Infoblog

Posts Tagged ‘paul signorelli’

Acting State Librarian of the California State Library Stacey Aldrich will be helping current and prospective library leaders use current tools to explore the future in her Infopeople workshop, “Building Leadership Skills: Planning for the Future,” scheduled in libraries throughout California in June 2009.

“We’ll be looking at what kinds of sources you should be scanning for clues to the future and why; what kinds of triggers you should be looking for; and how you ask the right questions about the future,” she said during a conversation earlier this week. “The key here is that the more tools that you have for thinking about the future, the more proactive you can be about creating the future. This workshop is an opportunity to learn and practice some future-thinking tools and then spend some time thinking about the future so you can find opportunities.”

Included in the curriculum are explorations of scenario planning, a concept explored by futurist in his book The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World; environmental scanning; and top trends which library leaders need to watch.

“We need to look outside of libraries for the forces and trends that are changing people’s expectations about information, technology, and community,” Aldrich says. “If we’re asking the right questions about our future, we can keep developing services that meet the needs of the people we serve.”

Among the sources she cites are the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conferences with talks which are archived at Ted.com; the Pop!Tech conferences with similarly archived materials at Pop!Tech.org; and trendwatching.com, which offers a variety of resources including free monthly “trend briefings.”

Using these tools will help library leaders engage in more effective environmental scanning and scenario thinking. Environmental scanning, she suggests, is “taking an interest in observing the world around you…reading and observing things you may never do,” and scenario building, “in its simplest terms, is creating stories about the future to help your library think about possible futures, and then build strategies that will help you thrive in each of them, and to help your library create its preferred future.”

The workshop is the latest offering in Infopeople’s multi-stage Eureka! Leadership Program with its “Building Leadership Skills” series, and it will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled sessions. Registration ($75 per person) for “Building Leadership Skills: Planning for the Future” and other “Building Leadership Skills” sessions is continuing on the Infopeople website; instructors for other sessions in the series include Marie Radford and Steve Albrecht.

Sessions of “Building Leadership Skills: Planning for the Future” are currently scheduled for Buena Park Library District (6/4/2009); San Diego County Library Headquarters (6/5/2009); San Francisco Public Library – Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room (6/11/2009); Belle Cooledge Library in Sacramento (6/12/2009); Fresno – Woodward Park (6/16/2009); and San Jose Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (6/23/2009).

Overcoming challenges in the library workplace involves a mixture of creativity and fun, Suzanne Merritt suggests in her new full-day Infopeople “Building Leadership Skills: Stimulating Creativity” workshop sessions being offered in libraries throughout California from April 10-24, 2009.

“I think the important thing that people will come away with is a boost in their own confidence, in their creative abilities, and that they can apply that in any area of leadership,” she predicted in a conversation earlier this week. “I feel it is important for anyone in a leadership role not only to have a boost in their own creative confidence, but to pass that along and encourage to those they lead to believe in their creative abilities as well. Together they can solve any problem that comes along.”

Merritt is no stranger to the topic of how creativity helps improve the workplace and produce results. Through the work she does through her own company, Ideas With Merritt, she provides participants with tools and skills which translate inspiration into workplace innovation on a daily basis. These skills are divided into three interrelated elements: collecting experiences, connecting those experiences to the workplace, and creating growth by generating, judging, and refining ideas.

“Every human being is creative,” she notes. “Our creative contributions matter. As leaders, part of our job is to bring out our own creative potential and bring that out in the people that work with us. When we do that, people have fun…When people have fun, they are creative. Everything’s so serious right now; it’s a great time to revitalize your own creative energy.”

Material presented during the Infopeople workshop is designed to help library leaders and others—including library business managers, public information officers, systems staff, facilities managers, and volunteers—find creative solutions for handling the increasing workload they face, attracting new audiences and funding sources, and restructuring existing services.

She will introduce participants to her own model, the C.U.R.I.O.S.I.T.Y. model, in which each letter in the term “stands for something specific that people can look for in the world around them to look for sources of inspiration.”

“I don’t want to be listed as one of those ‘these are dire times’ speakers. This is about possibility and positive energy, and having some fun while you do your work,” she concluded.

