Librarian of Fortune

21 tips for consultants and entrepreneurs

Alan Weiss, whose Kool-Aid I drink regularly, just came out with a fabulous list of 21 pieces of advice for the new (or re-focusing) consultant/entrepreneur. Based on my own experience, he's spot on, and I appreciate his get-to-the-point approach. Highlights for me:

 4. Call everyone you know. Explain your value and ask for business AND referrals.

 13. Never  be afraid of losing business. It’s the quickest way to lose business. Instead, focus on boldly acquiring business.

 14. Invest in marketing and in your own development. You cannot cut your way to growth or reduce you path to success.

 21. ALWAYS price based on value, never on time units.

 

Information wants to be free... or expensive

I was reflecting today on Stewart Brand's famous quote, first said in 1985:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient [emphasis added]. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

What I found most interesting is that the "cost" of information is not inherent in the information itself but is specific to the individual recipient.

This is yet another way of saying that the role of info pros has to be not just providing information but making sure it will be seen as valuable to each client. Is it distilled? Is it easy to read, repurpose and share? Is it customized and formatted in the way your client wants?

Want more thoughts on how to turn "free" information into "expensive" information? See the slide deck of a presentation I gave in July at the AALL conference: From Search to Insight: adding value where it counts, and other slide decks at BatesInfo.com/extras.

 

Adding value @ AALL 2011

I just left the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries. I was invited to speak at the Private Law Libraries' one-day summit about adding insight to research. I tweeted like crazy except when I was speaking -- lots of thought-provoking speakers. Interestingly, every speaker brought up the need to be more efficient and cost-effective as well as the need for librarians to add more value to their services. (For great coverage of the summit, see Connie Crosby's blog. I will admit that I got into a virtual smackdown on Twitter with @mdmlibrarian, scheduled at the same time I was, begging Connie to live-tweet OUR talks. Yeah, she's that good. (Turns out she attended a third session! So much for bribery...)

A comment during my talk was "I wouldn't dare provide financial analysis." My response was that, yes, she could provide financial analysis... just make it transparent. Your clients expect you to provide more than just the raw data. Another librarian  told me that she's working on raising her staff's analysis skills and  said "I have to avoid using the A word." I have experienced the same reluctance to providing analysis in some of the private workshops I've done recently.

I spoke for 50 minutes and had enough questions to speak for twice that long. You can see the slide deck at Batesinfo.com/extras

Preparing for your career or your business

I just read a great post from the SLA Future Ready 365 blog. In From Student to Professional: How I Became Future Read, Karly Szczepkowski talks about how a recent MLS graduate prepared for her career while still in school. Her perspective is equally applicable to anyone starting an info business. Highlights of the post:

* Gain relevant experience. [NB: I appreciate that she didn't say "how can I get experience if everyone wants experienced people?" Instead, she decided that she needed to gain skills and took responsibility for developing them.]

* Join a professional association. For Karly, it's SLA. For new business owners, it's the association their clients belong to.

* Create my personal brand. [NB: whether you're employed, self-employed, or not employed, you have a brand. Karly describes how she took ownership of her profile and found ways to demonstrate her unique value.]

 

"Is this all I get for my money?"

My latest Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month looks at consequences of not managing clients' expectations regarding what you will be delivering.

One of the most challenging parts of running any professional-services business is managing clients' expectations. We are delivering an intangible -- insights, information, analysis -- and we cannot anticipate what we will find when we first talk with a client. If we talk about the articles we will deliver or the charts we will complete, we are inviting our clients to judge us by quantity. If, instead, we talk about the insights we will provide, we frame the discussion around the value we bring. [...]

Who judges what "good" search results are?

I had a great conversation with Chris Sherman at Web Search University about search results, which brought up to me an enormous disconnect between SEO and info pro communities. (Gee, what a surprise!)

He and I were comparing Google results for a particular search technique. Of the first 10 results, the second and sixth hits were spot on. Since it was a somewhat amorphous topic, I expected to have to wade through a lot of stuff to find what I was looking for. Two good hits from the first 10 was pretty good for me. Chris labelled those results as a #fail, since 80% of the results weren't useful.

My response: It's a question of precision vs. recall. Search engine marketers consider results with less than 90% relevance to be a failed search, because the precision wasn't high enough. Info pros, on the other hand, are often more concerned about recall; we want to make sure that we find as many useful resources as possible. For a difficult search, 10% or 20% relevance is just fine.

And this comes back to my ongoing theme that we info pros are far more data-tolerant than most people. Wading through page after page of search results is just fine with us, as long as we find something useful. And we often forget that our clients are far less data-tolerant than we are. One of the biggest challenges of info pros is limiting our results to the depth and breadth that our clients need. We want to keep digging deeper, and to send our clients all the fascinating information that we found, forgetting that this may be doing the client a disservice.

