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Archive for the ‘Outreach’ Category

Catching up

This will be the last post here before the fall semester begins — officially begins, at least. On July 31, I had 20 incoming students from our new online PhD Business Administration program in the library for a 2-hour workshop. So the semester has really already begun for me. I had a lesson plan based on active learning (student teams presenting the pros and cons of scholarly research tools like Scopus, Google Scholar, Business Source Premier, etc.) that I use for classes with year-3 PhD students writing a prospectus, but this new cohort was so talkative and eager to ask questions that we ended up covering the planned learning outcomes through discussion and conversation instead. (We did do some computer work together.)

I hope you read Elizabeth Price’s guest post on her adventures leading business students in a semester-abroad experience in Antwerp. When I first read Elizabeth’s draft, I laughed out loud twice. She’s a good writer and shared some interesting lessons learned from her very embedded experience.

This fall I hope to make time for a couple of posts on general liaison issues. At the Charleston Conference in November, Min Tong (U. Central Florida), Cynthia Cronin-Kardon (Penn), and I will be leading a “lively discussion” (one of the formats there) on “Leading from below: Influencing vendors and collection budget decisions as a subject liaison”. I’ll try to post a summary of that discussion and other Charleston learnings.

Also, there have been some changes in our liaison organization, a once frequent topic here at this blog (example post). I can’t write that I’m particularly happy with what has happened in the last few years, but we might try some new approaches this school year. So given the past detailed coverage of our reorganization here, I should probably write an update on that this fall.

But let’s focus on business librarianship one last time before classes resume…

Today’s topic

Fred the Bear welcomes you to Belk Library

Fred the Bear welcomes you to Belk Library

Last Friday, BLINC met in Belk Library, Appalachian State University in Boone for its summer workshop. Leslie Farison, the ASU Business Librarian, was our host. A dozen friends assembled for the workshop, fewer than usual, but not an unexpected number given the location on the edge of the state and the season. Two librarians were first-time attendees and we gave them a warm welcome. Some folks came up with their families for a short mountain vacation; one of us spent Friday night camping on the Blue Ridge. The weather was lovely, ten degrees cooler than down in the Carolina Piedmont.

Our agenda consisted of recently requested topics that didn’t fit cleanly within our recent themed workshops. So sort of a grab bag or a short attention span agenda:

  1. Introductions and updates: what’s new with you and/or your library?
  2. Teaching business databases in social science classes
  3. Collection development: How are you selecting business books for the circulating collection? What business reference books are still useful? Other collections issues?
  4. Advanced SimplyAnalytics

We began the workshop in a top-floor conference room with a pretty view of campus and a few mountains. Leslie arranged food and coffee. In the introductions and updates, many BLINC friends talked about new and ongoing economic and community engagement projects. Those projects are always interesting to hear about and often inspirational too.

Teaching business databases in social science classes

Dan Maynard of Campbell University led this discussion and provided some examples from his campus. He focused on two NC LIVE (state-wide access) databases, ReferenceUSA and SimplyAnalytics, that provide geographical data.

Dan Maynard leading the discussion

Dan Maynard leading the discussion

Dan looks for classes that focus on “small places” such as rural and micropolitan areas, custom-defined geographies, or identification of specific populations and establishments. Recent examples at Campbell include identification of local food systems and food deserts, public health education work with locally owned restaurants, researching a town of 646 people, and analyzing a specific social enterprise zone in eastern North Carolina. Dan displayed course descriptions that focus on communities, social change, and engagement – those classes could be targets for outreach too (time permitting, he added).

Other applications for these databases from our discussion:

  • In a community college, an upper-level English class writes social science papers on a social issue of interest, and local data must be included;
  • Several campuses have business writing classes within the English department;
  • From a public library angle: a nonprofit focuses on local social, educational, and economic development and needed help understanding the nature of downtown neighborhoods;
  • Helping an artist become an arts entrepreneur (even she didn’t use that language).  In the example, the BLINC librarian helped an artist use SimplyAnalytics to define her market (“interest in art shows” variable) and then that data “flipped a switch in her brain” regarding how so-called “business” databases also apply to her situation.

