Communicating Competencies and Collaboration
by Lorri Zipperer, MA,
and Sara Tompson, MS
Lorri Zipperer is an independent cybrarian and information project consultant, specializing in medical information and knowledge management. She currently sits on the Board of the SLA Biological and Life Sciences Division, is a past secretary of SLA-IL (1998-2000) and recently edited Lessons in Patient Safety for the National Patient Safety Foundation. Zipperer can be reached at zipperer-info@attbi.com
Sara Tompson has been a physical sciences/engineering information professional for more than 15 years and is currently the library director at Packer Engineering (www.packereng.com). She is a licensed private pilot working on her instrument rating, as well as chair of the SLA Engineering Division and past-president of SLA-IL (2000). Tompson can be reached at sarat@xnet.com.
Putting Theory into Practice
Professionalism lends itself to teaching. The consummate information
professional realizes he/she is part of a process, and endeavors to contribute to the cycle, not merely take from it. In librarianship, mentoring is highly regarded as a way to contribute and is encouraged by professional organizations such as the Special Libraries Association (SLA). Teaching can even be viewed as an extended mentoring situation, and one that provides rich benefits for both the students and the mentor. More library and information science graduate schools are realizing the value of practitioners as a model for praxisputting theory into practice. Information professionals are succeeding as adjunct faculty in these schools, bringing their daily "frontline" experience to the classroom as an illustration of the theories behind organizing information for access. Practitioner adjuncts can complement full-time faculty who are more skilled in pedagogy, but who may not have recently worked as information professionals in other organizations.
In addition to expanding the offerings at a university for a professional program, adjunct teaching responsibilities allow for a unique type of continuing education for the actual practitioner. Teaching allows practitioners to articulate what they know, while affording them the opportunity to improve upon their communication competencies. Add to this the experience of working with fresh minds, and practitioners can discover new directions and energies from those who represent the future of the information profession.
Many librarians are kept busy with their job responsibilities alone. Those who wish to expand into new venues of professional development may often discard opportunities due to time constraints. This article illustrates how a team from the Illinois Chapter of SLAlooking for an opportunity to creatively embrace several projectscoalesced into a group that shared its expertise through the venue of adjunct instructorship. This example provides evidence that the individual information practitioner can successfully further the profession through collaboration with others.
Launching a Concept
The Special Libraries Association text Special Libraries: A Guide for Management (henceforth "The Guide") was the genesis of this group's team activity. The process of developing a working style on a distinct project ultimately served as a structure for other efforts, principally team teaching a special libraries course. The Guide itself served as a text and a framework for several semesters of Special Libraries Administration at Dominican University's accredited program in library and information studies. The school is based in River Forest, Illinois, but offers classes at several locations in the Chicagoland area.
The Guide has always been a project of the Illinois Chapter of SLA. Illinois Chapter President Doris Saunders (1960-61) called together a team including Ruth Nielander, Bill Budington, JoAnn Aufdenkamp, Shirley Harper and Ed Strable to work on the new publication in the early '60s. The fourth edition was launched in 1995 when the editors of the previous edition sent out an invitation to a group of chapter members to shape an author team in order to update the book. This latest edition was published in 1997.
The author team consisted of seven information professionals from the chapter. At the time, the collective experience of the group represented more than 50 years in the profession, with a wide range of information backgrounds and subject specializations. Most of the team members had been published in the past and all had been active in SLA and other professional groups. Despite this respectable set of accomplishments, it is probably safe to say that none of the individuals involved would have sought to do the book alone. As noted by Bahr and Zemon in a recent ACRL article, "Collaboration brings other benefits as well, not the least of which is alleviatingprofessional isolation."
Parallels with Teaching
The group found the familiar structure of their team afforded them important initial comfort in tackling new groundgraduate instruction. Several Guide authors were present at a Dominican University announcement regarding a tenured faculty member's move to another institution. The faculty member was the regular instructor for Special Libraries Administration. Dr. Prudence Dalrymple, the dean of Dominican's Graduate School of Library and Information Science, saw this as an opportunity to invite The Guide author team to step into the spot vacated by the instructor. Dalrymple has remarked that she was "very impressed with the camaraderie of the group, and that this had turned into a book. It seemed like such an obvious next moveto move the authors in and have them teach the course!"
The initial approach to the team's first semester in 1999 was somewhat more traditional than the way in which the class was ultimately configured. The only author at the time with any formal teaching experience was the primary instructor for that first semester of Special Libraries Administration. The Guide was the required text; the development of a business plan served as an additional focus for the class. The rationale for the business plan structure was to demonstrate to the class that the planning process serves librarians and information professionals well, regardless of the environments in which they work. The other team authors attended this first semester as guest lecturers, typically teaching from the chapters for which they had been primary content providers. The students were receptive to this variety of front line practitioners.