The workshop is the latest offering in Infopeople’s multi-stage Eureka! Leadership Program with its “Building Leadership Skills” series, and it will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled sessions. Registration ($75 per person) for all remaining “Building Leadership Skills” sessions is continuing on the Infopeople website. Instructors include Stacey Aldrich and Marie Radford.

Sessions of “Building Leadership Skills: Stimulating Creativity” are currently scheduled for Arden-Dimick Library in Sacramento (4/10/2009); San Diego County Library Headquarters (4/13/2009); Buena Park Library District (4/16/2009); Fresno–Woodward Park (4/20/2009); San Jose Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (4/22/2009); and San Francisco Public Library—Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room (4/24/2009).

Managing a public library building is managing the public trust creatively and economically—often with extremely limited resources, Libris Design Project Manager Linda Demmers reminds us in her new Infopeople workshop, Low Cost Space Planning and Remodeling. “You’re managing the physical assets of a city. If you have a 10,000 square foot library…you are basically managing a public asset that is worth over $6 million. It’s your responsibility that the public get the maximum return on that investment.”
Through her workshop, which will be offered in San Francisco (March 19, 2009), Buena Park (April 3, 2009), and Contra Costa County/Pleasant Hill (April 16, 2009), participants hear about and see images of innovative, low-cost remodeling efforts which Demmers has documented through her extensive travels and experience with library renovations. The result is that library staff, facility managers, and design professionals interested in planning a small or large library remodel walk away with “terrific ideas” from the course materials as well as from the experiences they share with each other, she said during a recent conversation. “The idea of the low-cost remodel is that it can be either an immediate or an intermediate solution to physical problems in a facility…One part of the workshop is what I call putting lipstick on the pig…if you are planning on a new library in the short-term, you don’t want to spend a lot of money (on the current one). A lot of what I’m showing in the workshop is things you can do at no cost.”
Among the topics covered are how to begin without the services of a consultant, which includes learning how to evaluate options, simplify the space-planning process, and test options before proceeding. Participants also discuss quick fixes including creative use of color to repaint a space; inexpensive replacement of outdated signage; merchandising; and sustainability which includes simple Green strategies. “Getting down to the nitty-gritty” is next on the agenda, with discussions about scheduling the project, budgeting for it, and evaluating it once it is finished. An in-class group project helps participants solidify their awareness of teamwork, decision-making, and presentation essentials.
With a goal of assuring that everyone with a stake in the process will be heard, “I do a lot of community meetings with stake holders so that people feel enfranchised through the process,” Demmers noted. “I’ve been doing it for 20 years. It’s pretty common in facility planning (and) a lot of communities have gotten familiar with the process of doing a needs assessment.”
Those interested in learning more about using their limited resources to improve their libraries in ways which better serve library members and guests will find registration ($75 per person) continuing on the Infopeople website for sessions of “Low Cost Space Planning and Remodeling.” Additional design planning resources are available in the Planning Documentation section of the Libris Design website.

Two of the library community’s leading consultants and thinkers, Joan Frye Williams and George Needham, will be providing guidance on how all of us can better understand and respond to the goals and priorities of our communities, employees, and colleagues through the latest offering in Infopeople’s “Building Leadership Skills” series.
“In tough economic times, knowing how to be strategic in decisions about where to cut and where to spend is more important than ever. Because we travel all over the U.S., we can offer strategic skills in the context of what we know about successful practices in other libraries,” Frye Williams noted recently in talking about the “Building Leadership Skills: Strategic Thinking” sessions which she and Needham will be offering in libraries through California from March 9-27, 2009.
Strategic thinking focuses on identifying and seizing opportunities to make a difference, and choosing one’s actions accordingly. Emphasizing day-to-day strategic thinking rather than how to develop comprehensive strategic plans, Frye Williams and Needham will guide participants in a pragmatic exploration of leadership and strategic thinking, taking the long view, leveraging a library’s existing assets, identifying strategic opportunities, and overcoming objections to a proposed course of action.
According to the instructors, strategic thinking should be part of everyone’s job. This course, therefore, is designed for those who are interested in positioning themselves, their work group, or their library for greater success. The session is also open to people who are new to the library field, and to others—fundraisers, grant writers, marketing staff, and public information officers – who do not have an extensive library background.
Enrollment to date shows that library directors, assistant directors, and board members will also be among the attendees, making this “an excellent – and affordable – opportunity for team building and horizon expanding,” Frye Williams observed.“Participants will learn practical criteria and techniques for making tough decisions and we’ll provide tips for how to continue moving forward even when resources are limited.”
The workshop is the latest offering in Infopeople’s multi-stage Eureka! Leadership Program, and it will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled sessions. Registration ($75 per person) for all remaining “Building Leadership Skills” sessions is continuing on the Infopeople website. Instructors include Steve Albrecht; Stacey Aldrich; Suzanne Merritt; and Marie Radford.
Sessions of “Strategic Thinking” are currently scheduled for Arcade Library in Sacramento (3/9/09); Fresno—Woodward Park (3/12/09); San Diego County Library Headquarters (3/23/2009); Buena Park Library District (3/24/09); Pio Pico Koreatown Library in Los Angeles (3/25/09); and San Francisco Public Library—Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room (3/27/2009).