Lunch

BLINC friends at the F.A.R.M Café

BLINC friends at the F.A.R.M Café

We walked over to Boone’s little combination college town/mountain gateway downtown street with hardly a chain restaurant to be seen [ok, there was a Jimmy John’s and a Ben & Jerry’s]. Most of us dined at the F.A.R.M Café, a nonprofit community kitchen serving healthy food where everyone is welcome (“Food Regardless of Means”). The restaurant is in an drug store space (think soda shop in the back). Social entrepreneurship! A local church started it up. It was busy for this Friday lunch; we arrived right before the noon rush.

Collection Development

After lunch, we reassembled in a computer classroom on the ground floor, near Fred the Bear (see picture above). Morgan Ritchie-Baum of the Greensboro Public Library led a discussion of collection development. BLINC talks about data and databases all the time, but it’s probably been too long since we discussed other aspects of collections such as managing print book collections.

Morgan Ritchie-Baum leading the discussion

Morgan Ritchie-Baum leading the discussion

Morgan began by telling us this was her first weeding project in her career. Her library’s business collection hadn’t been weeded 10 years and needed attention. (Greensboro Public’s emphasis has been on ebooks.) Morgan used a CREW Method 5/3/MUSTIE weeding policy (“Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding”; MUSTIE explanation – these were all new to me).

Morgan’s discussion questions:

  • How are you selecting business books for your circulating question?
  • Print or digital? What are your patrons asking for?
  • How are you selecting and deselecting titles for your business reference collection?
  • What business reference books are still useful?
  • Are print business reference books still useful?
  • How are you tracking usage of your business reference collection?
  • Is repurposed space more important than space for print reference collections?
  • How big a part of your job is collection development?

Most of us reported little to no usage of print business reference books. The ratio books, Gale Business Plan Handbooks, the NC Manufacturers Directory, and the S&P Industry Surveys were still used sometimes. (We then discussed the electronic versions of those titles.)

For circulating business books, there was still significant interest from patrons for print copies. Someone mentioned Jennifer Boettcher’s zombie list project.

Morgan shared lists of resources for collection development:

  • Library newsletters (NYPL, Grand Rapids, Free Library of Phily)
  • BRASS outstanding titles
  • Reference guides from BRASS and the Library of Congress [BLINC librarians in the room have worked on both sets]
  • Lists of core collections from the U. of Florida
  • Plus the more general publications like CHOICE, Charleston Advisor, Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship, and the book review magazines

SimplyAnalytics

Our final workshop topic was advanced applications of this database and also how to make decisions from the data. I led the discussion with some preparation help from SimplyAnalytics’ Juan Vasquez. Steven Swartz contributed by increasing the number of concurrent users at ASU that day, and temporarily giving the campus access to the Simmons Local dataset, which isn’t in the NC LIVE dataset package but is used by some of us in the state. (MRI is in the NC LIVE deal.) So maybe a lesson here is that vendor reps are often happy to help with peer-training when you ask.

We voted from a menu of topics and decided to focus on:

  • Manipulating the legend;
  • Nature of psychographic data;
  • When to use tracts and block groups versus other types of geographies with variable populations (zips, counties, etc.);
  • How to determine local market size or potential;
  • Filters (we spend a lot of time building good filters and understanding their visualizations in maps and tables).

Final round of community building

Lost Province Brewing Co. of Boone

Lost Province Brewing Co. of Boone

After officially ending the workshop at 3pm, most of us had time to visit a downtown brewery for some more socializing. That was fun. There was also some discussion there and at lunch about for-credit classes some of us are teaching, and about the Entrepreneurship & Libraries Conference. Sara Thynne and I will be rotating off of BLINC leadership and will soon be focusing on co-chairing that conference along with Morgan.

So ended the BLINC summer workshop and now the fall semester is welcome to arrive.

