women competing with other women? You’re often competing to be the token woman, so it’s understandable. But that’s not a solution.
• Be strategic & display assets that you have that the rest of the group doesn’t.
• As a new manager, how would you form relationships with existing employees? It’s difficult in a corporate environment, people below you may have interviewed for the job. In a small company, things are flatter and it’s easier to assimilate into the culture.
• Ask questions as often as you make statements.
• Practice public speaking – presentation means a lot in leadership. Find mentors. Reach out and help others.
• Make time for yourself, don’t make yourself the last person on the list. Be willing to go around obstacles instead of over them. Don’t stay in a place where you’re stalled.
• “Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does allow freedom.”

Agile Development and Failing Fast
Sarah Allen (Blazing Cloud, Mightyverse, RailsBridge), Shaherose Charania (Women 2.0, Founder Labs), Tara Hunt (Buyosphere) & moderated by Jen Consalvo (Tech Cocktail, Thankfulfor)

• Agile Manifesto – 2001. Emphasis on working together nimbly. Refined & primarily adopted by the engineering side of software. Promoted on business side through lean startup movement.
• Idea generation, validation, prototype. Cutting out the fat – what can I build today, quickly, at a low cost to test my assumptions? Lean startup – getting data from customer, making iterative changes (small changes each day), designing your product in real time with your customers (early adopters who are OK with a fuzzy product and will give you feedback).
• Minimum viable product (MVP)? When should a product be pushed out? Different viable products for a beta customer vs general population.
• Do you want press or do you want polished product? Get feedback from more than just your friends & supporters. Test with your target audience. How will you define your market? Early MVP can be the smallest unit of work that you can use to test your key assumptions. Doesn’t promise more than you can deliver. Release a tiny product with A feature, not the all the features.
• Failing fast? Take customer data and your vision and merge them. No one is 100% right (you or the customer).
• It’s a challenge to not be afraid of failure. Things we can prove vs things we believe. Assumption might not be completely wrong, but we need to know more about it.
• Is this failing fast culture killing creativity? What are we measuring as failure? What are the metrics? “pitch deck” Failing fast versus succeeding slowly.
• Agile practices – balancing art vs science? Unique to your team, the vision for your startup & their appetite for risk. Startups are creating something from nothing, isn’t that what artists do?
• The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
• Find tools that work for your team. It’s about communication and collaboration.
• Don’t take funding for as long as possible. Be independent. Allows you to tweak, think about things differently.
• ⅔ of new startup ideas right now are not new, they are mashups, derivatives. Not that those aren’t important.
• “Creative Fridays” – stretch your mind in a different way for a few hours.
• Intellectually give yourself permission to do stuff that seems completely unrelated on a regular basis. Something that seems fruitless to keep your mind alive.
• Have a personal board of advisors during this time. A startup can be chaotic and lonely.
• Write down what you think the vision of your product is, what your key assumptions are and how you intend to test those assumptions.

Library Programming Idea: Debates & Truthiness

A programming idea came to me on the drive home from work a few weeks ago. I hope someone will steal it for their library!

The elections are coming (November 6). The Commission on Presidential Debates (I didn’t realize this was a thing!) has announced four presidential and vice presidential debate dates and locations:

• Wednesday, October 3 – First presidential debate – University of Denver, Denver, CO
• Thursday, October 11 – Vice presidential debate – Centre College, Danville, KY
• Tuesday, October 16 – Second presidential debate – Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
• Monday, October 22 – Third presidential debate – Lynn University, Boca Raton, FL

Most campuses organize public viewings of the televised debates (or at least one of them) to encourage student involvement and civic engagement. I’ve seen this done through Student Senate or sometimes through the College Democrats/Republicans.

The library should totally partner up! We could have a table with 3-5 librarians wherever the debate is being shown. The librarians would have laptops or other Internet-connected devices. As the debate takes place, the librarians would be live fact-checking, pulling up data to clarify crazy accusations, finding local information that new policies might impact or disrupt, etc. Maybe the librarian would ring a bell and shout out an interesting related fact when they found it. Maybe there would be a projector showing a collaborative Google Doc up on the wall next to the debate, automatically updating with blurbs of information. Or projecting a Twitter hashtag with related information (specific to the university) where students could engage in the conversation. You could invite political science students/faculty to participate, partner up with a class, or even have some poly sci folks and librarians engage in a post-debate panel to debrief, discussing what was said and the truth (or untruth) of it.