In response to changes in the instructor team and shifting professional and personal demands, three Guide authors served as co-adjunct instructors for Special Libraries Administration in the following year. Building on the experience of the initial class, the instructors enlisted colleagues within and beyond SLA and the book project, to serve as guest lecturers on important issues of administration and/or libraries. This collegial approach served to further broaden the students' contact with a variety of information professionals and philosophies. The use of practitioners in the classroom added value to the already rich library and information science curricula at Dominican. As stated by Dean Dalrymple: "Adjuncts are the bridge that connects the academy and the professors to the community of professional practitioners. In LIS education, we are particularly fortunate, because the people who teach our classes are the top professionals, not the unemployed Ph.D.'s as can be the case in some disciplines. In fact, I often compare our school to medical schools where the clinical faculty are the ones who socialize the students into practitioners."
In balance, Dalrymple noted that: "Full-time faculty provide the institutional organization and structure, the policy and the research and theoretical base for the discipline, but often they draw upon their professional experience as well."
The university's concern for providing continuity for the students required a personal commitment by the adjunct instructors to attend class regularly, despite the presence of guest speakers. The university ensures compliance by requiring the designation of one member of a teaching team as the "instructor of record." Administrative duties of this instructor include collecting and recording assignments, taking attendance and serving as the primary contact between the staff office and the teaching team. The university exercised care in explaining to the students how all the instructors contributed to the grading process in equal fashion. This tactic led to thorough comments and a broader critical "peer review" perspective on the students' approaches to their assignments and class participation.
In 2001, the class was repeated with the same team of instructors, who this time interjected more of their opinions and experience into the mix of readings for the class. This approach was also used for the 2002 course. The additional readings were used to represent the newest ideas and applications represented by the philosophies taught in other segments of the curriculum, as well as those from other segments of the management and professional literature. The external sources acquired greater importance in the second year as The Guide was retired as the course text. It had proven to be dated in its examples for new recruits into the profession; a text was needed that would more accurately illustrate the world students were entering. The Guide is currently being considered for revision, and may once again be used for a text in Illinois (it has also been used in Michigan and elsewhere for similar special libraries courses).
Other elements of the class remained consistent with the earlier model. To retain The Guide's emphasis on the key competency of communication with management (Competency 1.7) the development of a business plan continued to serve as a key component of the class.
The role of "instructor of record" still provided structure to the class, and the responsibilities for each session's lecture and discussion facilitation were appropriately distributed. Guest speakers were still employed and provided a valuable experience to the students. These colleagues had multidisciplinary backgrounds, and included SLA members and some non-librarian colleagues.
In support of the instructors' belief that librarianship is a dynamic profession of potential leaders, a focus was placed on nurturing skills to aid the students to interact effectively in the field, building on the theories taught in other areas of the curriculum with examples of practices. An emphasis was placed on truly understanding the organization within which an information professional functions. This organizational approach is being addressed more frequently in the education of information professionals.
Content Focus
The development of the syllabus and the execution of the teaching function focused direction on corporate needs initially communicated in The Guide, supported by selected SLA Competencies that are illustrated below.
(Also see SLA Competencies: www.sla.org/content/SLA/professional/meaning/comp.cfm)
Business planning: SLA Competency 1.7: [The special librarian] uses appropriate business and management approaches to communicate the importance of information services to senior management.
The business plan structure, and the assignments that were presented as components of a business plan, were the means by which students could master this competency. A business plan is a core communication and strategy tool in the corporate world and beyond. It is a useful planning and navigation document for establishing new business (or libraries) and new products and services. In this course, students use the business plan as a guide to establish a new information service or product in a setting determined by the instructors, based on student areas of interest.
Presentation ability: SLA Competency 1.5 (part 2): [The special librarian] reports results to management and demonstrates important strategic relationships and 1.7develops appropriate approaches to communicate with management.
Advocating for support of a special library is a regular occurrence for a special library manager. A formal method of winning management backing for projects is through oral presentations. Whether to retain space, increase staff or expand services, librarians should be prepared to gather strategic and financial support for their activities through effective presentations to small groups of non-librarians. The instructors strongly believe students need to become comfortable talking in front of others and presented their students with a non-threatening environment to build that competency. To parallel other elements of class emphasis, team presentations were chosen as a primary communication vehicle for the class.