It’s one thing to write and post an Infoblog article on the subject of change, as I did last week. It’s an entirely different and far more visceral (learning) experience to observe projected changes occurring so rapidly that they are in place before we have time to digest predictions regarding their impending arrival.
One day after writing about Paula Singer’s current full-day Infopeople workshop— “Building Leadership Skills: Leading Change,” which continues statewide through February 25, 2009—I had moved on to a different endeavor: reading the 2009 Horizon Report, posted online on January 20, 2009. Having been introduced to what the annual Horizon reports offer trainer-teacher-learners shortly after the New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE posted the 2008 version, I was looking forward to seeing updated predictions on technological innovations which “are likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education” over a five-year period.
The topic was already on my mind because I had heard predictions about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 while attending a session at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Conference in Denver late last month. One of the speakers at that ALA session had mused about the possibility that our mobile devices would soon be able to provide information including where the nearest Whole Foods market is, and would also notify us if one of our friends was in a Starbucks coffee shop two blocks away from us. Audience members’ reactions to the latter possibility ranged from “wouldn’t that be cool?” to “that’s creepy”—or, as one friend asked, “isn’t that cool and creepy?” Regardless of the reaction, the underlying message was that this was an idea to watch for over the next few years—a period which immediately shrinks when we read the 2009 Horizon Report.
Among the technologies evolving rapidly and which are meant to reach a new level of maturity over the next year, according to the Horizon authors, is mobile technology, and interesting innovations are already in place: “Applications designed for mobiles can…record a photograph of a CD, video, or book, then identify the artist or author and display that along with reviews of the piece and information on where to buy it” (p. 8). (Watch out, Whole Foods; our mobiles know where you live.) Furthermore, “(a)n increasing number of mobile and web-based services can respond to geolocative data in creative and useful ways…Mobile Twitter clients…add the user’s location to tweets (postings via Twitter), indicate nearby friends, and show messages tweeted in the user’s vicinity” (p. 15). (Watch out, Starbucks, we know who is Twittering at your tables and counters.)
So as I read that January 20 report in early February and thought back to predictions I heard at the end of January about what was literally on and in the Horizon, I suddenly understood at an emotional level what Paula Singer had said about “living in an age of permanent white water” and needing “the skills to help ourselves and others deal with change successfully.” And how much all of us can gain from Paula’s workshop and the recognition that the future is nearly behind us at times as change occurs even before we have heard that it is coming.
N.B.: To register for remaining sessions of “Building Leadership Skills: Leading Change” —Arden-Dimick Library in Sacramento (2/20/09); San Francisco Public Library (2/23/09); and Fresno—Woodward Park (2/25/09) —please visit the Infopeople website.