Scary thought? Kinda, but also exhilarating. Imagine the fast pace, the tension, the engagement. Imagine students looking from the television screen over to a librarian for assurance – is what (s)he just said true?! Imagine the conversations this could spark. This kind of partnership would provide a plethora of opportunities:

• Show how research works/doesn’t work/is messy & iterative
• Encourage digital literacy
• Demonstrate the importance of critical thinking about and evaluation of information
• Promote civic engagement (w00t!)
• Show that the library is not just a building & the skills we teach can be applied outside the classroom

Practically, there would be some nuts and bolts things…The librarians would probably want to have an internal training session beforehand to go over some relevant resources/tools. Someone would make a LibGuide. Anything tangible that was developed could be shared with students as a resource. Or even opened up to student contributions (!!).

I am really drawn to the idea of transparently modeling research behavior. If we can’t find something right away, we are showing students that research is not easy and straightforward. It would be good for them to see that we’re not superheroes with this stuff, that even librarians sometimes struggle with research. You could almost just live-project your computer screen onto the wall and let students watch your process. Or, record everything with a tool like Captivate (this could make for a pretty dynamic video tutorial post-debate, particularly if you sped things up and did some voice-over work) and share it later.

It could backfire. But it could also be really fun. What other programming have people done around elections/debates? Please share thoughts and ideas in the comments.

Image CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 courtesy of Jason A. Samfield. Muchas gracias to Lindsay Sarin, Melissa Gold & DJ Ramsay for the brainstorming and feedback on this post!

C&RL News – Job of a Lifetime – Leo Lo

My sixth interview for the Job of a Lifetime (JOAL) column in College & Research Libraries News is now available online! I spoke with Leo Lo, research and development librarian at Kansas State University. Leo has a pretty unique position which allows K-State Libraries to experiment with new initiatives and services. Check out the interview here:

Job of a Lifetime – Leo Lo: Research and Development Librarian at Kansas State University

You can also visit his blog at http://www.leoslo.com/ or tweet to Leo at @leoslo. Do you have the job of a lifetime? Enjoy & feel free to leave comments!

Related posts:

• C&RL News – Job of a Lifetime – Lizz Zitron
• C&RL News – Job of a Lifetime – Tina Hertel
• C&RL News – Job of a Lifetime – Jason Casden
• C&RL News – Job of a Lifetime – Emerging Technologies Librarianship
• C&RL News – Job of a Lifetime – Brian Mathews

Sips Card Project

A few months ago I came across the fabulous work of mixed media artist Kristen Solecki, out of Charleston, SC. There’s just something about her use of color that really draws me to her prints and paintings. I ended up purchasing some of her owl prints to give away as gifts and they were gorgeous in really simple Ikea frames.

Kristen contacted me a few weeks later to let me know about a new publication that she and partner Tim LeVan Miller are embarking on. Enter Sips Card:

“Sips Card brings independent fiction and local coffee shop/bar venues together. Customers can find Sips Cards at participating coffee shop-like venues. Each card contains a QR code, loaded with a short story from an independent writer meant to last as long as their drink. The cards are venue specific and include their business information as well as that issue’s author, story title, and website.”

Um, amazing. I immediately loved this project because it’s the perfect combination: coffee, good writing, and technology. Plus, it’s an example of QR codes that actually makes a lot of sense (rather than randomly slapping the darn things on every piece of paper in sight). Also, this would be a really fun activity for a library. I could totally see an academic library partnering up with their student-run literary magazine and in-house coffee shop to do a project like this. Maybe even team up with Sips Card to do a limited-series offshoot event of some kind. FUN!

Check out the Sips Card website or Facebook page to learn more about the project. Submissions of poetry and short stories will be accepted April 16 – May 31 for Issue 2. Writers, get a move on! Hope to see some of your best work featured on a Sips Card.