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Wrapping up the semester

Exams at UNC Greensboro end today (Thursday) but my semester wrapped up Tuesday afternoon with the final presentations in MKT 426: International Marketing, the Export Odyssey class. The event took three hours and included three visitors: our SBTDC partner Owen George and two of the company representatives. I hosted the reps while Professor Bahadir was busy up-front grading and managing the team transitions. Half of the students were graduating, and for many this presentation was the final work of their UNCG career.

Unlike last semester, there were no presentation flops this time – all the teams did at least a good job presenting their research and recommending a detailed export market strategy based on that analysis. A couple of teams struggled to articulate their recommendation for the nature of the channel of distribution (i.e. “place” in the 4 P’s such as “indirect sales to a wholesaler” or “direct sales to major hotel chains”) based on their industry and customer identification research. But we asked them to discuss it more and eventually they got it right. This was an example of trying to make decisions based on research, perhaps the main goal of business research instruction. (This comes up later in this post.)

One student team’s company was AEG International, which exports the Firefly product: a solar-powered battery to run lights and power mobile phones. Firefly was developed in West Africa to support rural communities with no electricity. (Note the pictures on that page.) The students proposed having an NGO that serves rural areas in Senegal to distribute the product to its potential users. Professor Bahadir and I hope to have teams work with AEG on their additional products in the future, maybe their water purification product.

While walking back to the library after the final presentation, I bumped into a student who recognized me. His name is Vincent, finance major about to graduate. He reported he had three exams to go and looked tired already but stopped to thank me for the research workshop I led in his FIN 442: Investments class last fall. He said his team didn’t know what they were doing with their research project on Tesla until my workshop, and they ended up with a decent grade on that project because of me. I don’t do that much for the finance program, so this comment warmed my heart. Vincent has a summer job in Research Triangle Park (where BLINC met last time) and hopes to land a full time job in RTP after that. I wished him well.

On return to the library, our LIS intern Ashlea was working the Information Desk. She told me this was her last desk shift as she too was graduating. We exchanged a hug and I asked her to stay in touch as she begins her professional career as a librarian. And on these happy notes my school year ended.

Today’s topic

Old Salem scene

Old Salem scene

A few academic librarians in BLINC (Business Librarianship in North Carolina) have a tradition of gathering at the end of the spring semester for a 3-hour discussion of trends too narrow in scope for a general quarterly BLINC workshop. Mary Abernathy, our BLINC member from Salem College, hosted this event on Wednesday. Salem is the oldest, continually operated educational institution for women in the United States. The Moravians who settled Salem (nucleus for what became Winston-Salem) founded this institution before the American Revolution as a girls’ school. There is also a high school for women next to the college. (Old Salem is a neighbor; my pictures here are actually Old Salem pictures although the college is very pretty too.)

This year six friends were able to meet. Four of them were new members of BLINC and early-career business librarians, bringing energy and fresh ideas to our discussions. Before drafting our agenda, we asked Angel Truesdale from UNC Charlotte for an update on how she and her colleagues were doing after the shooting there last week. She reported that emotions remained high but that they were moving forward. Angel was not on campus the day of the shooting but was helping staff the library the next day.

We agreed to this discussion agenda:

  1. Measuring faculty research impact
  2. Programming for business students in the library
  3.  Instruction:
    • Classroom engagement and workshop design
    • Use of instructional tech
    • Assessment of business research instruction
  4. Summer projects: what do you focus on?

Any confusion in this summary of our discussions is my fault.

Measuring faculty research impact

Betty Garrison of Elon University introduced this topic. She and her colleagues are doing a lot of work in this area. Betty helped create a library guide on “Measuring Your Research Impact.”

Old Salem scene

Old Salem scene

We discussed marketing strategies for reaching professors on this topic. Summer Krstevska of Wake Forest University suggested than an informal and personal strategy can be more effective than mass emails. Focus on building relationships, meeting in person outside of the library, etc.

We discussed our faculty status (or not) on campus and how that status can help or hinder us. The status of librarians at UNC Charlotte is complex, Angel reported, but at least her dean is a member of the faculty council and is able to advocate for librarian expertise and services.