Overcoming the stress caused by continual change seems to be a major battle for many of us—leaders and potential leaders alike—so the lessons Paula Singer offers in her new full-day Infopeople workshop are designed to help attendees develop the tools needed to engage in positive and long-lasting changes which improve library services.
“Building Leadership Skills: Leading Change,” which is underway and continuing in California libraries through February 25, 2009, is the latest offering in Infopeople’s Eureka! Leadership Program series, and “Leading Change” will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled sessions.
“Change is inevitable. It’s ongoing. It’s critical to learn how to lead change because we’re living in an age of permanent white water, and we all need the skills to help ourselves and others deal with change successfully,” Singer acknowledged during a recent conversation.
“Leading Change” has two basic parts, she added: “We look at the internal aspects of change, how we handle the emotional challenges created by any change, as well as how to make change happen.”
The rapid rate of technological change, the existence of four distinct generations of staff in the library, and external factors including the worsening state of the economy all contribute to the pressure that leaders and other members of library staff are facing. Singer provides tools and improves students’ skills by guiding workshop participants through their own change projects. By engaging in conversations with their fellow students and learning from what the instructor brings to the classroom, participants are working through the steps that will enable them to lead their projects from successful start-up through successful implementation. They return to their libraries with plans which can be explained and promoted in positive ways and immediately applied.
Those completing the day-long workshop “learn different ways of dealing with resistance to change. They also create a vision for their project and devise a message to communicate it from the head and the heart. They learn how to create a sense of urgency about the project, assess the barriers, and create strategies to overcome them—how to sell it, how to implement it, and how to sustain it,” Singer concluded.
N.B.: Registration ($75 per person) for the latest offerings of Eureka! workshops is continuing on the Infopeople website under the heading “Building Leadership Skills.” Instructors include Steve Albrecht; Stacey Aldrich; Joan Frye Williams and George Needham; Suzanne Merritt; and Marie Radford. Sessions of “Leading Change” are scheduled for Buena Park Library District (2/17/09); San Diego County Library Headquarters (2/18/09); Arden-Dimick Library in Sacramento (2/20/09); San Francisco Public Library (2/23/09); and Fresno—Woodward Park (2/25/09).

I have always been amazed by the amount of learning which quickly occurs in a one-day Infopeople workshop, a four-session Infopeople online course, or even a one-hour Infopeople webinar. And I’ve been equally fascinated by how much can be absorbed through an 18-minute TED (Technology, Education, Design) talk. So to watch nearly 50 of those offerings and countless other brief (three-minute) sessions as they were being delivered in a four-day period during the 2009 TED Conference simulcast event in Palm Springs last week has left me nearly numb. Overwhelmed. Exhilarated. Exhausted. Inspired. And looking forward to discussing and digesting them with friends and colleagues in the weeks and months to come.
TED organizers, as mentioned in an earlier Infoblog posting, have already begun adding the 2009 talks to those previously available at TED.com. The talk by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was online even before any of us had left the Long Beach and Palm Springs sites, and Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s well received and moving “A Different Way to Think About Creative Genius,” in which she explores the theme of how a writer deals with unexpected and tremendous success and the realization that one’s greatest work might already have been produced, is also now available for those who missed the original—or simply want to see it again. And again. And again.
Other bloggers have done a great job of temporarily and copiously filling the TED gap by posting summaries and highlights of many of the sessions—Global Voices Co-Founder Ethan Zuckerman’s is one of the most detailed I’ve found; just when you think you’ve read everything on a page, you see that there are links to additional pages which cover earlier TED 2009 sessions. And one “TEDster” from the United Kingdom, in addition to providing glimpses of what she had attended, went so far as to write a complimentary piece about those of us who were working at the book-selling operation in Palm Springs—her point being that even the TED bookstores (“part literary haven, part neighbourhood hang-out” and organized by Neal Sofman of Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco) were a vital part of this community of learner-thinker-activists who gather to be inspired and then return to countries all over the world ready to be part of the process of creating positive change.
A community of learners at this level is an astonishing thing to see. It’s a gathering where neurological anthropologist Oliver Sacks starts off a day with a description of a sight-impaired woman’s visual hallucinations, and is later followed by Elizabeth Gilbert on the theme of the creative muse. Then architect Daniel Libeskind provides a whirlwind tour of his work, and later that afternoon polymorphic playwright Sarah Jones does variations on a presentation currently available for viewing on YouTube. That evening, astronomer Jill Tarter leads us through the stars and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, oceanographer Sylvia Earle takes us in the opposite direction to explore the depths beneath the surface of our oceans, and Venezuelan conductor Jose Antonio Abreu shows us how young musicians are made. We explore the world of molecular biology and innovations in the study of viruses; learn about high-rise (vertical) farming in cities rather than in more traditional agricultural settings; and spend part of another evening with Bonk author Mary Roach telling us “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasms” (and may not have wanted to know, when you get right down to it).
And before you know it, four very intense days in a community of learners are over. But, like any great learning experience, the pay-off is just beginning.