Computers in Libraries – Wednesday

Innovation Success Framework – Jeffrey Phillips, VP of OVO Innovate on Purpose and author of Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t – And What That Means for Your Business

• If someone walked into your organization and asked you what the process was for managing a purchase order, there would be a clearly defined course of action with designated people working together to get things done. Why aren’t we work flowing great ideas in this same fashion? We need to make sure that there is a process for good ideas so that they don’t just die.
• There are a lot of factors impacting innovation, including disappearing trade barriers, increasing rates of change, increased customer expectations, increased access to information, and decreasing cost of entry.
• [New to me] idea of “skunkwork” – a working group completely outside the company culture. Does your library have something like this? Would it work? Does it?
• To create an innovative business-as-usual model (as opposed to the this is how we’ve always done it mindset), we need to focus on communication, compensation, and culture.
• Quotable moment: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
• Companies (and libraries) have an unbalanced skill set. We have lots of training on efficiencies, but not so much on innovation. We need to learn more about trend spotting, customer insights, and prototyping.
  • Question from Erin: Are these skills reflected in current LIS programs? Could they be incorporated in the future?

Unleashing the Power of Your People – Michelle Boule, author of Mob Rule Learning: Camps, Unconferences, and Trashing the Talking Head (Track F – Library Issues & Challenges)

• This session was awesome because it modeled the idea of an unconference/participant-driven event. The audience actively participated in brainstorming topics for discussion, voting on them, and sharing their experiences. Really the best way to learn something – by doing it – so I give major props to Michelle and the Track F moderators Jennifer Koerber and Michael Sauers.
•  To do: Survey all staff of the library (including librarians, support staff, shelvers, student workers, interns, etc) to find out what they are passionate about/good at. These are opportunities to get your community engaged – they could teach a class or do a training session related to something they personally enjoy. You never know where (or who) the next great idea will come from.
• How do you counterbalance the fear factor when getting people engaged in this kind of learning activity?
  • Question from Erin: Why aren’t we doing this sort of thing as library instruction? Why not take this approach with our users? Is anyone doing this?

Capturing, Sharing, & Acting on Ideas – Adam Shambaugh & Jill Luedke from Temple University Libraries (Track C – Inspiring Innovation)

• To do: Look at literature from business, management, and organizational behavior about organizational innovation and idea development.
• “Fuzzy front end” is a phrase used in the industry and literature to refer to the stage of ideas in their infancy. It’s often the most difficult stage because they are so nascent, with limited buy-in and being ill defined.
• Ian Alam article on early idea development reveals 3 stages: idea generation, idea screening, and concept development.
• Because of the random nature of ideas, capturing them in the moment is very important. Note from Erin: This is something I am very familiar with as a writer. I have ideas at the strangest times and if I don’t write them down, I lose them completely. This goes for everything from blog posts to letters to my friends to poems. So this session really resonated with me on multiple levels.
• New ideas will be qualitative, informal, and approximate. At this stage, ideas have the potential to be successful or unsuccessful so you can’t automatically discount anything.
• Temple did a “Capture And Idea” project, initially focused on improving user experience. They purchased and handed out idea notebooks to everyone in the organization and had them record ideas. Then, the TULibrary Experience Blog was created for employees to share ideas, which were discussed even further at retreats. From those discussions, a task force was developed to address ideas and issues (the “Fix It” Team).
• Why would you want to capture ideas? So you don’t forget it, because you can’t share it with other people if it’s inside your mind, and to let things percolate.
• What ideas would you capture? Problems you encounter (inside and outside the library), behaviors you observe (particularly unexpected), questions you’ve been asked repeatedly, complaints, and cool stuff. Note from Erin: This aligns really nicely with some usability/user observation stuff I’ve heard about. It would be a good way to get staff on board with a user-study sort of project.
• To do: Look up Catch & Springpad apps
• Advice for doing a project like this = suggest various platforms for capturing ideas based on comfort level, make it easy and inclusive, make sharing easy and accessible, give suggestions at the beginning to make it concrete, incentivize, and be inclusive.
• This kind of project really intrigues me. I feel like I made decent headway with our brainstorming session a few months ago, but then I was thinking about it some more and that was probably only the first baby step. If you ask for ideas once, or twice, even, and then don’t necessarily take the suggestions or follow up, people could feel like they wasted their time or aren’t being taken seriously. They might not want to contribute again in the future. However, if you fostered this culture of idea sharing, and consistently asked for and acted upon feedback, there would be more buy-in. People wouldn’t necessarily expect that each and every idea they generated was amazing and will be implemented immediately on the spot. It would just be an understood baseline/course of action to regularly generate and share ideas. This goes for internal an external audiences for libraries – staff, users, donors, admin… ::nerd::
• Both of these speakers were awesome. You could tell that they really knew their stuff and they were completely at ease in front of a room packed full of people. Very engaging with good content, tone, speaker presence, etc. Probably one of the most seamless and least awkward library conference presentations I’ve seen to date.