Angel also affirmed Summer’s focus on the personal touch. Angel uses a mail merge to email her faculty, so that the faculty member’s name is included in her opening line. She does get more responses that way, it seems. She also advocates for making friends with business school staff persons. Those folks are often key gatekeepers and holders of key information.

Several of us email the new faculty hires and new PhD students each August with personalized greeting and offers of teaching and research support. And attending scheduled research presentations in the b-school helps to get noticed (and to better understand the research the faculty are doing).

Angel created a visual graphic describing her services to faculty, as opposed to just using text.

Google Scholar now provides alerts for new publications with specific keywords, such as the name of your campus or the business school.

Business schools tend to highly rank journals from the big for-profit publishers like Elsevier. This could become an issue as more libraries and faculty senates reconsider supporting big subscription packages from those publishers. Stay tuned…

Programming for business students in the library

We discussed hosting special events in the library targeting business students. Ideas mentioned in our discussion:

  • Partner with the b-school on a co-branded program. (I mentioned the library-funded social entrepreneurship business model competition I need to work on this summer.)
  • Work with career services (also to provide research instruction to non-business students as they prepare for interviews).
  • Betty reminded us that the First Research industry reports (which NC LIVE provides via ProQuest) include sections on “conversation starters” and “call prep questions” – great for interviews, not just sales.
  • Partner with student clubs like CEO.
  • Nancy Lovas from UNC Chapel Hill discussed the Live Action CLUE game that her library system puts on each semester. (She played Professor Plum last time!)
  • Young business alumni can be interesting to current students (some alums could perhaps talk about the value of working with the business librarian and using databases too).
  • Consider livestreaming events for online students and satellite campuses.

Instruction

Given that four of us are newish business librarians, we talked a lot about making inroads intro classes for instruction time. Angel discussed her work with an accounting/ pre-business major class in which she provided drop-in lab support and research consultations. We talked about time efficiencies a bit here.

Old Salem scene

Old Salem scene (flag represents the construction date of the building)

Nancy discussed the mere five minutes of class time she was allowed in a 400-student introduction to entrepreneurship class. There was some sentiment that short visits to large classes sometimes is a good strategy to get started creating productive engagements with students.

We talked about the sometimes tricky need to help professors create better assignments and research projects. This led to a really good discussion about the nature of teaching business research skills and information literacy. Summer lamented when students fail to apply research to making a decision. Or as students have put it:

  • “What do I do with this industry report or market data?”
  • “How do I apply this to my project?”
  • Or “What do I do next?”

We mentioned Ilana Stonebraker’s work at this point. Sometimes it helps to give students specific prompts:

  • Based on this demographic (and/or psychographic) research, who is your best customer?
  • Based on this industry analysis, how would you describe the long-term health of this industry?
  • Based on this financial benchmarking, what is a likely profit margin for your start-up?

Nancy discussed how she asks students to brainstorm their own research questions: “What do you need to know about this market or industry or company or business idea?” If looking at articles, “what are you looking for in the article?” Have them share their questions in a Google Document.

Don’t ask “Does anyone have a question” but rather “What questions do you have?”

Angel recommending looking at some of the products in Project Cora, which covers business research topics and specific business databases.

(In our spirited discussion of business research instruction, there was no mention of the frameworks, even though all of us are familiar with them.)

Old Salem scene

Old Salem scene

We discussed how we prepare for a workshop. While many of us usually have teams focus on their assigned or chosen topic (an industry, market, product, public company, local small business or nonprofit, etc.), Summer sometimes has all the students work on a product that is harder to classify than their officially assigned product for the class. She discussed how her example provides a deeper learning experience than researching the simpler, official product.

One of us likes to use mind-mapping tools, in which students develop a list of subtopics and/or research options for their assigned topic. Students still like Kahoot. Padlet can be a visually attractive alternative to a shared Google Document. Are tech tools like these effective or merely flashy? Well, students do respond well to the visual elements that these tools provide.

Nancy described an assessment research project she is working on. It will involve student use of a LibGuide with a test and control class. She is working on the IRB submission.

That was it for assessment, sorry. We were starting to get hungry but wanted to discuss one more topic before lunch.

What do you do in the summer?

