Well, we’re finally at part three of this series. Here are my final ten tips and a bonus one. (Check out part one and part two here, in case you missed them.)

The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. As mentioned in my previous post on this topic, if you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t, you must keep trying until you do. To get their sponsorship and support, tell stories, make the business case, and sell the benefits. Please read on to learn about making the business case, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting Knowledge Management.

I wrote my first 12 tips for innovation and product development success at your library based on my own experiences (and as a sort of ode to my 39th anniversary of my MLS graduation). This is a three part series and the next 11 tips are right here. Watch for the final batch in my next post.

The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. If you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t, you need to keep trying until you do. To get their sponsorship and support, tell stories, make the business case, and sell the benefits. Please read on to learn about effective storytelling, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program.

There’s nothing like the 39th anniversary of your library school graduation to cause you to reflect. I have many memories of a young, newly minted, newly married and very green librarian heading out into the big world. Ironically, my first task in those pre-Amazon days was to order a book—and I didn’t know how and was a solo librarian. Learning started fast in professional practice. What have I learned in the last 39 years, and is any of it useful?

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” The origin of this quote is unclear, but it is often cited in the education sector during discussions about how best to motivate students and improve teaching skills. The concept is equally relevant to customer service, and therefore applies to librarians and other information professionals.

Librarians are more relevant than ever. We have no good reason to be on the defense and every reason to take the offensive. Conversation in our field is fraught with too much navel gazing and not enough looking at external evidence that many things are going well. We share too many stories about the bad stuff and too rarely share the successes. Yet we are an adaptive profession. Positive change is our tradition; let’s talk about that!

In a recent article, Knowledge Management in the Age of Social Media, author Robin Singh suggests that social media presents serious challenges to the traditional "knowledge base," and asks whether it can transform knowledge management. Please read on for some additional thoughts on social knowledge exchange as a supplement to classic KM.

One of the most popular buzzwords in library-land at the moment is ‘curation’. It’s used to describe anything from old-fashioned collection development to human filtering activities on social media like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and blogs. The word ‘curator’ gets used too liberally to describe the stuff people do on the web and, in my humble option, dilutes and pollutes the professional things that librarians do.

The biggest mistake people make when selecting a KM system is to choose a platform instead of an application. The business case is dazzlingly simple—yet many organizations overlook it.

Are librarians actually experts? If so, what are we expert at? What is our expertise?

There are plenty of articles and studies on information literacy in our professional literature. However, these almost always address the issue of information literacy in public, K-12 and academic libraries, and focus on end users. But what about workplace literacy?

A meme in the Millennial generation is that they hate to be called Millennials. Same goes for hipsters, punks, etc. So, forgive the shorthand in this post to describe the cohort of new professionals in our field. They offer as much diversity as there always has been, and no generalization can make up for that. That said, there are some themes emerging as newer professionals comprise an ever-increasing share of our field.

In an earlier post, I described a problem in our profession that is exacerbated by the double hump (Bactrian camel) in our population curve. How can you bridge the gap?

Open source software (OSS) is the technology world’s response to consumers who are price sensitive, but as with many things, it’s important to do your homework before making a commitment. Read on for some thought provoking suggestions on how to evaluate the best ILS or KM software for your organization. Maybe it’s open source, maybe it isn’t.

I’ve spent a lot of time with new graduates in our profession—those who have started on the path to great librarianship but struggle with finding their footing in the world of library teams—and I’ve noticed some themes. Please read on to find out what librarians have in common with camels.

I am often asked “What do I tell IT when they want to replace an existing Lucidea solution with one they promise to build in SharePoint?” Well, there are many advantages with our Lucidea solutions, but here I’d like to share one simple but very powerful differentiator: date handling and date searching. Once you’ve read this, you’ll have a thought-provoking response for IT!

The Masonic Temple in Philadelphia has been called one of the great wonders of the Masonic world. Located within The Temple is the Masonic Library and Museum of Pennsylvania, which houses thousands of texts and artifacts relating to the history of the Fraternity in the Commonwealth and the founding of the United States of America. The Library staff leverage SydneyEnterprise to help them advance knowledge and understanding of Freemasonry and its place in history.