To be working at the TED (Technology, Education, Design) Conference simulcast event in Palm Springs on a day when Infopeople announced Linda Demmers’ “Creating Learning Spaces in Your Library” webinar is yet another reminder of how wonderfully intertwined our various communities of learning have become in an onsite-online world.
Demmers, through her online Infopeople presentation, will be helping viewers explore how libraries can play larger educational roles in their communities. TED, in its 25th annual gathering of dynamic and innovative speakers, is bringing members of its worldwide learning community together in its new Long Beach home; those live Long Beach presentations (with approximately 1,300 attendees present), combined with the simulcast version here in Palm Springs (with an additional 400 people viewing and discussing the live large-screen presentations), is a trainer-teacher-learner’s dream come true.
The usual wide range of inspiring speakers on a variety of topics included futurist Juan Enriquez (author of As the Future Catches You); P.W. Singer (Wired for War); Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talking about philanthropy and, in the second half of the talk, the importance of supporting great teachers; and, Seth Godin, drawing from his book Tribes to discuss how everyone has a leadership role in a Web 2.0 world.
Two talks with film previews were among the highlights of the late-afternoon/early evening session. Producer Jake Eberts provided a stunning nine-minute preview of Oceans, a beautifully moving underwater follow-up to Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s Winged Migration (scheduled for release in France this fall and a U.S. premiere on Earth Day—April 22—in 2010), and introduced Perrin to the audience. We didn’t even have a moment to catch our breath before Earth From Above photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand introduced his upcoming feature-length film Home, which will be released in its entirety online for free downloads in June 2009 and will also be distributed in a variety of other ways. Which raises an interesting question for libraries interested in creating learning spaces: might those with meeting rooms or more formal auditoriums plan ahead and access the free downloads so that library members and guests can gather to view the film and then engage in discussions immediately following the presentation? In an onsite-online world, the possibilities are increasing every day.
This being TED, surprises were the order of the day, and the Palm Springs version didn’t let us down: the first of the four days of TED talks ended with a brief and lively training session led by YouTube “Where in the Hell is Matt?” celebrity Matthew Harding, whose tongue-in-cheek videos show him dancing (intentionally) badly in visually stunning settings all over the world. Harding later confirmed, in a brief conversation, that his efforts to teach the nearly 1,700 audience members split between the two Southern California TED locations a few simple dance steps from India was his largest attempt to date. And even if we couldn’t dance to save our lives, we would have had to have been pretty curmudgeonly to not walk away from this “blended” joyful learning experience without large smiles and a sense of even better presentations waiting to be heard when everything reconvened this morning.
N.B.—To view TED talks, please visit the TED archives online; to participate in Linda Demmers February 18, 2009 “Creating Learning Spaces in Your Library” Infopeople webcast, please visit the Infopeople site.