For some of us, this will be the first summer as an academic librarian. What do you prioritize? How do you handle the sometimes very different workflow compared to the fall and spring when we are busy with instruction and consultations? (Of course this isn’t the situation with everyone. I just got off the phone with my fellow BLINC officer Sara Thynne of Alamance Community College, and Sara is no less busy in the summer.)

Some answers:

  • Betty’s library has weekly workshops for librarians and library staff. Departments take turns coming up with the topics.
  • Library faculty retreats and unconferences.
  • Updating web sites, LibGuides, videos, etc. Betty’s library devotes two full days for everyone to work on standardizing, updating, and improving LibGuides.
  • Mapping out a personal research agenda and writing articles.
  • Working through a “summer to-do” list used each summer. It covers updating LibGuides and videos, cleaning out email folders, desktop files, heavy-use folders, and paperwork in the office; updating social media professional profiles; adding possible conferences as well as fall semester embedded classes to the calendar, etc.
  • Updates to make, cleaning out my email folders, cleaning up my desktop and networked folders, etc.
  • Catching up on professional readings (articles and blog posts) saved up since the fall semester began.
  • Submitting proposals to fall and spring conferences (we briefly discussed our different travel funding policies).
  • Getting name and contact info for new incoming professors, PhD students, etc.

Then we walked up to Willow’s Bistro for lunch with a bit more work-related discussion but mostly socializing before bidding adieu.

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Food truck lunch time at the BLINC workshop

Food truck lunch time at the BLINC workshop

BLINC (Business Librarianship in North Carolina) met for its spring workshop last week Friday. You can’t tell from this lunch-time picture, but the flowering trees are now blooming over here in the NC Piedmont, and the daffodils are up and looking pretty. Well, the lack of coats on these business librarians enjoying lunch and networking outdoors is a sign of spring!

We met at the Frontier, a shared-work space, in Research Triangle Park, just south of Durham. It had been a while since we met in RTP. It’s pretty famous for being one of the most successful research parks in the country. It reflects the early, 1950’s, suburban model of research parks; only recently has the park become concerned with mixed-used development and more sustainable transportation options. In contrast, the newish Winston-Salem Innovation Quarter, where BLINC has met before, is largely built from downtown former RJ Reynolds tobacco factories. The Quarter is high-density and has lots of housing a short walk away. (However, we are still waiting for our downtown, full-sized grocery store.)

Around 20 business librarians, public and academic, attended the workshop. We had more public librarians than academic librarians this time, a nice change of pace. Four folks were first-timers at a BLINC workshop. We gave our new friends a special welcome.

Workshop description: “Social entrepreneurship has gone mainstream, but libraries have been helping people trying to solve problems in their communities for a long time. At this workshop, we will share and discuss library services and resources to support social entrepreneurs in both public and academic libraries.”

My notes are somewhat rough since I was also serving as the workshop coordinator, along with fellow-officer Sara Thynne of Alamance Community College. My apologies to the presenters and you readers.

Agenda:

9:30-10:00: Socializing over morning snacks and coffee
10:00-10:30: Introductions; what’s new with your work or at your library
10:30-11:30: Social entrepreneurship, part 1:
Steve Cramer (UNC Greensboro): Introduction to social entrepreneurship and how today’s topics fit together
Dan Maynard (Campbell University):  Lessons learned about working with social entrepreneurs  as a Sullivan Fellow
Betty Garrison (Elon University): IRS 990 forms for nonprofit research and financial benchmarking
11:30-12:30: Lunch at the Food Truck Rodeo
12:30-2:00: Social entrepreneurship, part 2
Nancy Lovas (UNC Chapel Hill): The UNC Makeathon — students developing prototypes that promote positive social impact
Deanna Day (Small Business and Technology Development Center): Support organizations for social entrepreneurs
Steve Cramer: Simply Analytics (NC LIVE) v. PolicyMap v. Social Explorer for community indicators data
Final discussions facilitated by Sara Thynne (Alamance Community College)
2:00-3:00: BLINC planning discussions: NCLA 2019 additional program proposals and final decisions on our socials; topics for summer workshop at App State

Introducing the topic

I used the definition from UNCG’s Seminar in Social Entrepreneurship class:

“Social entrepreneurship is a growing field that depends on market-driven practices to create social change. Social entrepreneurs leverage available economic resources and innovations, to support their passion to have a positive impact on the global and local community.”

