2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
eliminate the need for post-meeting review; according to Wainhouse’s research for
Citrix.
(http://f8consulting.com/documents/Web%20Conferencing%20for%20Teams.pdf)
Harvard Management Update lists five tips for better virtual meetings: 1) be very
interactive, 2)use technology to enhance collaboration, 3) reserve meetings for
two-way communication, 4) level the playing field by requiring all participants to be
either all alone or all together with others and to alternate time zone choice if
different ones are involved; and 5) establish a no e-mail or instant messaging
policy during the meetings. This is just business courtesy.
(http://www.workshifting.com/downloads/downloads/5TipsforEffectiveVirtualMeetin
gs_HBR.pdf)
A note about communication collaboration across generations in the workplace.
Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, value job status and social standing.
Gen X, born between 1965 and 1979, change employment and careers frequently.
Gen Y, born between 1980 and 1995, also known as the Net Generation, are
technology smart confident, sociable, with strong morals and expect flexibility in
the workplace with more frequent job changes. Gen Z born after 1995, also known
as Digital Natives, use social media as primary communication, belonging to large
communities online without necessarily knowing those within them personally.
So, those are the challenges to collaborating through communication.
5) A fifth type of collaboration in libraries is with other fields or specific areas of
interest. For example, journalism is a field that is changing as dramatically as
libraries are.
A conference was held in April, 2011, in Cambridge called “Beyond Books: News,
Literacy, Democracy and America’s Libraries – Assessing the Common Mission of
Journalists and Librarians.” Beyond Books focused on librarians and journalists
being committed to communities where people participate in self-governance. “Our
libraries and our free press share a common mission of civic engagement and
information transparency.” This is based on the idea of Thomas
Jefferson,”Democracy demands an educated and informed electorate.”
Libraries definitely play a role in an informed electorate. In one article, “Tulsa City-
County e-Library: The Library Can Become a Hub of Knowledge for the City and
County of Tulsa”, I suggest that the public library can be the hub of knowledge
management for a whole community. In a second article, “Branch Libraries as
Social Network for Tulsa”, I suggest that branch libraries can provide a social
network for a community by facilitating engagement of neighborhoods united at
their branch libraries and connected on the web through social media. Coordinating
this with the local newspaper created a coordinated collaboration for an informed
electorate. This collaboration can strengthen both fields of librarianship and
journalism.
In another field, Liz Bishoff in Library Journal said, “If librarians want to lead in
creating the digital future, they need to learn how to work with their colleagues in
museums and archives.”