Infoblog

Posts Tagged ‘Training’

I know, I’m usually plugging an Infopeople podcast, but today I’m plugging this great interview on T Is for Training with our own (well, she’s her own person, but we love her) Sarah Houghton-Jan aka the Librarian in Black. Sarah has a new book coming out, and is also going to be teaching a new online course for Infopeople (check out the description and sign up here). Sarah has lots of hopeful words for libraries and good advice for keeping up with new stuff – oh, and figuring out how to find a balance between work life and home life.

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).

The challenge, when you love everything you promote, is to draw attention to something which stands out above all the other great offerings. One of those “special children” for those of us working with Infopeople is Cheryl Gould’s latest offering, “Fully Engaged Customer Service,” so Infopeople is offering it at a 50 percent discount to any library willing to book a contract offering at $1,000 per day.
Here’s how Infopeople Project Director Holly Hinman has described it to library directors throughout the state:
“At first glance, you may think that this is ‘just another’ customer service workshop, but it’s not. This workshop comes out of an LSTA grant project in which the Silicon Valley Library System/San Jose Public Library hired Infopeople to develop a new, highly experiential and interactive customer service training program based on recommendations from the Envirosell study of customer service in San Jose and Hayward branches. ‘Fully Engaged Customer Service’ employs an almost continuous series of short, intense exercises that give participants the experience of real-life customer interactions and practice in good customer service behaviors. In other words, this workshop doesn’t just ‘talk the talk,’ it ‘walks the walk.’
“This workshop has proven results, as documented by a series of studies by Godbe Research. Amelia Davidson of Godbe Research says that ‘Godbe Research found the training to be highly effective in teaching library staff to be more proactive in approaching customers, to be more inquisitive with customers about their needs in order to ensure that barriers are overcome, and to use interactions to teach customers about the full range of services offered by the library. Based on the results of our studies, we give the training our strongest recommendation.
“’The customer service training program developed by Infopeople has had a significant and sustained effect on the quality of library staff’s interactions with patrons. Following the training, library staff were found to initiate four times as many interactions with customers. The training also was found to have a significant effect on performance ratings collected in the study. Specifically, the training significantly improved the performance of library staff in the following areas: eye-contact, facial expression, availability to patrons, assessment of patron needs, quality of information provided to patrons, and the outcome of the interaction. Moreover, these improvements were sustained from the immediate, post-training assessment to the follow-up assessment that occurred one month after training. In addition to these objective performance measures, the training was also found to have a significant effect on the attitudes of library staff toward customer service and patron interactions.’”
Those interested in scheduling this as a contract workshop for their library or system can contact Gini Ambrosino (gini@infopeople.org). Those interested in attending currently scheduled sessions (Alameda County Library – Fremont, 2/9/2009; San Francisco Public Library, 2/19/2009; Buena Park Library District, 3/17/2009; and San Diego County Library Headquarters, 3/18/2009) will find registration continuing on the Infopeople website at a cost of $75 per participant.

