Symposium Poster Sessions

Caroline Fuchs

Symposium Speaker IV: Damon Jaggars

“I Can’t Believe He Did That…Again”

Books mentioned by Damon Jaggars

Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1995.http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/32430189

Daniel Goleman, Richard E Boyatzis, Annie McKee, Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/54798787

Douglas Stone, et. al. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. Penguin,2000. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44063027

Kerry Patterson, et. al. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. McGraw-Hill, 2002. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48989136

Richard E Boyatzis, Annie McKee, Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others Through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/58546666

Symposium Prize Winners

We would like to congratulate the following winners of the symposium raffle prizes. The proceeds from the raffle benefit ACRL/NY programming and initiatives. The 2009 winners are: Irina Kandarasheva from Columbia University (Netbook), HollyHeller-Ross from SUNY Plattsburgh (Flip Camera), and Betsy Crenshaw from LIU Brooklyn (hand-beaded necklace made by Carrie Eastman).

Two doorprizes, consisting of certificates for free admission to the 2010 ACRL/NY Symposium, were won by Lucy Heckman from St. John’s, and Steve Essig from New York County Public Access Law Library.

Symposium Speaker III: Mary Carmen Chimato

“10 Years, 4 Libraries, 2 Office Moves, and 1 Staff Retreat Later: A Leader Emerges”

Mary Carmen Chimato engaged symposium attendees with high-energy freestyle approach, reaching an audience that extended across the conference room.  In her presentation, Chimato shared her professional life experiences, commitment to work, and the fervor to create the best user experiences possible for library patrons. She began her career at the Florence A. Moore Library. Her experiences as a newbie librarian and the mentoring she received transformed her into an experienced librarian. Working in a small library required wearing multiple hats and taking on multiple responsibilities. She continues her professional journey at North Carolina State University (NCSU), where she is Head of Access Services in a large library, supervising a large number of staff.

Chimato told of her determination to create a user friendly environment for library patrons and simultaneously improve the morale of the circulation department at NCSU. She created a sense of belonging to a team in her department, producing and atmosphere that is supportive, collaborative, and goal driven, ensuring and sustaining a pleasant work environment for her staff. This allowed her employees needed to achieve the best possible outcomes for the experiences of users and their own job satisfaction. Her relentless efforts to inspire staff, create trust, resolve issues in a timely manner, and support staff initiatives helped her realize her professional goals. Chimato recommends the book, “Death by Meeting” by Patrick Lencioni, for leadership and team-building inspiration.
 
Chimato endorses a practical leadership style. She described the characteristics of responsible leaders, suggesting that good leaders must ask difficult questions and attempt to arrive at decisions that everyone agrees to support. Leaders should acquire the communication expertise to pitch ideas to employees and administrators during the initial planning stages of a change. Leaders, she says, should offer challenges to their staff; even small successes can be improve employee morale. In her experiences as a leader, Chimato has learned to invite feedback from all levels, allow risk taking, generate higher expectations, and acknowledge achievements. She believes that positive library user experiences depend on service; every library employee, should treat everyone, including colleagues, as customers of the library.  She goes on to state that effective leaders can motivate by:

o Putting work in context
o Developing their followers professionally
o Leading by example
o Providing support

Chimato believes “attitude is everything.” She encourages library leaders to develop a positive attitude, a sense of humor, confidence, and committment to their work. With this kind of a leader, staff will soar with vigor and enthusiasm to achieve goals.

Mary Carmen Chimato, an emerging leader, credits her success to having a phenomenal mentor, professional life experiences prevailed, and the unwavering commitment to create the best user experience possible for library patrons.

Book mentioned by Mary Carmen Chimato

Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: a Leadership Fable about Solving the Most Painful Problem in
Business. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53848357

–Dianne Gordon Conyers

A Message from the President: Susanne Markgren

Happy New Year! I am pleased to step into the role of ACRL/NY President for 2010. This year we will continue with many of the initiatives we began in 2009. Our discussion groups have been reorganized to better fit the ever-changing roles and diverse interests of today’s librarians, and we working with other library organizations in the area to collaborate on advocacy issues and sponsor programs that will appeal to academic librarians.

