Leaping Off the Edge: Thriving in Ever-Changing Information Futures
by Debbie Hunt and Rose Falanga
Debbie Hunt is a senior information specialist for The Exploratorium, and principal of the Information Edge (dhunt@exploratorium.edu). Rose Falanga is a senior information specialist for The Exploratorium (rosef@exploratorium.edu).
Jump In
Debbie Hunt and Rose Falanga have between them uncounted years
of professional experience in the library and information fields. While library school gave them a foundation of service-oriented values, most of the skills they bring to their current cutting edge positions have been learned on the job and through continuing education. Their stories demonstrate how special librarians can remain valuable and marketable assets to their organizations, or on their own as independent information professionals.
Getting From There to Here
Debbie Hunt remembers spending many summer days at the local public swimming pool. When she was eight years old, she finally got up enough nerve to climb the ladder to the high dive and jump off the edge. Little did she know then that leaping off the edge would become a pattern of behavior in her professional adult life.
Rose Falanga's information service vocation began when she was ten. A sick neighbor wanted more of a special nonprescription skin cream not available in the local drugstores. The neighbor only had a sample she received in the hospital. Falanga took the sample and sat with a phone and the Manhattan phone book. Her theory was that every company on the planet had some kind of office in New York, and in the late '50's, that was largely true. A dozen calls later, a case of free samples was being shipped out and a career was born.
The Chance-Taker
Hunt graduated from UC Berkeley's (UCB) Library School in the late '70s, after having completed an undergraduate Spanish degree at Berkeley. She became a librarian because, as an undergraduate, she worked at UCB's Moffitt Undergraduate Library and saw what reference librarians did. She knew that finding answers to questions was for her. However, when she graduated from library school, the competition for jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area was really stiff; librarians with 5-10 years of experience were filling entry-level positions. Many of her classmates left California for the Midwest where there was less competition.
Hunt was fortunate that a local civil engineering firm posted a 'help wanted' note on the school's job board saying they needed someone to organize the firm's library. Hunt met with the two firm principals and wrote up a proposal. Immediately after graduation she spent three months diving into organizing and cataloging a book, journal and trade catalog collection and answering reference questions. She also trained secretarial staff to type catalog cards (yes, it was that long ago) and the engineering staff to use the library and card catalog. Clients of this firm saw what she had done and she spent the remainder of her first year in the profession organizing engineering libraries. Little did she know that this first consulting job would pave the way for the wonderful career path she has taken. It was the first in many instances of leaping off the professional edge.
She took another leap by leaving her native California to take a position at the University of Nevada-Reno as government documents librarian and then at the Nevada State Library as its first collection development librarian. When online searching was still a novelty and personal computers had yet to be invented, Hunt started the first computer online users group at the Nevada State Library. (They used TI Silent 700 dumb terminals with acoustic couplers and thermal paper.) She figured if she wanted to learn how to search and search well, and have colleagues trained whom she could consult with, this was the way to go.
When Hunt started her family, she returned to the Bay Area. To enjoy the flexibility that being an independent information professional allowed, she started her own company, Information Edge. She returned as an automation consultant to her original engineering firm and became the first medical librarian at her hometown hospital. She had never done medical librarianship, but decided to leap off the edge again. One of her biggest leaps came in the mid-1990s, when she was looking for something to do in addition to consulting. Falanga knew Hunt because they had both been presidents of BayNet. Falanga contacted Hunt about a temporary, part-time position as Internet resource specialist at The Exploratorium, creating and fostering an online community of science educators around the country. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. Hunt leapt once more and over the years, her job has evolved into the current one as CTL (Center for Teaching and Learning) Senior Information Specialist.
Hunt also teaches at the local community college in the library paraprofessional certificate program and Falanga joins her for an online course for UC Berkeley Extension, called "Online Searching and Electronic Research." Hunt recently developed a new course for InfoPeople entitled, "Teaching the Public to Use Digital Resources."
The Warrior
Falanga believes she was born a librarian. She began working in school libraries in the fourth grade and took her first paying job as a page in the local public library on her 16th birthday. This led to jobs as a page and master filer at the research libraries at New York Public, which put her through undergraduate school. She had wanted to major in math, but settled for a degree in expository writing, which fit in better with her work schedule. Being accepted into the graduate program for library service at Columbia University was a high point in her life. It was a magical year at a magical time, in the early '70s, when everything was radicalized. She was trained to be an information warrior, indexer and young adult specialist.
Computers were another story. Falanga did get a brief chance to offer up keypunch cards at the Shrine of the Mainframe through a special programming course offered at Columbia's library school. She also had a vision of the future while on a tour of the New York Times Index. She saw her first computer terminal and asked the guide what it was. "Oh, that," he said, "That's nothing. We're computerizing our morgue. It won't work." Several years later that project emerged as The New York Times Database.