Let’s acknowledge that our educational system generally does a poor job introducing us to the theory, process, and language of budgets and budgeting. Let’s further agree that this leaves many of us unprepared for our first (and second and third) experience preparing and managing budgets when we begin writing grant proposals, managing projects, or assuming our initial supervisorial-managerial position. We stare at endless rows of numbers, line items, index codes, sub-object codes, and income and expense statements. And, if we have any feeling left at that point, we break into a cold sweat.
What makes all of this even worse is that when we turn to those most likely to be in a position to help us—those fulfilling the function of a chief financial officer or budget manager or budget analyst in our organizations—we find that the language they speak—the language of finance and budgeting—is much different than what we have come to recognize as plain English. That, I suspect, is when despair sets in.
Library budgeting, Infopeople instructor Anne Turner suggests, need not be all that frightening or disheartening—even in the worst of economic times. It is, she says, all about “asking why,” translating the answer to that question into something which helps others understand why services and projects should be funded, and keeping the effects of budget cuts visible so those served by libraries will understand what their tax dollars are—and are not—providing.
“Working with a real live budget—it’s not what you get taught in library school…First you have to learn what you can change and what you can’t,” she explained during a conversation late last month, on the final day of her 25-year tenure as Director of the Santa Cruz City-County Library System. “Part of the why is figuring out a way to translate, from the library’s point of view, why (something) is a problem and how to translate that for the board.”
Turner, in her Infopeople “Public Library Budgeting” workshop which will be offered in California libraries from January 13 through March 4, 2009, helps demystify the process, helps participants become familiar with the language and processes of budgeting, and offers some hands-on fun as everyone works on budgets for two hypothetical facilities which she wickedly refers to as “the abysmal branch and the barely adequate branch.”
Literally nothing will be spared during the daylong session, she promises; the dreaded process of considering and implementing budget cuts receives abundant attention during the workshop. A common budgeting mistake, she suggests, is to try to make cuts in behind-the-scenes operations: “You have a lot of trouble getting behind the scenes services back later.
“Cuts need to be visible,” she counsels. “The public has to understand that the library can’t live on love alone.”
N.B.: Online registration ($75 per person) is currently underway for sessions of “Public Library Budgeting” to be held from 9 am – 4:30 pm at Alameda County Library–Fremont (1/13/2009), Buena Park Library District (2/4/2009), San Diego County Library Headquarters (2/6/2009), Fresno—Woodward Park (2/10/2009), Los Angeles Public Library (2/18/2009); Sacramento Public Library (2/23/20098), and San Francisco Public Library (3/4/2009).

If we step away from concerns about not seeing forests for trees and look, instead, for the hidden roots to projects like the new San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) Leadership Academy, we discover encouraging stories about leadership, patience, and how long projects can take to reach fruition.
One traceable root begins with SFPL City Librarian Luis Herrera who, through his previous work as President of the Public Library Association and the California Library Association and in his current position as Chair of the Public Library Association Leadership Taskforce, has long supported leadership training initiatives. Another slow-growing root came in the form of Maureen Sullivan’s introductory Infopeople Eureka! Leadership Program “Exploring Library Leadership” workshop in 2006; she was so surprised by the level of discourse springing from a session offered exclusively to SFPL staff that she handed the large sheets of class notes over to Herrera while the two of them were at an out-of-state conference in autumn 2006. The notes returned to San Francisco in Herrera’s hands, along with the beginnings of SFPL’s Leadership Academy. Herrera convened a meeting of the workshop participants before the end of that year, contacted Sullivan so she could conduct a series of focus group discussions with managers and staff throughout the organization in summer 2007, and rolled out the first offering of the Academy in November 2008—something he hopes to offer to staff on an annual basis.
Current participants are meeting once a month for four months in day-long sessions led by Sullivan; invited to hour-long informal coffee groups with SFPL administrators to discuss leadership issues; and, in an activity similar to what Infopeople’s Eureka! Leadership Program Institute graduates are engaged in, will be completing projects which help develop their skills while making major contributions to the library for which they work.
“It’s actually exceeding my expectations. When I talk to people who are participating, they are so jazzed. The expectations are high that we’re off to some systemic changes in the organization,” Herrera said during a conversation last week. “Every (Library) division is represented with the exception of one—Finance, which was short staffed…Within those divisions, we have folks from the page level to the middle management level. We have librarians, we have technical assistants, we have custodians, we have security personnel, and we have engineers. That’s as broad as it gets.”
Brian Castagne, who works in SFPL’s Project Read literacy program and is among the members of the Library’s first Leadership Academy cohort, calls Sullivan “exceptional” for what she is offering and notes that the program offers both the comfort and encouragement of learning from others who are in the program and the challenge of moving beyond the routines of working within one library work unit: “I’m in a transition period,” he acknowledges, “more self-reflective. Perhaps I’m challenging my first response to things, my immediate response…listening and processing other people’s viewpoints, learning how to slow down and thoughtfully expressing ideas…Almost everything I do is a work in progress.”
Orkideh Sassouni, a Deaf staff member of SFPL’s Deaf Services Center, also is finding that exposure to colleagues throughout the organization is broadening her awareness of how a large library system like SFPL operates. She also, she says, is learning how she might, as a member of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Deaf communities—learners of American Sign Language, interpreter students, researchers, Deaf senior citizens, Deaf international visitors, and others–assume a positive leadership role: “Prior to going (to the Leadership Academy sessions), I didn’t realize the hierarchy of the organization and how it all fit together—how things are organized…I’ve realized that all of us have the same problems…it’s all about communication.” Echoing ideas expressed by San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone in a separate conversation, she spoke of wanting to serve as a bridge within Deaf communities and within the library—a role she already is beginning to play through her activities as an American Sign Language instructor on the Santa Rosa Junior College campus in Petaluma and positions she has held elsewhere, including with the archives department at Gallaudet University.
And, as always, the winners are obvious: all of us who, seeing what Herrera, Sullivan, Infopeople instructors, and others are accomplishing, learn from these examples and help perpetuate them.

