Presentation Croatian Library Association

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Croatian Library Association, April 27-29, 2006 More than Keeping Pace: Finding Your Competitive Edge Susan Fifer Canby, VP Libraries & Information Services, sfiferca@ngs.org 1145 17th Street N.W., National Geographic Society, Washington, DC 20036

Zdravo srda"cni pozdravi . I am delighted to be here to share with you how some American libraries find their competitive edge to thrive in their organizations. I will rely on my own library for illustrations, but can assure you that my successful American colleagues are using similar strategies. Hopefully you will be able to sort out what might work or be of value in your organizations.

By way of background: I work for an international educational and media organization – the National Geographic Society, which publishes its message in 26 languages, including Croatian. Maybe some of you are part of the 20,000 Croatian subscribers to National Geographic magazine or have seen our television programs. The Geographic’s mission is to share geographic knowledge -- most people think this means helping them to better understand their world. To those ends, since 1890 the National Geographic Society has funded more than 7500 grants for projects, expeditions, and films. In Croatia, we have funded projects on: The First farmers in Dalmatia; 95 million year old marine snakes and lizards; Archaeology of Neothermal Dalmatia.

Librarians face many challenges – which require flexibility, imagination, marketing, technical, and many other skills. Finding our competitive edge is all about “Position and Leadership.” Librarians must go beyond managing to leading. Libraries are like small businesses within our companies, the government, schools and universities. We have to first clarify our position in our company – this takes assessing our strengths, translating them into the services and products that match up with the needs of our customers, then delivering on our promises, and reporting on our impact or return on investment.

Our goal as librarians is to provide the best services to our users to make them efficient, effective and productive. To do this we have to assert leadership and to become a “change agent,” while we continue to dispel simplistic perceptions, e.g. “libraries are all about books;” “most information is free and can be found with Google.”

Let’s begin with positioning. The first step is to assess our assets and skills so we can translate them into products and strategies. As librarians we often not trained to think of our skills and services in terms of revenue, so I will review examples of how my team turned some of our assets and capabilities into products and strategies. • We used our knowledge of the organization and writing skills to create income through entrepreneurial activities. • We used information and filtering skills to provide competitive intelligence. • We used our knowledge of information tools and the needs of user to negotiate information access across the organization. • We took our management skills and applied them managing intellectual rights, contracts, business records, people, metrics, projects. • We used our collaboration and networking skills to enable us to facilitate knowledge sharing.

Customers are always looking for the WIFM – “What’s in it for me?” Just like other businesses, libraries have to tailor our services to the needs of our customers – in our case we have two broad categories – offsite and headquarters staff – within headquarters – we have 1400 business and editorial staff – but a key sub-group within both groups are the 150 managers – because they are the ones who make decisions about resources and services.

We have to link our goals directly to the needs of our customers. Our 2006 plan includes broad strategies for 2006: Provide Excellent Services, Enable Corporate Growth, Integrate Technology, and Foster a Quality Workplace. Under each of those goals we describe various strategies, which managers take ownership of. These goals are connected directly to what our customers and management are asking of us and provide a reality check for us to warn us if we are creating products or services that don’t line up with the needs of our customers.

Because the Library is not a separate entity, our goals must reflect and connect to the culture of our parent organization. We have to continuously ask: --what drives the business? --are we serving the decision makers? --where are the gaps in service we can fill? --how can we connect people to people, people to ideas, and ideas to ideas to move our business forward?

The final steps in the process work together: Deliver what we promise and then evaluate the impact and report it to the organization.

Let’s go through a few revenue examples first: When my boss, the Chief Financial Officer, challenged us a couple years ago to earn revenue so we’d understand how difficult it is, we translated our knowledge of the Society to write a short history of the Geographic you see to the left. It is called “High Adventure” and in two years it has sold more than 40,000 copies and is in its third printing.

Although our publications index is available online, 25,000 people still want to purchase a print index – so we compile them. These efforts have only been a gesture to our CFO. Their revenue doesn’t come close to underwriting the cost of the Library, but it did demonstrate to him that we understood the principle, that it takes revenue to enable the Society to afford a library.

Special libraries are under enormous pressure to go digital, because people think that everything is free on the web. Some American libraries are even being asked to abandon their print collections. We decided to make a case for our collections by leveraging them in a non-traditional way. We work with the division who licenses the Society’s brand and they use our collections to inspire the design elements from our:

 -- postcard and stamp collections
 -- illustrated rare books 
 -- map cartouches and more.