Falanga had trained to be a school librarian and would have become one except that she graduated at the height of the Baby Boom. The market was so saturated that the school librarian exam was not even given that year. Instead, she ended up building another strength by becoming an indexer for H.W. Wilson. Although she loved the intellectual challenge of indexing, she was soon lured away by Queens Borough Public's offer of a young adult position.
But the warrior in her never died. At the same time she was spending 35 hours per week working for Q.B.P.L., she was volunteering 40 hours per week for the only 24-hour walk-in crisis center and hotline in New York City. She also got involved in starting a blue-collar women's center, All the Queens Women. She then moved to Cleveland where she did more work with kids.
When she left Cleveland for California in 1977, she also left public libraries. She was looking for more opportunity to learn and grow than they could offer at the time, especially in computers. Those years of struggling with catalog cards and rolodexes prepared her psychologically for the technological changes that were about to happen. Her love of math and logic was also a great asset.
Falanga was not employed when she arrived in California, but within months of her arrival the various parts of her background coalesced into a dream job. One of the hotline advisors from the New York days had started a company in California, which had won a federal contract to create a national drug abuse prevention information center. Falanga was offered a job as their librarian.
The Pyramid Project, as it was called, was extremely exciting. It served a national audience of community-based organizations with research, government documents and technical assistance. There were two toll-free lines out and two lines in. This was a big change from the public library days, when staff was forbidden to call the central library. But the project had no computers and Falanga was still determined to master online searching. One day she walked onto the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and asked the first librarian she saw who the best searcher was. She was directed to Ingrid Radkey at the Biology Library. Radkey was very gracious to Falanga, allowing her to sit behind the reference desk while Radkey communed with Medline and Biosis using a TI dumb terminal. For the next few years Falanga regularly traded lattes for invaluable lessons from Radkey. Her project never did get a terminal, but a project down the hall did and she convinced them to let her use it at night, in exchange for doing occasional searches for them.
When Pyramid received a termination contract to computerize its files in the early '80s, Falanga took on the job and also took advantage of the opportunity to gradually move into consulting work. She figured the changes were happening so fast, it was the only way to keep up. For ten years her clients paid her to learn their systems and teach them how they worked.
Around the same time she started her consulting phase, she was also drafted by the local community college to teach the introductory course in librarianship for their Library and Information Technology program. They knew about her because she was involved in both the local SLA chapters and in forming BayNet, the Bay Area's multi-type library network. Terminally shy, she had no idea she could teach until she tried, but the students seemed to like her. (They once gave her a standing ovation and a bottle of brandy to show their appreciation.) As she learned more about computers she also brought them into the curriculum, creating new courses and helping to expand the program. Her reputation grew and she began teaching professional development courses for local library organizations and U.C. Berkeley Extension. San Jose State's SLIS tapped her to create a graduate course on Information Brokering.
Falanga developed a facilitative, rather than authoritative style of teaching. Frequently an idea for a course would come out of a perceived need from the field, rather than expertise on Falanga's part. She would use the course development as a way to become conversant with the issues. She taught about retrospective conversion years before she personally underwent the grueling process, but when her time came to convert, she was ready.
In 1985, Falanga took on a new client, the Teacher Institute, a professional development program at The Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco. They had placed a confused posting on the SLA Jobline and she convinced them that they had no idea what they wanted and so needed her. For five years she juggled her client and teaching commitments with a growing emotional and professional attachment to the museum. It offered everything she wanted in a job: challenge, growth, the opportunity to both be useful and to support real institutional and pedagogical change.
In the late '80s, Falanga sensed another sea change in technology that would affect the profession: computers and networks were getting too complex to keep up with from the outside, as a consultant. The Exploratorium was demanding more and more of her time to create a state-of-the-art library and Learning Studio and offered another inducement: thanks to an aggressive, forward-thinking computer department, the museum was always acquiring the latest hardware and software. Falanga could make a contribution while keeping up on her skills. Although it would take several years to finish up with her clients and turn her classes over to others (mostly to Hunt), she began to work full-time at the museum.
She began a policy of working, even on her days off, on personal and museum special projects as a way to learn new software and systems. She began to publish two Web sitesBluethread (a site on reform Jewish studies), and a site for her mid-'60s high school community. She believes that working on personal projects is an excellent way to stay fresh in her skills, and the museum encourages such efforts. Once, when she was home for eight weeks after a foot operation, some departments sent her flowers, but the Teacher Institute loaned her one of their new Macintosh SEs, which came with Hypercard and Filemaker. She had never used a Mac before, so she set up a special work area in her living room so she could wheel herself right up to the table and mess around. By the time she returned to work she was an expert.
Where We Are Now
Hunt and Falanga are both senior information specialists, positions they created when their job titles no longer reflected the work they were doing.