Developing leadership skills, as San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone is discovering, is a continual process with plenty of surprises and opportunities.
Having been a longtime participant in Infopeople’s Master Trainer group, Cipparrone leapt at the opportunity to take workshops through Infopeople’s Eureka! Leadership Program and then attend the “Eureka! Leadership Program Institute” in San Diego earlier this year. She has, since finishing the onsite work at the institute, been working with colleagues to shape a project which will continue her development as a leader while making a major contribution to the San Diego County Library: helping to implement RFID (radio-frequency identification) service in several library facilities as a collection management tool and to streamline the entire process through which library members and guests borrow library materials.
“My project is to be an internal and external customer care agent partnering with our branches and our support services to help make the transition using RFID to affect the changes within the branches,” she said during a conversation earlier this week. “I’m trying to make it clear that I’m not there with a point of view, but to help bridge a gap. It’s really more of a communication thing.”
The project will begin with three branches participating, she noted: “Ultimately, the success of those three branches is going to filter out to the rest of the organization, so it’s really important that people feel that they were heard…so we can expand that experience out to the others.”
Among Cipparrone’s surprises was the realization that leaders play an important liaison role within their organizations: “I think that prior to Eureka!, my feeling was that somehow…you had to follow a certain path and you needed to improve things.” As a result of attending the Eureka! institute and remaining in contact with other program participants, she has become “more open to other points of view and seeking other opportunities…It’s not as if it is some amazing conversion process, but the fact that you’re with similarly engaged people at various points in their career and that we can reflect on who we are and where we might go–the institute provided those tools and those connections.”
Trainer-teacher-learners and other current and prospective leaders who are observing the process through Cipparrone’s eyes can also benefit from her experiences in that they provide a contemporary example of how effective continual learning models can be. The combination of onsite workshop attendance, follow-up meetings, the intensive institute, and a project which pulls everything together is a great example of how Infopeople and others are seeking ways to reinforce what learners are acquiring in contemporary training sessions. And it doesn’t stop there: participants are now in contact via the Eureka! Leadership News blog and webinars like the one that Cipparrone and Eureka! institute alumna Genesis Hansen presented this week on the topic of “Free Online Tools for Project Management”—yet another way that Cipparrone and her colleagues are gaining leadership experience while creating content which is useful to others.
Next: Infopeople and the San Francisco Public Library Leadership Academy