Teamwork skills: SLA Competency 2.7: [The special librarian] works well with others in a team and 1.11acts as an effective member of the senior management team.
Teamwork is a part of business today. The instructors believe that the students' understanding some of the dynamics of a team function in a corporate environment will serve them well in future endeavors. Students were assigned to teams and given an instructor-crafted scenario that required them to address an information need with the development of a new service. Both team assignments and scenarios were based on the topical interests of the students. The specific environment and service to be developed varied from team to team, yet each team had distinct parameters.
Working as a Team
By applying what was learned through their corporate experiences to class assignments and the structure of the class itself, the instructors were able to infuse a dose of reality into this course. Instructors and students shared their 'lessons learned' to enrich the experience. The instructors believe that successful team teaching incorporates:
· distinct roles and assignments for each individual;
· defined and accountable grading mechanisms;
· students being treated as members of the team dedicated to their own educational experience;
· communicating to students what will be expected of them as information professionals in the workplace;
· an appropriate amount of flexibilitybeing responsive to the demands of a working person's time, balanced with standardized requirements; and
· students and instructors must be accountable, both as individuals and as team players.
Bahr and Zemon make similar observations in their article on collaborative writing:
"First, select coauthors [or team teachers] carefullyAssess both personal and intellectual factors [including] a deep interest in the topic and a commitment to fulfill their share of the responsibilities, in addition to compatible work habitssecond, collaborators should make their expectations clear to one another from the start"
On Point
At the San Antonio SLA conference in 2001, a spirited conversation took place at the session "Library Education: Knowledge Skills for the 21st Century." This session brought together a panel of academics, information consultants and special librarians to discuss future directions for the education of the profession. An emphasis on real world applications of the philosophies of library science was cited as essential to the creation of a well-constructed professional information base. Several audience participants supported information professionals serving as adjunct professors.
At that session, SLA leaders expressed concepts discovered by the author team in their librarianship teaching experiences, including:
· the need for an emphasis on business orientation and other skills;
· a need for librarians to embrace risk more robustly, as it can present opportunities;
· an increased need to utilize networking as a way to gauge the rapid change in a profession and the specific world it operates in; and
· a clear idea of how to develop markets for services.
The business approach to a special libraries class presented in this article can absorb and capitalize on the ideas from that invigorating session, as they are paramount to success in many corporate ventures and initiatives. These points can certainly be applied to the development and management of information and knowledge efforts. The business plan and marketing approach to management instruction is flexible enough to enable these ideas to be represented therein.
Future Challenges
The profession should challenge its members to get involved with the education of its future (i.e., students!) and academia should embrace the inclusion of experts from the field in their community, as Dominican University has done by creating and supporting a role for adjunct professors. Embrace team teaching to discover what the future of library science holds! Lending expertise to the academic process provides practitioners with the opportunity to learn from students who are often full of energy, good ideas and life stories. 
Notes
Bahr, Alice Harrison and Mickey Zemon. "Collaborative Authorship in the Journal Literature: Perspectives for Academic Librarians Who Wish to Publish," College & Research Libraries, Sept. 2000.
Eddison, Betty. "Our Profession is Changing: Whether We Like it or Not," Online 21,
Jan./Feb. 1997.
Jones, Rebecca. "Business Plans: Roadmaps for Growth & Success," Information Outlook,
Dec. 2000.
Lettis, Lucy. "Enacting Revolutionary Change in the Information World," Information Outlook, Oct. 2001.
Marshall, Joanne, Bill Fisher, Lynda Moulton and Roberta Piccoli. Competencies for Special Librarians for the 21st Century. Special Libraries Association: Washington, D.C., May 1996.
(www.sla.org/content/SLA/professional/meaning /comp.cfm)
Porter, Cathy A., et al. Special Libraries: A Guide for Management-4th ed. Special Libraries Association: Washington, D.C, 1997.
Robbins, Stephen P. "Teams vs. Groups: What's the Difference?" Organizational Behavior: Concepts, Controversies and Applications-8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.
Tompson, Sara. "A Guide for Management Fourth Edition." SLA-IL Informant, Nov. 1997.
Wetlaufer, Suzy. "HBR Case Study: The Team That Wasn't," Harvard Business Review, Nov. 1994.
Special thanks to the other member of our instructor team, Rebecca Corliss, who is key to the spirit of our pedagogical effort. Also, this article and the activities it draws from could not have been written without the dynamic and spirited relationships built during the development of the 4th edition of Special Libraries: A Guide for Management amongst the author team: Mary Beall, Jan Chindlund, Rebecca Corliss, Christina Krawczyk, Cathy Porter and ourselves.
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