Learning: A Year-Round Process Within SLA
Ever wondered how your library or information center compares to others in terms of staffing, services, and customers?
Want to learn how to develop and apply cultural intelligence at your organization so you can work more effectively with diverse colleagues and clients?
Interested in learning more about artificial intelligence, libraries in the cloud, or the semantics of library job descriptions?
SLA’s Annual Conference has earned a well-deserved reputation as the premier educational event in the special library community, but learning is a year-round process in SLA thanks to our chapters (geographic units) and divisions (discipline-specific groups). For example, on September 19, the San Francisco Bay Region Chapter and Silicon Valley Chapter will jointly present a dinner program titled “Developing Your Cultural Intelligence in the Workplace: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Michele Villagran, founder and principal of CulturalCo, will discuss how to use cultural intelligence to enhance awareness of ethnic, national, and generational differences within the workforce and harness those differences to encourage creativity and innovation and improve performance and decision making.
The next day, the Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division will host a webinar titled “Benchmarking Pharmaceutical Information Roles: How Do Pharma Info Teams Compare with Other Industries?” Robin Neidorf, director of research at Jinfo, will present the findings of a study on benchmarking information roles, talk about different models of organizational structure, information team staffing, and services offerings, and explain the uses and limitations of using this benchmarking data to support strategy development and stakeholder engagement.
Next month, on October 20, the Kansas/Western Missouri Chapter will host its fall conference. The conference will feature a keynote address titled “Data Science Applied to Information Science” and will include poster sessions on topics such as libraries in juvenile detention facilities and sessions on intellectual property, promoting library services to an internal audience, and scientific research for non-scientists.
These and other chapter and division offerings help keep SLA members abreast of new developments within the library and information fields and contribute to the overall body of knowledge within the SLA community. Make learning a year-round process for you by joining SLA and taking advantage of the many learning opportunities that SLA has to offer!
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