For more on distillation and making information more user-friendly, see my talk on adding value at BatesInfo.com/extras

 

 

Is an MLS still relevant?

I recently asked "Is an MLS Still Relevant?" in my ONLINE column. (Online, v. 34, n. 2 [March-April 2010], p.64) An MLS student recently emailed me some questions about that article. I'm curious as to what other thoughts you might have.

First is the quote from my article. Next is a question. Following that is my answer.

At a recent online conference, the head of a large corporate library told me that, as she reviews resumes for info pro positions, she counts an M.L.S. degree as a point against an applicant…

 This seems counter-intuitive. What was this library head’s reasoning for this stance?

Obviously, I can't speak for this person. I suspect that it was because many people with MLS degrees leave school with little experience working in special libraries, are not familiar with the need to market the library, don’t have much experience in the professional online services, and don’t have their heads around the idea of providing analysis to research.

This isn’t to say that current MLS grads don't have those skills, of course. Simply a statement that, for her, experiencing doing these things were more important than being taught the skills.

 

The better-paying jobs for M.L.S. graduates are those that require initiative, an innovative approach, and practical research and information management skills.

Would you please give me some examples of these better-paying jobs?

Corporate libraries often need info pros who are willing to take the initiative to create internal wikis, or to develop a new marketing strategies, or to develop webinars, or to provide analytical skills on top of research. Part of the skill set required in these jobs is the ability to identify an employer’s most pressing strategic needs are, and to figure out how your skills can address those needs. For example, are special libraries concerned about moving into social media? Then they’re looking for info pros who understand how to build a brand in the Web 2.0 space.

I wrote a newsletter issue on informational interviews, which may give you some ideas on how to learn what special librarians’ needs are.

 

“Unfortunately, many LIS programs are still graduating students who have no meaningful experience in using the professional online services, searching beyond the open web, or providing added value to their research.”

 What are some examples of commonly desired value added services for research?

The ability to work with the library client to learn what the information will be used for, and to then build a deliverable that enables the client to make a decision. Data visualization skills – to turn a statistical table into a more compelling chart or graph, to understand how to make numbers more understandable. Data-mining skills – to understand how to learn information about information. I also recommend running a simple search on the concept of added value in libraries for lots of other perspectives on this topic.

 

The ‘clients’ of the LIS programs' graduates want people who have a practical set of professional skills, a familiarity with new media and new technology, an appreciation for the need to tangibly demonstrate their value to their employer, and the basic skills in using the premium online services.

 What practical set of professional skills are these employers looking for?

In addition to what I described above, initiative to gather, analyze and summarize information; ability to market yourself and your library; familiarity with how to search social media and to use it for branding; skills in creating podcasts, webinars, charts and graphs, blogs, wikis, effective presentations, among other skills.

 

What are the main premium online services that MLS graduates seeking jobs with these employers should be skilled in?

Any two of Dialog, Factiva and LexisNexis. Or one of the three and a deep understanding of one of the library-oriented services such as EBSCOhost. You need -- in at least a couple of different "languages" -- to understand how to conduct effective searches in a minimal amount of time. That means thinking on your feet, understanding how to get the most out of each service, how to produce output that you can then incorporate into a report, and so on. It also means being able to do that kind of dance in a variety of online search systems and services. Ability to search the web is assumed; what employers care about is skill in using resources beyond the web.

 

What other thoughts do you have on what skills an MLS graduate needs?

It's always about the customer

The Virtual Presenter blog had a great Q&A on how to entice people into attending a webinar. The same principle applies whenever we're talking to a potential client. 

People don’t need more noise in their lives, and what they pay attention to are things of self-interest. What are you going to help them get?

We have to talk about WHY we're offering a service, not WHAT the service is.

Does information want to be free?

For your beach reading, don't forget to bring along my latest EContent column, Divas and D&B Reports, in which I opine:

I never did believe that information wanted to be free ... just respected for more than its good looks. Apparently, no one else got the memo.
[...]
E-content, in and of itself, often isn't seen as particularly valuable. We can find the same material elsewhere on the web if we look hard enough, or we can find something else that we perceive as good enough. For information-and access to it-to be priced profitably, the value of the content must be readily apparent.

WWMEBD, or, where's the info profession heading?

In April, I was invited by the SLA student members of the GSLIS program at Simmons College to host a conversation about where our profession is heading and how to position ourselves most effectively. I had a fabulous time, and met some LIS students who are going to be great assets to their employers.

You can listen to my presentation and the Q&A here. And yes, there were actually signs on the hallways pointing the way to WWMEBD. Obviously, it's time to start ordering wristbands...