Computers in Libraries 2012

On Tuesday I’m headed to Washington DC for the 2012 Computers in Libraries conference (also known as CiL, hashtag #cildc). It’s my first time but I have heard great things from past attendees. Really looking forward to my first conference since early December! I’ll definitely be hitting up @jill_hw for my SU iSchool wristband (any other SU grads out there who are attending?).

Presentation

I’m presenting “Redesigning Reference Models” with two of my Millersville colleagues on Friday, March 23 from 10:30-11:15am. We’ll be talking about how our renovation project gave us the opportunity to rethink how we provide research help to the campus community, particularly without a centralized physical reference desk. Check out our teaser video and collaborative Google Doc to learn more. We’re encouraging everyone to use the hashtag #undesk for our session so we can keep track of the conversations.

Blogging

I’ll be blogging, but I’m not sure exactly when due to informal TableCons, LobbyCons, FireCons and BarCons that I’ve been assured will crop up. Live-blogging sessions, nightly recaps, post-conference highlights…anything is possible. There is a list of other CiL bloggers and the conference blog is a pretty nice resource too.

If you want to eat/chat/etc, hit me up on Twitter @libscenester. There are just a few days left to apply for our open Learning Design Librarian position, so if you want to discuss the job at all, hit me up in DC. Hope to see you there!

where credit is due:
Hand-drawn Post Layout via pugly pixel | CC BY-NC 2.0 Cherry Blossom by design_energy | Denne Fuchoor Font via dafont

Librarian Wardrobe

You might spot a familiar face or two over at Librarian Wardrobe! Melissa Gold and I work together as academic librarians in Pennsylvania. We’re modeling (air quotes) in front of our library which is currently smack-dab in the middle of a two-year renovation. You can learn more about the project here. The dress code at our place of work is pretty much non-existent… We typically use our best judgement based on our activities for each day. For example, you might find me in a blazer one day giving a presentation and then wearing jeans and converse to hang posters around campus the next. Thanks to Nicole for letting us share our outfits!

where credit is due:
WishWishThree Vintage Photoshop Action
Blog Photo Layout via pugly pixel
Fantabulous photography by Amy Pajewski

On Brainstorming

My colleague Greg and I recently facilitated a fun and successful brainstorming session at my library. We had everyone watch this video, asking them not to focus on the specific technology being used, but on the possibilities— how the technology impacted the experience of the family depicted. Then we talked about how the new library (including our new building, new website, changing staff and services) is shifting to focus on the overarching experience students have when they encounter “the library” on or off campus. We also talked about how the Millersville library has been soliciting user feedback for years about the renovation— what chairs would students prefer, what kinds of spaces do they need, what technologies should we support? We are moving in that direction with our new website as well, and at the moment are privileging input from our target audience over internal input in order to ensure that our “digital branch” exists primarily for the user, not the library. It’s a shift that has been happening for years (ever since I arrived in 2008), but I don’t know that anyone has ever presented it quite so holistically before.

Then everyone split into groups and did a brainstorming exercise. We had people count off by fours to ensure diverse representation in the groups— we wanted to get the broadest intermixing of the minds: front-line staff with administrators, student employees with librarians, etc. You can adapt/re-purpose our Brainstorming Handout if you’d like. The handout asks participants to consider a few everyday situations: buying and drinking a cup of coffee at Starbucks vs. a local coffee shop; listening to music on Spotify vs. iTunes; shopping for produce at the market vs. a grocery store. Greg and I asked the groups to use markers and big pieces of paper to brainstorm about an experience listed on the handout or another transaction/interaction, considering the following questions:

1. What did you prefer and why?
2. What made your experience better at one or the other?
3. What would make the experience even better?
4. What do you imagine this experience looking like 5 or 10 years from now?