While Infopeople continued responding to new requests for sessions of Cheryl Gould’s “Fully Engaged Customer Service” workshop in libraries throughout California, attendees at the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference in Denver earlier this week were talking about a different aspect of reaching library members and guests: through increasingly sophisticated online tools. Halfway between what we commonly refer to as Web 2.0 tools and what earlier in the conference were called Web 3.0 offerings, the more advanced of these innovations might leave us feeling as if they sense our information needs and are ready to meet them without formal prompting.
A rapid-fire and broad update on creative ways of reaching library members and guests was at the heart of OCLC’s 90-minute “Communicating with Your Users in Their Space” session Sunday morning, beginning with Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library Digital Branch & Services Manager David Lee King’s summary of how libraries are using what he called “outposts” (Facebook pages, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and others)—those places where libraries go beyond their own web pages to reach their current and prospective customers. Those interested in viewing King’s examples will find his presentation on SlideShare.
Cindi Trainor, Coordinator for Library Technology and Data Services at Eastern Kentucky University Libraries, continued the session with an introduction to LibX, a free browser plug in which leaves us feeling as if the tool knows what we want even before we do—and proceeds to nudge us toward finding it much more quickly than we otherwise would. Of particular interest are the LibX “context menu,” “browser cues,” and “magic button,” which help users find resources they might otherwise miss both within their library and through offsite providers.
WebJunction Senior Manager, Partner Services Rachel Van Noord brought us back to customer service basics through her “Engage Your Community: Five Principles for Developing Online Learning Communities” presentation (accessible from a link on the right-hand side of a WebJunction documents page). And Slide #18 in the presentation—a “continuum of engagement” chart which illustrates the levels of participation through which we pass (exploring, connecting, responding, personalizing, consuming, contributing, collaborating, facilitating, and leading) offer a great overview of how we move from working as individuals to serving as part of a collective to “help others get the job done.” It also might serve as a useful tool for any of us wondering how engaged our members and guests really are. And what we might do to engage them more fully.

Denver’s Central Library this morning delivered the ultimate example of great customer service as the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference was nearing its conclusion: a newborn girl.
A security officer, assisting a woman who had gone into labor, put his coat on the floor so the mother would have a soft place just inside the east entrance to the building, and other staff members held up blankets to provide the woman with as much privacy as was possible. They remained in position while paramedics delivered the child, Denver Public Library Training and Development Coordinator Sandra Smith confirmed this afternoon. The mother and child reportedly are doing fine; no additional information was available out of deference to the mother and the latest Denver Public Library customer; and there are, without doubt, going to be plenty of online stories about the library staff’s quick reaction to something they probably did not study in library school.
It was already clear, even before I learned why Library Public Information Officer M. Celeste Jackson was being interviewed by a local news camera crew in the lobby of the building early this afternoon, that this is a library system with a commitment to innovation and customer service even in difficult financial times.
There is a colorful easy-to-read map available in the building’s lobby for those who want to take a self-guided tour. Staff in the first-floor children’s, reference, and popular materials (fiction, videos, DVDs, books on tape, and CDs) areas are well positioned to answer questions. And clean, easy to read signage provides quick guidance to how the library’s resources are spread throughout the building.
It doesn’t take long to spot a wonderfully retro solution to the perennial problem of not having enough staff to provide immediate face-to-face assistance. Where Ohio University Libraries has been experimenting with the creatively high tech idea of using Skype so in-building users can talk to staff without having to find a reference desk, Denver Public has, under signs with the words “Ask A Librarian/Pregunte A Un Bibliotecario,” hung phones on walls throughout the building.
Picking up one of these hotlines, I learned from a member of library staff that the service was instituted when staffing cutbacks prevented the library from providing the level of service they wanted to deliver. The system, he added, is generally well used and there have only been a few crank calls from those picking up the phones.
It’s also obvious that the Library somehow avoids a problem which plagues many large urban library systems: library users who routinely have to be forcibly removed from buildings for disruptive behavior. There were few signs of this problem at the Central Library today, and a few frequent library members and guests confirmed for me that they are feel safe and comfortable using the facility.
Smith credits it to the well trained Security staff and the policy of encouraging anyone displaying disruptive behavior to review and sign the Denver Public Behavioral Contract so they can remain on the premises: “With each individual, it spells out a plan that emphasizes the message that DPL will work to encourage and facilitate the customer’s return to the library after the specific concerns have been addressed. These contracts are supported by city attorney and local courts,” she noted.
It is clear, from talking with the library’s training and development coordinator, that there is an institution-wide commitment to customer service and the prerequisite training; all staff are currently in the process of attending in-house “Crucial Conversations” sessions, and a well developed curriculum of workshops on a variety of topics is at the heart of the system’s commitment to developing and nurturing a community of learners.
N.B.—For a California-based example of innovations in customer service, please visit the Infopeople website page for Cheryl Gould’s “Fully Engaged Customer Service,” being offered both in open-registration and contract versions.