Our annual symposium, Emerging Leadership in Academic Libraries, was held on December 4, 2009, at Baruch College’s Vertical Campus Conference Center. From all accounts (and evaluations) it was an enormous success. This was the first year it was held in this location on the 14th floor. The large sunny room worked quite well for the poster presentations, and the round tables provided attendees an excellent space for networking. There were four speakers, all librarians in leadership roles: Brian Mathews, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Mary Carmen Chimato, and Damon Jaggars. Their abstracts, bios, and reading recommendations, as well as poster session abstracts and a bibliography can be found on the symposium web site: http://acrlnysymp09.wordpress.com/

I want to thank Caroline Fuchs for her work as our dedicated legislative advocate. She asked Assemblyman Mike Miller (of the 38th District) to come to the symposium and say a few words on the importance of funding to maintain and sustain our libraries. His presence was much appreciated by the attendees.

I am delighted to introduce Carrie Eastman as the Symposium Planning Committee Chair for 2010, and the Vice President/President Elect. She already has lots of ideas for the 2010 symposium. If you are interested in serving on the Symposium Planning Committee, please contact her.

The rest of the Executive Board for 2010 is as follows:

Rosanne Humes, Immediate Ex-President
Katrina Frazier, Acting Treasurer
Bellinda Wise, Membership Secretary
Sarah VanGundy, News Editor
Marsha Spiegelman, Secretary
Monica Berger, Webmaster, Blogteam
Scott Rummler*, Webteam
Caroline Fuchs, Legislative Liaison
Lois Cherepon, Archives Coordinator

Geographic Sections:

Susan Werner, Chair, Long Island
Fiona Grady*, Vice-Chair/Chair Elect, Long Island
Barbara Bonous-Smit, Chair, New York City
Anne Leonard, Vice-Chair/Chair Elect, New York City
Gloria Meisel, Chair, Westchester
Kris Wycisk, Vice-Chair/Chair Elect, Westchester
Discussion Groups:

Distance Learning
Kathryn G. Shaughnessy*, Chair

Education/CMC
Sheila Kirven*, Co-Chair
Amy Catalano*, Co-Chair

Information Literacy/Instruction
Eloise Bellard, Chair

New Librarians
Michael Handis*, Chair

Resource Sharing
Maureen Weicher, Chair

Special Collections and Archives
Keith Muchowski*, Chair

User Experience
Carrie Netzer Wajda, Chair
We will hold the following discussion group meetings this Spring: Information Literacy/Instruction on February 19, CMC/Education on March 19, Distance Learning on April 9, and Resource Sharing on May 7. These will be initial, kick-off meetings for these groups. Please contact the chair of the group if you are interested in attending. You do not need to be a member of ACRL/NY for the initial meetings, but you will need to join to continue to be a member of the discussion group. In addition, the User Experience Discussion Group will meet on February 3. See the ACRL/NY web site for further details: http://www.acrlny.org/

Thanks to the continuing board members for all your hard work, unlimited enthusiasm, and much needed support. And welcome to our newest board members (so noted by an asterisk after their names). I’m looking forward to working with all of you to promote our association, advocate for libraries in the greater New York City area, and offer our members motivating and provocative programs, meetings, and discussions in 2010.