After describing a few examples from recent magazines and newspapers, we discussed core aspects of social entrepreneurship. Many of these aspects impact our consulting work with social entrepreneurs.

  • Includes for-profit and nonproft organizations (including triple bottom line companies: people, planet, profits)
  • The need to define and measure the problem being addressed, and the people involved
  • The need to have direct experience with target populations
  • And working in partnership with members of a target community, not swooping in to fix problems for them – that’s almost never helpful or effective or indeed wanted
  • Industry analysis, competitive intelligence, financial benchmarking, and market analysis are required – the same research required by general entrepreneurship — even if you want to start a nonprofit and your heart is in the right place
  • Social entrepreneurs can’t expect grant money to come in from local governments or foundations just because it’s a significant social problem and you are passionate about your proposed solution
  • Social entrepreneurs must think seriously about possible revenue streams, and will have to create an income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow – whether nonprofit or for-profit

Lessons learned as a Sullivan Fellow

Dan Maynard (Campbell University) discussed “lessons learned about working with social entrepreneurs as a Sullivan Fellow”. Dan remains the only librarian serving as a Sullivan Fellow. From that page:

Dan Maynard

Dan Maynard on lessons learned as a Sullivan Fellow

“The Sullivan Foundation is focused on supporting faculty who are interested in incorporating social innovation and entrepreneurship into new or existing classes and/or proposed projects that serves to deepen knowledge of students interested in the field and faculty impact in the community.”

Dan has a lot of interesting stories to tell and recommendations to share. He presented social entrepreneurship in terms of the 3 M’s:

  1. Mission (useful work)
  2. Margin (it’s profitable)
  3. Meaning (“good work”)

The Sullivan Foundation focuses on rural and micropolitan places in the U.S. south — the kinds of places that often get ignored in discussions of trendy entrepreneurship.

Lessons learned:

  • Turn outward: everyone has aspirations: find out what they are
  • Discover your niche: deal with causes, rural issues, or urban issues. Don’t try to solve all the problems at once
  • Social entrepreneurship is not social innovation, social justice, service learning, or community engagement per se. It often involves those things, though. But watch out for folks with their own agenda but less interest in sustainable solutions
  • Be prepared for push-back from some faculty for using the “e” word. For some, entrepreneurship is a dirty word, a capitalistic idea
  • Be prepared to push back against administrators, bosses, sponsors, and funding agencies with their top-down pronouncements and top-down agenda (Dan gave a few examples)

Measuring outcomes: assessment or story telling?

  • Foundations seek storytelling and branding – human aspects, humanity on display. Not a spreadsheet of numeric assessments
  • Provide storytelling that earns name recognition
  • Assessment data is a fading emphasis in the foundation community

An example Campbell U story from Sullivan (Dan shared this link with us after our workshop – the story was posted the same day.)

Success stories sell, Dan asserts. He is getting more instruction and consultation requests on his campus as a result of Sullivan Foundation storytelling,

Dan is helping social entrepreneurs grow their networks and seek funding. Slow money, micro grants, and peer lending is happening in Dan’s rural county. It’s not just Detroit Soup anymore.

From the Q&A with Dan on academic implications:

  • A business schools are not the most fertile ground for social entrepreneurship — the arts and humanities are.
  • There is much less emphasis on traditional business plan writing [more on that after lunch].

We moved the IRS 990 discussion for after lunch.

Food truck lunch

The Frontier has “Food Truck Rodeos” on Friday, so we went outside and had lunch. That was fun. Easy to network and socialize on foot, and then we munched on benches.

Nonprofit financial research and benchmarking

Betty Garrison (Elon University) caught a bug and couldn’t make it, so I jumped in to cover this topic. Most of the BLINC friends had experience with the IRS 990 financial forms required for many nonprofits.