Everyone started working and Greg & I circulated the room to observe and chime in. Interestingly, all of the groups decided to discuss the experience of grocery shopping. Here are notes from some of the groups (I lost one of the big pieces of paper before getting it typed up):

Shopping

• Convenience
• Social interaction
• Central Market – Better customer service – local is better
• Drive-up grocery
• Co-ops (but land is disappearing)
• Ordering online
• Customization
• Continuing to meet expectations
• Convenience – Depends on location, more process/services coming to you vs going to it
• Grocery stores – convenient, open space, variety, cheaper, self checkout/single checkout
• Market – specialty items, freshness, fun, expect to spend more time
• 5-10 years from now – Electronic – order from fridge – personal grocery shopper – Multifunction cooking device – Ordering of items based on prior purchase

My purpose with this post isn’t to compare libraries to grocery shopping. But honestly, who can ignore the similarities when you look at the brainstorming results? Many of the things that came up as memorable parts of the experience of shopping have been talked about when discussing the future of libraries. Making services/resources/spaces convenient for the user. Providing an element of social interaction. Good customer service. Locally-focused collections. Electronic access. Customization and personalization. Multifunction devices. Recommendation services. Open spaces. Self-service points. Interesting…

Coming back together in a large group, we did a debriefing where each team talked about their brainstorming for a few minutes. Observations included that what is convenient for one group or person might be inconvenient for another (echoing the differences between target audiences at an academic library – freshmen vs seniors vs commuters). Another interesting point was that much of the discussion revolved around the customer experience (service, convenience) rather than the content (quality of food). Although one team did mention freshness and specialty items, it wasn’t the focus. It’s almost as if content is a given, a certain standard upheld so that consumers can focus on other factors when making their decision of where to shop. I wonder how much transferability this has when considering the library. Should we be staking our name and our futures on content alone? Should we downplay our content to focus more closely on other reasons users would want to choose the library as an integral part of their lives?

I deemed the brainstorming session a success. People didn’t feel threatened. They weren’t being asked to brainstorm about the library specifically, which could unintentionally underscore fears of job/organizational re-visioning. Instead, we deconstructed the everyday experience of grocery shopping. I think it was the first step towards opening a productive line of dialogue for the future of our library. Have you had success with brainstorming at your library? I’d love to learn how to do this better and more frequently!

Image CC BY-NC 2.0 courtesy of ericmay

Interview with “I Need a Library Job”

Check out my 6-question interview over on the website I Need a Library Job (INALJ) today! The site is a goldmine of ideas and resources for job seekers, new professionals, LIS students and career-minded information professionals. You can also find INALJ on Twitter, Facebook, and now my Blogs I <3 page!

Naomi will be posting more interviews in the coming weeks with fellow Lead Pipers Emily Ford and Ellie Collier. Oh yeah… I forgot to mention that I was invited to join the team at In the Library with the Lead Pipe! So honored to be working with such a fabulous group of professionals… and if you have ideas for guest posts over there, talk to me!!

In other news, I’ve added a sidebar widget (right hand side, just above Archives) called “Erin ‘Round the Web” to gather all of my various guest postings published outside of Library Scenester.

Goals for 2012

I don’t typically do a lot of goal setting, but there are some key things I want to accomplish in 2012 so I thought I’d post them here. If nothing else, it might help me stay accountable now that these have been released beyond my mind’s eye:

• Read more for pleasure (35+ books)
• Learn Drupal or die trying (okay, that may be a little extreme…)
• Successfully defend my MA thesis & graduate from West Chester University
• Complete Five Wishes/living will and collate all paperwork relating to benefits/insurance in case of an emergency
• Pay off my remaining student loan and save $10,000
• Apply for promotion & tenure

And some guiding principles:

• Go outside
• Do good work
• Ideate
• Help others

What are your goals for 2012? Do you separate personal/professional goals or lump them all together?

Image by http://dryicons.com