Posts tagged under: Professional Development

Lessons on building community while building the new OCLC Community Center

Next blog banner for post on OCLC community center update. Six icons representing features of the community center are shown.

If you participate in the OCLC Community Center, you’ll know it’s recently had a major upgrade. We’re happy with the results and excited about the possibilities ahead. But getting to this point wasn’t easy. It’s been a long road. And like many large-scale tech projects, the takeaways go well beyond the new software.

Every twist and turn offered lessons about how to better create valuable content and meaningful connections with our users. The truth is, we learned a lot more than ever expected about building community. And we’re hoping our experience can provide insights that inspire and inform your work to connect and engage with the communities you serve.

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Benefits of prioritizing proactivity

banner for OCLC Next blog post on prioritizing proactivity, duotone images of check-lists

The difference between being proactive and reactive has been swirling for me recently. It can feel empowering to be able to get ahead of something instead of having to respond in the moment. By prioritizing proactive measures—including training—we can create a more stable and sustainable future for our organizations and the communities we serve. And hopefully, minimize stress for ourselves, our staff, and our stakeholders.

Helping library workers do just that was part of the motivation for our recent update to the REALM project, an effort funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and led by OCLC.

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WebJunction, an evolution in library staff learning

WebJunction 20 Year Anniversary graphic

WebJunction is, first and foremost, the learning place for libraries. But what makes it special is our approach: We’re committed to listening, collaborating, and doing our own learning, too. It shows in how we’ve evolved over the past 20 years with projects—big and small—that truly reflect the library landscape and provide new ways of learning for all levels of staff.

What started in 2003 as a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that focused on helping library staff be more effective in offering public access computing has developed to include content reflecting all aspects of library learning needs. The WebJunction team is a vibrant group within OCLC Research, and our 20-year journey has produced significant contributions with and for the library community. We make learning practical and flexible, allowing individuals to modify and customize their experience to meet local needs. This has resulted in successful learning models that are both inclusive and actionable.

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DEI: A journey, not a destination

Last month, we received a very special honor. In a worldwide survey of technology organizations, Computerworld ranked OCLC first among midsized IT enterprises worldwide for demonstrating excellence in advancing workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

It’s gratifying to see our years of work in DEI acknowledged. Recognition like this is a milestone, a marker—and an opportunity to consider the questions that need to be answered as we continue our journey toward a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace.

It’s a journey because we cannot claim we have arrived. Persistent reflection and action are required to keep moving forward. We can share what has been achieved so far. What more needs to be done? What can we learn from each other?

In 2020, I shared a blog post calling all of us to action. On this day when we honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I’d like to provide an update on where we’ve been and what we’ve learned.

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Purposeful change management

Any kind of change can be challenging. Humans are naturally hesitant to change for very good reason. Unexpected change? Well, that can be traumatic. And if the crisis management we’ve all experienced over the past two years has taught us anything, it’s that change management can no longer be an afterthought. And yes, change and crisis management are different. Too often our approach is to wait for the effort to be in crisis before taking action.

As we shake off the stress of constant reactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, let’s take control with purposeful change. There’s no better time to reflect and learn from experiences, good and bad, and help your organization not only move out of crisis mode, but also be better for it.

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Drive social media success that connects on a personal level

How can you engage purposefully on social media with the different communities your library serves while also addressing larger, system-wide goals and policies? The concept of “social care” offers a clue. Social care differs from traditional customer care in that the purpose isn’t to address one issue, answer one question, or solve one problem. It’s also different than public relations in that it’s not about “one size fits all” for every audience. For social care, the goal is to nurture a more inclusive, longer-term dialogue.

At the Pikes Peak Library District, we’re using these principles to create local and program-specific social media personalities. All of our distinct voices closely align with the unique groups we serve and fall thoughtfully under a system-wide set of values.

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Connecting your library’s actions to global challenges: How do you stand up?

Working alongside library leaders from around the world, I’ve realized there is an interesting paradox in terms of organizational goals. While libraries around the world serve unique and diverse communities, at the core of their work, they share very similar visions and principles. Libraries similarly, are also able to adjust strategy and tactics very specifically to their users’ needs while keeping an eye on global interests. Finding ways to link these two levels—global interests and local conditions—can be very rewarding—and sometimes complicated.

For the past year, I have worked with OCLC Global Council and OCLC Research to explore such a link. In the fall of 2019, we began focusing on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to determine how libraries can use the goals as a framework to partner, both with each other and outside organizations, to better address global sustainability efforts.

Then COVID-19 struck. And libraries worldwide had an entirely new set of shared challenges to address locally.

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Lessons learned from the OCLC Community Center during the pandemic

When I wrote about the OCLC Community Center’s fifth anniversary last year, I thought we were all getting a handle on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We knew things weren’t over yet, but we also weren’t expecting to spend the next 12 months working from home, socially distancing, wearing masks in public, missing lunches and meetings and conferences, and so much more. While nothing replaces those in-person interactions, I’ve been amazed at how virtual engagement and connections have grown and deepened. As a result, we’ve all learned many valuable lessons about creating online community that will have lasting impact.

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Women in technology: We are all stakeholders

Since its inception in 2017, OCLC’s DevConnect series has been focused on library technology. Over the years, we’ve shared presentations that focus on the things that drive library innovation—specific APIs, projects, and code. However, the team that produces the DevConnect series is co-ed, and this year we wanted to focus on the people who move the field forward.

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Four ways to avoid the “transition trap” in your strategic planning

Even well-developed, regularly updated strategic plans are subject to short-term crises and changes in the environment. For the last 18 months, we’ve seen that take place as the world and libraries reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic. But beyond keeping day-to-day activities going, library leaders have also been considering how to manage the pandemic’s effects on strategic, long-range issues. Recent tactical decisions need to be balanced against longer-term strategic aims.

It’s important, as we move further into a post-pandemic planning mode, not to confuse tactical, transitional plans with long-term, transformational strategy.

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