Hunt's main responsibilities include the Educator Portal and the Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), as well as the Web/Internet presence of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) departments on The Exploratorium Web site. She is the owner of Information Edge, a cutting edge research firm. Hunt is active in professional associations, having just finished serving a two-year term on the Board of AIIP (the Association of Independent Information Professionals). She is still moderating AIIP's listserv and is on the Advisory Board of the San Francisco Bay Region Chapter of SLA. She is the recipient of the 2002 Chapter Professional Achievement Award.
Falanga has switched to special projects, such as the Educator Portal and EDAM, which archives the museum with the Bancroft Library and creates a federally funded digital assets management database.
Survival
Hunt and Falanga don't wish to give the impression that their careers have been trouble-free. Both have faced situations where they were not appreciated, were caught in the middle of political battles or were targeted by individuals with power issues. Their libraries and clients have been downsized, under funded and damaged by earthquake. In the long run, none of this turned out to be very important. While they don't forget the disillusionment, they came to understand that some things were simply beyond their control. To dwell on disappointment prevents you from taking advantage of future opportunities.
Over the years they have individually evolved very similar work philosophies. They credit these philosophies with helping them to continue leaping. Here they are:
· When the world isn't ready for your vision of what is necessary to complete an information task efficiently, keep trying until the technology catches up.
· Demonstrate your value to management. Make sure your job description accurately describes what you are doing.
· Acknowledge that your personal life is intertwined with your professional life. What may first appear as a constraint, may, in reality be an opportunity.
· Find a way to do what you feel you need to do in order to grow and take additional leaps. Volunteering and networking are not just ways to get yourself better known, but offer venues to try out new skills in ways that may not be available in your present position. This can take you to places you never imagined going.
· If the job market is slow, look for opportunities to consult, teach or hone skills that make one more employable.
· If you are not willing to occasionally go outside of your comfort zone, you may be putting yourself and your future employability at greater risk than you could imagine. The world will pass you by.
· Choose a job because it will enable you to make a contribution to something you can believe in.
· Be curious; ask questions; cultivate a broad range of interests.
· Networking is a two-way street. Participation in a successful project will invariably lead to other projects and opportunities. Starting in library school, the personal relationships you build form a foundation that will see you through your entire career.
· Have fun, but stick it out when it isn't fun, at least for a while. Always try to be prepared to leave; it puts you in a position of strength, even if you stay. Know when it is time to leave.
· Know your own priorities, as well as those of your clients/employers.
Special librarians and information professionals practice most of these precepts. Doing well in one area often leads to success in another. These are the keys to being ready to leap off the edge. Use your skills in creative ways to be more marketable so that clients and patrons understand and buy into your value and potential because they see what you can do for them.
The only sure thing is that there will be change. Don't wait to let the future happen to yoube a part of making it happen. Even though positions and technology change, most librarians are essentially serving the same function in an organization, which is to collect, organize and disseminate information.
Sometimes when you leap off the edge you don't land on your feet, but in the process you learn how to land better the next time. If we stop leaping, you'll stop growing and moving forward. And that would be unthinkable. 
Bibliography
AIIP www.aiip.org
BayNet www.baynetlibs.org
Bay Area Library and Information Network that promotes communication, professional development, cooperation, and innovative resource sharing among different library types in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bluethread www.bluethread.com
Center for Informal Learning and Schools(CILS) www.exploratorium.edu/CILS
CILS supports research and scholarship in the improvement of K-12 science education through the study of informal science learning and institutions, and their relationships to schools. For this project, The Exploratorium is collaborating with King's College London and UC Santa Cruz to invigorate science education.
EDAM (Exploratorium Digital Asset Management)Web site coming
The Exploratorium is implementing an I.M.L.S.-funded Digital Asset Management Program through which museum materials related to interactive exhibits and scientific phenomena, including images, educational activities and other exhibit-related resources, are digitally archived and made accessible to the museum's audiences.
The Exploratorium www.exploratorium.edu
Housed within the walls of the Palace of Fine Arts, The Exploratorium is a collage of hundreds of interactive exhibits in the areas of science, art and human perception.
Exploratorium Educator Portal www.exploratorium.edu/educate/
Everyone loves The Exploratorium Web site (winner of four Webby Awards, the latest in education). But because it consists of more than 12,000 Web pages, visitors often find that it is so content-rich they cannot locate exactly what they are looking for. The Educator Portal, launched in Spring 2002, is specially designed for educators, whether they are in the classroom, at the local Boys' and Girls' Club or home schoolers. Its clear navigation will help them access award-winning online resources, including Web casts, activities, publications and the latest information about our professional development programs.
Exploratorium Learning Studio www.exploratorium.edu/ls/
Flushing High School Classes of 1963-1967 www.exo.net/fhs
InfoPeople www.infopeople.org
Information Edge www.information-edge.com
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