–Susanne Markgren

Symposium Speaker II: Amanda Etches-Johnson

“Learning to Emerge:  10 Things I’ve Learned About Library Leadership”
Our speaker started her presentation by emphasizing the dynamic nature of leadership;  she changed her  title from “10 Things  I’ve learned” to “10 Things I am learning”  to better reflect her overarching “lesson”  that, although discreet projects may end, the multiple insights gained from leading any project continue.  She characterized herself as a reluctant leader, who had previously, and exclusively, associated leadership with “textbook management  techniques.”   Using some inspiration from mentors, some examples of her own work experiences   and some analyses of what she saw as successful social-leaders,  Etches-Johnson outlined 10 lessons that have helped her embrace the prospect of leadership.
1) No Ego:  Inspired by Jim Collins’s Good to Great, (www.jimcollins.com) Etches-Johnson echoes that what allows a good idea to become a great idea is for the leader to not “hold on to credit” – she has seen this work in a former boss who encouraged her teams to “work it out” as if any idea  were their ideas.  As a result, her boss was able to generate better- and best-ideas, foster “buy-in” and have everyone contribute to excellent execution.
2) No one is a “born expert”:  Etches-Johnson shared a lesson gleaned from the Canadian, “Northern Exposure to Leadership Institute” (http://www.ls.ualbereta.ca/neli).  Although we may have built up an area of expertise, being open to the “expertise” of others – both within our area  and outside our domain—allows us to evolve in our expertise and offers a more-informed view of librarianship in general.  Although she initially defined herself as a “user-advocate,” being open to colleagues’ notions of “user-experience” helped refine her notions of library advocacy in general.
3) Ask for forgiveness, not permission:  Waiting around for permission to implement ideas on the enterprise level can permanently sidetrack good projects.  If you can implement ideas with the technology and resources that are available to you, try it on a small scale to check viability; if  successful, the “test” can offer proof-of-concept for implementation at the next level .
4) Admit  your mistakes:  With a humorous visual of a misspelled tattoo (“Facebok”) , Etches-Johnson points out that leaders who fail to admit their mistakes will lose more than “face.”  Failure to admit a bad decision undermines your team’s faith in your  ability to recognize sound judgment.  From the Social-Leader world, she pointed to the Flickr July 21, 2005 blog entry entitled “sometimes we suck” (blog.flickr.net/en/2005/07/21/sometimes-we-suck) wherein the Flickr administrators admitted that internal and external communication problems left  a “small percentage” of users, (but a “pretty large number in absolute terms”) confused and annoyed after a hardware  platform shift.  Etches-Johnson offered her own gaffe too:  in trying to establish digital signage for the Commons in her library, she bought more than the library could handle – acting against the advice of one of her IT team.   Although the LCD screens are beautiful, the software purchased to generate the signs is so complicated that the signs and announcements are often outdated.
5) Celebrate your failures:  Etches-Johnson points to the “Fail Whale” graphic as a good way to not only admit your mistakes, but celebrate them!   Fail Whale appears on Twitter page when too many people overwhelm the Twitter system; it depicts small Twitter birds working together to carry a hefty whale.   It has inspired a Twitter Fan Club (twitter.com/failwhale) and the, “Fail Whale Pale Ale,” which brings celebration of the fail to a new level, with fans designing the label!  Etches-Johnson suggests that the library world could take a page out of the t=Twitter book – in addition to Library Success Wiki, she suggests a Library Failure Wiki, both to celebrate failure and to help others avoid the problems.  In addition she’d like to see a “library fail” camp.
6) Leadership is important, so is management:  Both are important, neither one is “complete” without the other.  Even if one has taken “management” courses, it may be worthwhile to take a refresher course in “project management” in particular.  Failing to manage people, time and/or resources effectively can mean a failed project.
7) Mentors: Get one. Be one.  Internal mentors can help you to understand the system as it is, and help you to figure out ways to implement changes you may think are helpful.  External mentors can offer an outsider’s view of how to navigate your institution and profession effectively, and alternative viewpoints for individual projects, organizations or management philosophies.
8) Network. SRSLY:  Etches-Johnson’s online class, “Five weeks to a Social Library” (www.sociallibraries.com) started with a blog post, and comments in which people volunteered to help.  Networking through online sites allowed Etches-Johnson to connect with other librarians who have similar interests, in ways that might have been geographically impossible in the face-to-face world.
9) Stretch Yourself:  Even if you think you can’t do something, give it a try…work outside your comfort  zone, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you can accomplish.
10) Model the behavior:  Embody the qualities you wish to see at work in your team.  Your behavior can have an impact, positive or negative, on the effectiveness of collaboration.  And of course, always show appreciation for the team –balance this with “no ego” above.

In closing, Etches-Johnson reiterated that these are not the only things she is learning from her team projects, but that she hopes they are the ones that translate across institutions and projects.  She looks forward to learning more along the way.

Book mentioned by Amanda Etches-Johnson

James Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. New York: HarperBusiness, 2001. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46835556

–Kathryn Shaughnessy

Symposium Speaker I: Brian Mathews

“Service and the Subconscious”

Brian Mathews began the morning session with what he called, “the conference’s most abstract presentation.” Titled, “Service and the Subconscious,” Mathews’s presentation was a mix of strategic planning, personal reflection, and leadership theory. According to Mathews, a leader’s role is to create an environment that inspires staff. As User Experience Librarian at Georgia Tech, he was troubled at times by the rushed quality of library services. To counteract this, he was guided by the idea of inspiring “world famous” service. He based his plans on the initiatives of Seattle’s Pike’s Place Fish Market and other forward looking companies. Brian challenged his department to envision what it would mean for Georgia Tech’s library to be the best at what they did. The library’s staff and faculty were encouraged to monitor themselves as well as call out others who were not living up to the collective vision of the department.

In order to create a more user-sensitive library, Brian brought unlikely pairings of students, faculty and staff together to generate ideas, asked “odd” questions, encouraged new activities, used games to involve students, and observed in detail how space was currently being used in the library. He found that just as negativity can be contagious when an organization is slipping, positivity can be contagious when the energy turns around. Influenced by Phil Jackson’s book, “Sacred Hoops,” Brian worked with others to build a team in which everyone was involved and played a role, and break down barriers within the library.