To leverage our heritage, we have built a database called the NG Timeline where we capture research we do about the Society’s history. Once we answer a question, we save the research and sources in this desktop resource so users can find the answer the next time for themselves. This is an example of how we translate our knowledge set into a product.

When we were exploring a partnership with Croatia to publish the National Geographic magazine, our staff wrote the story of our connection to Croatia, which served as a way to begin the business conversation with our partners in Croatia. We have written the story of our partnerships with the U.S. National Park System, the Space Program, and many other agencies. We have compiled more than 1500 original articles that are all cross linked and sourced to tell the story of the Society’s relationships, feats of derring-do, its heroes, impact and more. Staff use the content : -when they need a “ news hook” based on an anniversary or a past event OR to pursue alliances and grants with individuals and organizations

To justify collections, particularly archival ones, libraries need to provide better access. We teach a quarterly seminar on the history of the Geographic for staff, so that new staff will understand how they can utilize the history of the Society and how skilled our archivists are in translating the library’s collections for the products and business deals they create.

Besides earning revenue, saving money is also important. While our boss the CFO tells us he knows we can’t save our way into prosperity, he does think that if we use our resources wisely, then there will be more funds available for the Society’s mission to support research and exploration.

When we needed more staff to accomplish our goals of cataloging and organizing our collections, creating more finding aids, digitizing content, and enhancing metadata so that content could be found more easily, we spent the first couple of years trying to justify more headcount – really to no avail.

Then we created an academic internship program by which library students work in our library for free to get practical experience. This involved parsing out the projects so they would be coherent and a learning experience, but the result is that we have saved nearly $75,000 a year for the past three years (which pleases my boss), gotten our collections in better order, used our own staff wisely, and hopefully been able to influence some of the next generation of librarians.

Now let me show you how we took a customer need for competitive information and translated it into a daily news summary that is read by more than 500 staff at the Geographic, including our President. More than ten years ago, we began filtering the most important news for our staff in their terms – focusing on the legal, nonprofit, economic, international, marketing and branding issues as well as our major media markets – books, television, magazines, etc. As the Sun Microsystems librarian, Cindy Hill observes, “Libraries have the ability to filter out data "noise“ from valuable information and knowledge for the company.” This report has spawned other reports, but remains the single most important report we do.

Because organizations love to read about themselves – to see how they are discussed in the print and broadcast press, by their customers, by the market – what people think of their products, their staff, their influence, we created a daily report called “ NG in the News.” The Library was perfectly positioned to create this report because of our ability to search electronic news. It was a sort of by-product of the daily news filtering we were already doing. We are able to bring objectivity to this reporting – providing both the good and bad news about our organization.

Because our editorial staff is constantly scanning for content ideas to write about, rather than expect each of them do it for themselves, every couple of days we aggregate and point them to news on the web about archaeology, exploration, astronomy, oceanography, the environment, etc. This report is called “Earth Current.” After publishing it internally for a couple years, we realized geography and science teachers would also benefit from this filtered report. Today besides our editorial staff, more than 20,000 teachers read this newsletter. While we are not earning revenue for this product, senior management recognizes that it directly supports our mission to diffuse geographic knowledge.

After a couple years of filtering news, we began to write monthly reports and hold monthly briefings on topics that would benefit both the editorial and business staff. Examples of reports we have compiled include “Identifying Future Events,” “The Changing Face of Advertising,” “Travel Trends,” and “Digital Photography.”

Because the right hand of our organization often doesn’t know what the left is doing – at the time we publish these reports, we also compile what the Society is doing on the same topic. We gather this internal information by phone or email, since it is only tacit knowledge. As Jan Chindlund from McDonalds Corporation says, the idea is to “make the right information and knowledge easily accessible to our knowledge workers so those valued folks can use their time productively.”

As we filtered and analyzed more and more content, we began spotting trends in the marketplace – here is an example: BBC’s trial podcast. We gather these trends and publish a quarterly and yearly report for management. We lead a cross-divisional group that meets every couple of weeks to discuss trends and their implications for the Geographic. These sometimes become business proposals – for instance to develop an enterprise podcast. One of the advantages of spotting trends for your organization is being able to be first to take advantage of them. We produce a weekly podcast called “Listen Up,” which captures the highlights of our Business Intelligence Report, Mission Report, NGS in the News, and also includes a “Historical Moment” taken from our NG Timeline – all done with Library staff scripting, voices, and even original music.