We don’t have to look very far to see that leadership is an issue which is much discussed and often promoted within libraries and the communities they serve—possibly because so many of us sense a leadership void in so many of the organizations and political entities we encounter.
The great news here in California is that positive, vibrant, creative initiatives are underway. Infopeople is currently repeating its very successful Eureka! Leadership Program, which includes a series of workshops, a week-long leadership institute, and other events designed to provide inspiration and experience to current and prospective library leaders. Participants such as San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone, who attended the initial round of workshops and then attended the institute, are now working on their final projects designed to help them develop their overall leadership skills while making major contributions to the libraries for which they work.
There are also fine examples of library leaders cultivating leadership qualities among their staff: San Francisco Public Library City Librarian Luis Herrera currently has a four-month leadership academy running at the Library and has brought in training consultant Maureen Sullivan, who taught one of the initial Eureka! workshops, to oversee the project; Anne Cain (County Librarian, Contra Costa County Library system) also stands out as an example of a library leader inspiring leadership skills in her staff through her extremely strong commitment to training—something which appears to extend through the entire system and which begins with a month-long new staff orientation program designed to give every employee the best possible start at the beginning of their employment within the system.
If we move a little beyond the physical and virtual settings of libraries, we find tremendous resources from writers including Peter Block, whose Flawless Consulting reminds us that leaders work within organizations as internal consultants and outside of organizations in the more commonly recognized role of external consultant. We also find eminently readable material in a variety of sources including Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner’s The Leadership Challenge and Warren Bennis’s On Becoming a Leader—wonderful because they tell stories in the words of other leaders rather than remaining mired solely in the world of theory.
Many of the Infopeople “Building Leadership Skills” workshop materials remain accessible in the Infopeople past training materials archives. Infoblog articles on the workshops provide additional information. And registration for “Building Leadership Skills” workshops scheduled through mid-2009 is continuing on the Infopeople site.
Next: Polly Cipparrone and an Update on Her Eureka! Leadership Project

One of the best two-for-one deals for current and prospective library leaders is Pat Wagner’s “Building Leadership Skills: Developing and Leading Projects” workshop. Part of the Infopeople Eureka! Leadership Program series, it will be offered in California libraries through December 17, 2008; remains available after that on a contract basis dependent on the instructor’s availability; and has materials already viewable online in the Infopeople past training materials archives.
Attending the session held in the main library in San Francisco earlier this week (Monday, December 1), I was struck not only by how much useful guidance Wagner packs into that one-day class about how to collaborate to create successful projects, but also by the way she transfers what she knows to those attending the workshop. There is almost an aesthetic pleasure in watching how, as a leader herself, she inspires the best in people who join her in the learning process. As a trainer and a leader, she facilitates an experience involving tremendous amounts of teamwork, with a fine combination of seriousness and humor, in a way which leads the observant participant to see the workshop itself as a successfully completed project.
Through exercises in which we discuss case studies examining problems which are common in the project management process—at every step combining what we learn from Wagner with what we already know, and adding in copious amounts of what we learn from each other’s experiences in a variety of library systems—we gain confidence. The understanding that we have the skills to be successful participants in developing and leading projects. And an appreciation for the idea that success comes from well defined processes rooted in realistic expectations. You don’t seek perfection, Wagner suggests, “you do what you can do. That’s life.”
The heart of the afternoon session is an extended period during which workshop participants assume and discuss roles played by people in a project where the final product is a printed budget request to be submitted to a governing body. As the discussion continues, the magic begins to happen: Wagner almost completely recedes from being the center of the learning process and each of us works through a series of questions which prompt us to consider not only what we would do in the roles we have assumed, but how what we do affects all others involved in the project.
Among the lessons learned intellectually as well as viscerally is one Wagner summarizes near the end of the day: “being a good project manager means that the people working for you make the right decisions.” And if, by the end of the day, we haven’t completely absorbed that lesson, it is not for lack of effort on the part of the instructor or the workshop participants. Which probably is the most memorable lesson of all.
N.B.: Registration for the remaining scheduled offerings of “Developing and Leading Projects” (Fresno, 12/10/2008; San Jose, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, 12/12/2008; San Diego County Library Headquarters, 12/16/2008; and Los Angeles Public Library, 12/17/2008) and other Eureka! Leadership Program offerings is continuing on the Infopeople website under the heading “Building Leadership Skills”; each workshop is priced at $75 per person.

