Core Competency M: Demonstrate oral and written communication skills necessary for professional collaboration and presentations.
Section 1. Interpretation of competency
It is important for any information professional to cultivate the written and oral communication skills that are necessary for collaborating with teams of colleagues and clients as well as the ones that are needed to present information formally or informally to anyone.
Librarians are often called upon to strategize solutions to complex problems whether they are negotiating a reference interview or implementing a new software platform. This entails having both the ability to actively listen while the user defines their needs and then being able to communicate potential solutions.
Information professionals frequently communicate with others in their field through formal listservs, conferences, and professional literature. This promotes the free exchange of ideas enabling members of the field to collaborate to find solutions to commons problems. Through online and face-to-face contact librarians are able to foster relationships with librarians at other institutions which can help create camaraderie within the field.
Librarians also need to be able to express their ideas to library users and other stakeholders. Having an effective communication plan to advertise about important issues such as the library budget or changes in hours or services is vital to keeping the community engaged. Having well-developed resources that show users how to access the collection and find the information they need makes sure that the collection is being used, making the library a relevant community resource.
Section 2. Reference to supporting evidence
Evidence One. Professional Activity.
Migrating to the Open: Moving Scholarly Journals to the IR Presentation made at Digital Commons New England User Group, University of Massachusetts Medical School, July 28, 2017.*
This presentation informed colleagues who were also Digital Commons (DC) customers on how to migrate their institution’s scholarly journals from print or static web pages into the institutional repository (IR). It described the efforts I undertook as repository manager to convert three different publications, stored in three different formats, into dynamic online journals utilizing the software capabilities of our IR solution.
I chose this as proof of competency in the area of communication because I feel it is evidence of my ability to present information to a group of peers on a timely topic. While most of the librarians in the audience used DC as their library’s repository solution, relatively few were hosting journals through it. This presentation reviewed common challenges to digitizing journals and suggested some best practices around how to organize projects like these. It also sought to encourage the use of the DC IR to start new student-run journals to maximize the use of the repository.
* bepress (the parent company for Digital Commons) was acquired by Elsevier on Aug 2, 2017.
Evidence Two. Professional Activity.
Meet the Experts Panel and Q&A. This was a Q&A panel discussion at the Digital Commons New England User Group, University of Massachusetts Medical School, July 28, 2017.
As part of my participation in this conference, I was a member of a three-person panel taking questions from the audience. I feel that this unscripted conversation is evidence of my competency in the area of collaboration and oral communication. My fellow panelists and I had not met before that day; as we fielded questions we had to swiftly negotiate who would answer them and make sure that we all were equally heard. While this session did not involve the same level of preparation that my presentation did, it nevertheless required me to have a very full understanding of the product I was using and to be able to succinctly articulate why I made the editorial choices that I did.
Evidence Three. Work Experience.
UNH Law Library Blog Posts advertising news about the institutional repository, the law review, and a new study guide collection.
Communicating news about the library is important. Whether sharing success stories or advertising new services and collections, this type of communication should be a key piece of the library’s communication plan. At UNH Law, team members were free to post about recent projects on the library’s website.
I shared a lot of highlights from the institutional repository, announcing that the law review was now fully online, creating infographics regarding usage statistics, letting people know where we had been linked to from recently, and more. These communications were often paired with announcements that were sent from the school’s official Twitter account and between the two created a regular stream of communication for anyone interested in the school. I chose this as proof of my competency in this area because it shows an awareness of the need for regular outgoing communication to the library community.
Section 3. Application of competency
I continue to apply the concepts of communication to receive information and convey ideas to others in a collaborative constructive fashion. Recently I gave a presentation on Harvard’s Open Access Tracking Project to let other library science students at SJSU know about this resource and encourage them to help work on it. This semester I also created clear descriptions of workflow tasks with annotated screenshots for our student workers so that they can work as efficiently as possible. I am also collaborating with librarians from Boston College to bring an OpenCon satellite event to Boston in November 2018.
I feel that communication is an important part of any librarians job regardless of the role. There are many different ways that librarians need to communicate whether internally within their own organizations, to librarians at other institutions, as well as to users and important decision makers.