Another theme that Brian discussed was that of “Aloha” or an attitude of friendly acceptance, unexpected kindness, a shared sense of joy and peace, and self awareness and presence of mind. Aloha has been particularly relevant to Brian’s current position as Outreach Librarian at University of California at Santa Barbara, where the traditionally laid-back school is going through a troubled period due to the state’s budget crisis.

Citing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done,” Brian suggested that listeners could prepare to become a leader by being mindful, volunteering for grunt work, being involved in assessment as a door to change, always having a side project, and finding a mentor. A mindful leader, he said, will also be a good follower, and know what it means to be led.

Books mentioned by Brian Mathews:

John Yokohama & Joseph A. Mitchelli, When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. New York: Hyperion, 2004. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52806137

Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty, Bill Bradley. Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons as a Hardwood Warrior. New York: Hyperion, 2006. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/74149973

Janice Redish, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. Boston: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2007. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/85828748

Ram Charan, Know-how: The Eight Skills that Separate People who Perform from People Who Don’t. New York: Crown Business, 2007. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/68373258

Karen Glover, “The Evolution of the Georgia Tech Library Circulation Department” Journal of Access Services 4.3 (2008).

–Maureen Weicher

A Message from the President

Rosanne Humes

The ACRL/NY Executive Board and the Symposium Committee have been very busy the past few months.
The Symposium Committee, led by Susanne Markgren, Vice President/President Elect and Symposium Committee Chair, is putting the finishing touches on the December 4, 2009 event. The Symposium, entitled “Emerging Leadership in Academic Libraries” will be held at Baruch College, Vertical Campus Conference Center, 55 Lexington Ave, in New York. Our speakers will be: Mary Carmen Chimato, Head of Access and Delivery Services, North Carolina State University; Amanda Etches-Johnson, User Experience Librarian, McMaster University; Damon Jaggars, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services, Columbia University; and Brian Mathews, Assistant Librarian, Outreach and Academic Services, University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Executive Board has been evaluating and reorganizing the discussion groups. We have combined the Technical Services, Collection Development and Electronic Resources discussion groups and renamed them the Resource Sharing Group. We have eliminated Access Services, Cultural Diversity and Education/CMC, and added User Experience and Distance Learning.
To promote the groups and encourage new members, ACRL/NY has arranged for a different discussion group to meet at Mercy College Manhattan Campus each month. The discussion groups meet from 9:00 to 10:45, before the Symposium Committee that meets from 11:00 to 12:30, and then the Executive Board has its meeting from 1:00 to 3:30.
For more information on the Symposium, the Discussion Groups and all ACRL/NY business, please visit our website.

2009 Symposium: Emerging Leadership in Academic Libraries

Leaders inspire and motivate us. Leaders create vision and purpose. But what does it take to be a leader in today’s academic library? How do we mentor and sustain leaders within our organizations? How do we take charge of our own career paths and move into leadership roles? This symposium will address these questions while opening up a discussion of leadership across the different stages of librarianship.

The symposium will be held at the Baruch College, Vertical Campus Conference Center, 14th floor, Friday, December 4, 2009 from 9 am to 3:30 pm. For more information, and registration, please visit the 2009 symposium website: http://acrlnysymp09.wordpress.com/

ACRL/NY User Experience Discussion Group

The first organizational meeting of the ACRL/NY User Experience Discussion Group, led by discussion chair Carrie Netzer Wajda, was held on Friday, September 11th at Mercy College. The topic brought 14 attendees from diverse backgrounds and academic institutions. After a brief networking and meeting period from 9-9:30, the meeting opened at 9:30 with an introduction to the User Experience Discussion Group by ACRL/NY board members. This was followed by a roundtable discussion of attendees’ knowledge of and interest in usabilty issues.
During a lively discussion, participants expressed curiosity and concerns about how to do usabilty research using surveys, interviews, and web analytic software. Generally, the discussion focused on the idea that making libraries more usable for our patrons shouldn’t be difficult – indeed, the best way to achieve better usability is to make the research process less burdensome on librarians.
Based upon participant feedback, it was proposed that the group meet twice or three times per year, perhaps with an event component. The next meeting’s discussion, to be held in early December, will consider survey design, administration, and working with institutional research boards. The December meeting’s location and date t.b.d. Meeting minutes are posted on the discussion group website at http://acrlnyux.wordpress.com/.

The group can also be found online on Facebook Groups.