If you work with children in libraries and have the sense that you are missing a significant part of your audience, you may be right, Infopeople instructor Adrienne Furness maintains. While more than one million children are engaged in homeschooling throughout the country and the majority of them use libraries, few libraries are providing services directly targeted at this audience, she suggests.
“I would say that one of the things that prevents a lot of librarians from providing services to homeschoolers is that they don’t feel confident that they know what homeschoolers are up to…what they believe, how they function,” she said during a conversation this morning. She hopes to reverse this situation a bit through “Service to Homeschooling Families,” an Infopeople workshop she will offer throughout California between December 2008 and April 2009. The first session is scheduled to be held at the Main Library in San Francisco on December 4, 2008.
“Homeschoolers tend to be very reasonable and knowledgeable about libraries because they use them so much. On the other side, homeschoolers are sometimes reluctant to approach librarians” because they don’t know how they are going to be received, she added. “I try to give them (workshop participants) the tools they need to go up to a homeschooler and talk to them without feeling ignorant—some confidence, some background, and some ideas. I think a lot of people are intimidated by homeschoolers.”
Furness herself first became interested in homeschoolers while she was earning her degree and was living upstairs from a homeschooler. She has, since that time, spent a decade serving as Children’s and Family Services Librarian in Webster, New York; maintains the “Homeschooling and Libraries” blog, which includes interviews and an article on library orientations for homeschoolers; and wrote Helping Homeschoolers in the Library for ALA Editions.
“I think for me the most interesting thing is that there certainly will be values we don’t share with homeschoolers, but I think there are a lot of values we do share. How they define education may be different from how we do, but they truly love knowledge, and that provides common ground for us to work together,” she notes.
“One thing that I like to say when I start my workshops is that I’m a working librarian. A lot of times people are overwhelmed by offering services to different populations. It’s doable. You can make just a little effort and get huge returns on it…It’s almost that by letting people know you’re interested, you’ve won over a lot of people,” she concluded.
Those interested in learning more about homeschooling in California; how to develop low-cost, high-impact programs for homeschoolers in libraries; and how to create a homeschooling collection useful for homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers alike can register through the Infopeople website. Additional online resources include a National Home Education Network website on what homeschoolers want from libraries and information available through the HomeSchool Association of California website.

Inspired by conversations during the California Library Association conference in San Jose earlier this week and by online coursework through the University of North Texas, I’ve been completely immersed in discussions, articles, and examples of how onsite and online reference services are developing. It’s no surprise to discover that much of what works in one arena carries over effectively into the other, and the continuing popularity of Infopeople workshops on reference-related themes, as mentioned in the first of these two articles, tells me that there is still a very strong place for libraries in reference and information retrieval assistance.
One of the most consistently interesting sources on the topic is Thomas Mann, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress and author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research. His 41-page article (“The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries,” written in 2007) draws from the book to offer an insider’s view of how first-rate reference services can work in almost any setting. There is plenty here for us to absorb as we consider what we should be providing through learning opportunities targeted at library staff as well as at library members and guests.
Although the article is directed toward staff and students in an academic library setting, the basic procedures obviously remain useful within public library settings as well. He discusses how encyclopedia articles, through references at the end of those pieces, can help students and other information seekers locate standard works on a topic. He discusses the resources available through online public access catalog subject searching; mentions how the often overlooked printed volumes which form Library of Congress Subject Headings can lead to even more resources; and continues with demonstrations of how searching for journal articles not only provides great source materials but leads to additional finely targeted resources in the form of citations at the end of those articles. Again, there is nothing here that could not be used just as effectively through an online reference session if both parties have access to collections which support the reference work underway.
In two other articles (“Teaching Library of Congress Subject Headings,” published in 2000 in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, and “Why LC Subject Headings Are More Important Than Ever,” published three years later in American Libraries), he focuses on a very specific part of the process and offers easy-to-learn tips and tricks which assist us in the reference and research process. His theme is readily identifiable: libraries offer wonderful resources for those in search of information, but library staff does not always do a great job at making library users aware of those resources.
Library of Congress Subject Headings, Mann maintains, is “one of the most valuable conceptual tools a researcher can have,” but “it must be taught, explained, and exemplified by librarians” (Mann, 2000, p. 117), and that is a lesson not to be ignored by any of us in our role of trainer-teacher-learner. “Teaching library research without LCSH is like teaching medicine without anatomy,” he adds (p. 118).
A noteworthy part of all Mann’s writing is his consistent pattern of avoiding either-or solutions. He does not overtly choose one method for assisting information seekers. Instead, he offers a variety of options in an attempt to provide the best assistance he is capable of offering. In the process of working alongside him through the material he has published, we have the opportunity to learn more by example. Through this process, we move a little closer to the level of achievement he has reached—to the benefit of those we serve.