My last post defined terms related to customer engagement and focused on the personal relationship-building component of our mandate with our target colleagues.

A major element of building relationships is knowing your colleagues well. No one’s memory is perfect. You can’t remember everything, and you may be working in teams (although this is useful for solos too). For sustainability and teamwork, you need to build a database that pulls together your knowledge of your clients and colleagues.

This series of blog posts on client engagement is inspired by a reader comment. Thanks!

“I appreciate Stephen Abram's tips. Could you talk more of 'engagement'? How can special librarians 'engage' employees? THANK YOU!”

This reader comment has inspired me to think more deeply about how special librarians and information professionals need to behave differently on the customer engagement front. Yes, special librarians are different!

In his “Knoco Story,” Dealing with the Important Urgent Knowledge First, KM expert Nick Milton discusses the difference between important and urgent information and knowledge. Understanding this difference is key for special librarians and other knowledge professionals as they manage workflow and resources to best support their end users and deliver the most impact.

As information professionals we are often asked to give our advice and our professional opinion on a number of issues and projects. Sometimes it is difficult to offer guidance confidently, yet it is our obligation to do so. In this post I’ll offer my thoughts on why and how to begin.

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.)

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.

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!

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?

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.

Most librarians (and indeed, most professionals) think of networking as a personal, face-to-face activity. Most also look forward to meeting their fellow librarians and to making new friends, all while learning together about new ideas and trends in the library field. The challenge for solo librarians is that they often cannot leave their libraries to attend live conferences and meetings.

Solo librarians need powerful time management tools, since they are running their libraries without paraprofessional staff to assist. I’ve learned that many solo librarians (as well as other professionals) use their smartphones to manage and organize their time. Technology to the rescue!

It used to be considered inappropriate for library staff to monitor the usage patterns of their end users, but for today’s special libraries, tracking and acting upon the insights gained is essential for delivering the best in content, tools and services. Learn how to make a successful case for end user tracking.

You’ve got an imagination. You’re creative. Librarians often say they’re not—so typically modest—but generally acknowledge that the magic in getting answers and insights from information is a creative act. Librarians are experts in that. If you’re too self-effacing to present yourself as an expert, can you simply admit to your expertise?

In this first post (of many) for Lucidea’s Think Clearly Blog, I’ll put forward two frameworks for thinking about how to successfully present creative ideas for innovation and change within your organization.