As more and more content is born digital and with the exponential growth of e-mail, libraries are the logical ones to organize and provide discovery tools for our organizations. We manage information like contracts, business records, documentation of procedures and processes, reports, etc. Because much of this content is born digital now, we have to build the infrastructure, set the rules, and create the naming conventions for a shared electronic filing center.

We also manage the electronic sources we purchase for the organization. We negotiate the best prices because we negotiate for the entire enterprise, rather than an individual division. Sometimes divisions agree to share costs -- This co-ownership of information products allows the library to manage the life cycle and security for the product, but has limited financial implications for the Library’s budget. This is useful when adding new expensive resources, because it simplifies the justification if others are willing to pay directly for it. Of course it is important to follow up with appropriate training to ensure the tools are used efficiently.

The Library needs to keep asking our customers the question: What information do you get now and what you need to get that you aren’t getting?

Libraries can also create discovery tools for both internal and external information – here is a database we created to point staff to key resources in the deep web – where Google is unlikely to take them – yet where some of the best information is. So here a user would click through “Places, Travel and Exploration,” choose “Europe,” then be able to search specifically for directories, guides, maps, or blogs.

We are usually first to experiment with collaborative tools like wikis. We put together a cross divisional team of 20 women interested in gathering information about women explorers to see if we might be able to influence the organization to publish more about these women.

As we spot new technologies that might help our staff, we test them out. For instance – real simple syndication or RSS feeds are a good way for editorial staff to stay up on breaking news from print, web, and broadcast because with a free reader, the focused news will feed into their email. We introduce new tools like these during 20-minute coffee or cookie breaks, which are short learning opportunities we provide staff in the mornings or afternoons. We build a web page like this that lists news feeds by subjects of interest to them as well instructions on how to download an RSS reader.

The Library is helping the organization present its content geo-spatially. As content is born digital, the latitude and longitude needs to be assigned to the photo, the film, or the text as part of the process, so the content can be presented from a spatial perspective as you see on this map – each yellow box indicates more National Geographic information. We want people who cruise maps to find rich media that we publish to help them better understand their world. Our part of this project is to develop a master taxonomy or gazetteer, to determine how to harmonize our legacy place names, and to build a strategy to capture this information when the asset is created. Improving the discovery process is obviously a skill librarians share – and our skills are needed to solve increasingly more sophisticated access issues.

And of course, teaching and learning are interwoven in everything we do…we understand that lifelong learning is a prerequisite for professional success. Because finances are scarce for external training, we worked with various divisions to develop an internal university to help share knowledge with each other. After three years we have recruited 37 staff faculty who teach more than 250 sessions annually to 540 individual staffers (or a third of the organization). We recruited our lawyers to teach negotiation skills since that is their skill set; our proofreaders to teach their copyediting skills; senior managers teach how to run a good meeting, time management, presentation skills, project management; cartographers teach geography based on volatile boundaries, based on geography; Human resources teaches interview skills, team building and leadership; and of course librarians teach web skills, finding experts, organizing electronic content, finding information about plants and animals.

Delivering products and services is important – but equally import is measuring and reporting on impact. These are the ways we measure impact: • what we’ve earned, what we’ve saved • how we stimulated innovation • how we improved decision-making • if we’ve increased productivity and facilitated knowledge sharing.

We take the time to evaluate our services and products so we improve them and extend what is working best. We quantitatively measure impact with surveys, follow up on training, and track our onsite and web usage. Where we can, we calculate the comparable value of our business intelligence reports or trends analysis reports with outside competitors. We measure our results against our goals and those of our customers.

We also measure outcomes qualitatively by collecting anecdotes and accolades when they are sent our way: for instance from one of our magazine editors this year:

Dear Susan: Your scan on the world is invaluable. Critical actually. We are besieged with information. The filter you provide makes a huge difference for me. Not to mention that I trust your folks to be sniffing out the next trail worth pursuing, and giving us some valuable signposts along the way. Many thanks to you for your leadership.

