Quantum² Highlights
A newsletter of the Dialog leadership development program for information professionals

Dear Quantum² Member...
Conference time is upon us once more. With many of us attending 2006 SLA Conference, June 11 -14, in Baltimore, and the AALL Conference, July 8-12, in St. Louis, we hope you are all prepared for an invigorating time of leadership development and professional learning. Our newsletter this month is designed to help you put your knowledge sharing and networking skills into context.

Quantum² at Professional Conferences

Thomson Scientific and Dialog are sponsoring a host of division courses and events at SLA. For a complete list of sponsored events, please stop by the Thomson Scientific/Dialog booth (Booth #2405) to meet us and say hello.

On Monday, July 10, at AALL, Betty Jo Hibberd will be discussing our Quantum² session Measuring Impact: Cost Justification of Information Services in a panel presentation.

Spotlight on Quantum² InfoStar
Amanda Franken

Like most innovators, Amanda Franken is never satisfied with status quo; she is always searching for ways to make things work better and faster. As the senior manager of the Library and Information Centre for PricewaterhouseCoopers in South Africa, Amanda makes continuous improvement and systems' assessment part of her daily routine and aims to keep quality standards very high.

To learn more about Amanda’s quest for continuous improvement, read her profile at http://scientific.thomson.com/quantum/infostars/gallery/.

Quantum² Topic of the Month
Sharing Your Knowledge

A key element in attending the SLA Annual Conference is the desire to learn professionally from colleagues and to build up your network of contacts, so that you can share your latest knowledge with colleagues upon returning to your workplace. Information professionals are in an ideal position to take a constructive role in helping the organization move forward in a knowledge-sharing environment, in spite of the natural resistance of “giving up” knowledge commonly associated with this process. I

Information professionals, by the nature of their work, already share “personal” knowledge. They commonly:

• Make connection points within the organization
• Volunteer and seek out opportunities to contribute
• Take action to make things better
• Become known as sources of organizational knowledge

Core to the purpose of SLA conference activities is the mission to assist information professionals to envision a leadership role. By harnessing the attributes above in parallel with attained knowledge from the conference and through new contacts initiated, you can facilitate the collaboration that is necessary to make your organization a knowledge sharing one. A knowledge-sharing plan that incorporates some of the activities listed below becomes a tangible way of demonstrating your sharing of this personal knowledge.

• Communities of practice – by modeling the example of SLA CoPs in capturing chapter and division documentation for projects or initiatives, information professionals can help their organizations benefit from colleagues’ expertise. In the organizational setting, these can be formed by individuals or teams to support a common purpose or goal.
• Leveraging in/Leveraging out – each time a new project or initiative begins within your organization, check for others in your organization, or use knowledge gained from networking with SLA colleagues in other companies (or from discussion lists), who have relevant experience.
• Research and Re-use – encourage your colleagues to archive and share templates, documents and to standardize formats for re-use. This action saves time through minimizing unnecessary duplication, and others will be motivated by experiencing increased productivity.
• Best Practices & Benchmarking – SLA annual conference and other professional conferences are opportunities for cross-functional interaction and relationship building that will result in future examples of less structured knowledge sharing.

Knowledge sharing and other skills and attributes form the core of many Quantum² workshops and Web resources. For more tips on leveraging your personal knowledge, visit the Quantum² Web pages at http://scientific.thomson.com/quantum.