We summarize impact in an annual report. But reporting annually isn’t enough. I schedule a weekly meeting with my boss; have my managers do a quarterly presentation so he understands what we do is a team effort. I write weekly one-page reports that address his goals and monthly bullets that are part of the report that goes to the Society’s president. We must be good at reports, because this year my boss asked me to write his annual report to the President. At least annually we develop a presentation to take to each division – where we talk about new services, materials, projects, document management, or online sources to help them. We use this time with our customers to assess how our content and services are being used and set up follow-up training.

While establishing position, leadership is the other key goal. We all start with a hierarchical structure. The circle below describes projects that are organized across the library – such as training, running an internship program, creating a podcast. These jobs can belong to anyone who has the passion for them – here is where my staff learns project management skills. With this experience, I encourage them to contribute to cross divisional teams outside the library -- like running our internal university or managing the enterprise intranet.

Participation is not dependent on one’s place in the hierarchy, but on one’s skills, interests and relationships. So anyone, whether a manager or not, is encouraged to lead or participate in these teams. Librarians need to be embedded in the teams that do the work of the organization – and to assert leadership, to take responsibility for specific roles in collaborative efforts, and to learn how they can influence our organizations.

Marketing our services is not about brochures – it is being integrated into the life our of our organizations.

Some final tips on strategies to develop position and leadership. • Explore the “white space” on an organization chart -- that space between and around jobs – where no one actually has assigned responsibility, where the library can support information management, organization and knowledge sharing. Libraries are positioned to see the “white space” because of the trends work we can do, and because we are used to working across the organization – not hierarchically within one unit. This gives us a broad perspective and potentially the network to accomplish cross-divisional work. • We can build alliances with people and divisions who might be willing to share expenses or work on projects where there is a joint passion – such as developing the Women Explorer’s wiki. • With each product we look for the extensions and ways to parse the content out from different perspectives – such as doing a “Business Intelligence Report,” then creating “NG in the News,” our science report “Earth Current,” analyzing the results in executive briefings, spotting and reporting on trends – then summarizing the highlights in a podcast. • We can custom focus the content to fit the needs of our customers – so business news is directed at the business staff; science news for editorial staff, legal and nonprofit news for lawyers. Again quoting Jan Chindlund, “ We are really in charge of the ecology of information and it is our job to get the right information to the right people.” • Capitalize where there are redundancies – realizing that one of us can search the key websites and post the important science news; this makes so much more sense than to have every writer, photographer, filmmaker trying to do it for themselves. • Everything in life and business is a balance. It is important to watch for the ‘danger zones’ – as my staff frequently reminds me, we only have so many staff; we have a core mission; and we have annual goals to achieve. My boss now understands how talented librarians are – that we have organizational, networking, teaching, technical, writing, research skills – we can create books, we can run projects, we can build databases, we can persuade others – all of this confidence can be seductive and lead to ‘mission drift’, which may preclude our doing what only we can do.

So while there is lots of competition for our organizations and for libraries, positioning the library will help you find your competitive edge – the challenge isn’t about saving libraries – it is about saving our organizations. If we do, they will save us right back. We have a unique opportunity to add value to our organizations with leadership, because of the combination of our filtering, organizational, networking, technical, training, and communication skills. At the same time we have to be ever alert to evolve and change our destiny within our respective organizations – to recognize our company champions and the organizational demands and shift accordingly... at the right time.

We can’t underestimate our ability to lead change – we can’t wait to be told or to be called upon – we need to see where you can make a difference and take action. Finally perseverance pays off – People makes things happen through their imagination, willpower and perseverance… press forward to position the library and exert leadership, and you will find your competitive edge. Hvala for your attention and best to each of you.

Bibliography • Bellman, Geoffrey M. Getting Things Done When you are not in Charge. BK. www.bkconnection.com • Burlingame, Dwight R., ed. Library Fundraising, Chicago, ALA, 1995. • Hall, Margarete Rooney. “Fundraising and Public Relations” International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 7, no 4 (Nov 2002), p 368-381. • IML “The Future of Librarians in the Workforce.” 12/15/2005 http://imlsworkforce.org/ • Kelley, Tom. The Ten Faces of Innovation. Doubleday, 2005. • OCLC. Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: a report to the OCLC Membership, 2005. • SLA Annual Salary Survey and Workplace Study 2005, Alexandria, Va.: Special Libraries Association (SLA), 2005. • Stuhlman “Think like a Business, Act Like a Library” SLA, Information Outlook 7, no 9 (9/2003).