  • 501(a) organizations.
  • Due 5 ½ months after fiscal year ends
  • If under $200K in receipts, an organization can submit a shorter version, 900-EZ
  • Private foundations of any size submit a 990-PF that usually includes a list of organizations given funds with the dollars amount

Using some examples I pulled up from http://foundationcenter.org/find-funding/990-finder, we discussed using these forms for financial benchmarking and strategic insights.

Librarian support of the UNC-Chapel Hill Makerthon

Nancy Lovas (UNC Chapel Hill) described the nature of this event and her role in it as the recently-hired entrepreneurship librarian. This is a new but already big event at her campus. https://www.makeathon.unc.edu/ . It lasts a week. Ideas must have a social impact focus. Many non-business students compete.

Nancy Lovas on the Makerthon

Nancy Lovas on the Makerthon

Student teams present either an idea for a physical product or an app (apps are really popular). The teams use the business model canvas for their submissions and 12-minute presentations. Nancy provided research consultations for six of the teams.

Nancy has a research guide, https://guides.lib.unc.edu/lean-canvas, organized around the topic boxes of the business model canvas.

She also works with the campus’ social entrepreneurship hub, located within the Campus Y.

Nancy led a discussion on the business model canvas versus the business model versus the traditional business plan. Many of the public librarians hadn’t been exposed to these alternatives to the business plan.

Small Business and Technology Development Center & social entrepreneurship

Deanna Day (research consultant (and librarian), Small Business and Technology Development Center) discussed how the SBTDC supports social entrepreneurs. SBTDC is the “business and technology extension service of The University of North Carolina” [from that site]. So it covers the whole state through our 16 campuses.

Deanna Day on SBTDC consulting

Deanna Day on SBTDC consulting

Deanna provided some examples of SBTDC’s social entrepreneurship clients. SBTDC councilors also support students working on pitch competitions (I didn’t know that).

The councilors’ biggest concern when working with new social entrepreneurship clients: that the clients won’t be able to sustain their business/organization, and that their financial planning is undeveloped.

Deanna expanded on the financial challenges of creating nonprofits. From one of her slides:

  • Everyone wants to be a nonprofit
  • Because funding is difficult to obtain from traditional sources?
  • Most VCs and angels are not interested in social impact funding
  • Only 11% of big bets go to people to color
  • But other business structures can also be effective
  • SBTDC’s biggest challenge is clients who are not interested in developing a financially sound, sustainable enterprise

SBTDC now uses Liveplan, available to their clients. It works well, she reported. Banks and the SBA accept Liveplan reports when they consider making a loan.

Social data

 I talked briefly about Simply Analytics (which we all have access to via NC LIVE), PolicyMap, and Social Explorer as tools for social entrepreneurship.

Even though many of us usually turn to Simply Analytics for its deep collection of psychographic data, it has plenty of Census data too, which can easily be ranked by location as well as mapped.

PolicyMap has lots of free data and therefore is still useful without having a subscription. It has a robust collection of health indicators, not just Census data: CDC National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the Behavioral Risk Factor Service, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Also HUD data on affordable housing. The PolicyMap blog is open access and had been very helpful to me: https://www.policymap.com/blog/

Social Explorer is very useful for time series data, since it has data back to the original, 1790 Census. Of course, the data back then was pretty limited in scope. For more recent years, it has data from County Health Rankings and Roadmaps.

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Happy spring break! Well it’s that magic week at UNCG at least.

Catching up

Sorry I haven’t written here since before the spring semester began. We liaisons are busy people, right? I’ve had more night classes than usual this semester, for both one shot instruction (often graduate classes) plus two of my core embedded classes (for which I had to reduce my roles). I’ve also had some morning classes on the same day as the night classes, so a number of 12-hour days this semester. Tiring.

But perhaps also because of this trend:

UNCG business school enrollment trend

UNCG business school enrollment trend

The UNCG School of Human & Health Sciences has also grown a lot, while the Nursing, Arts & Sciences, and Education schools have been declining in enrollment. Interesting trends that will maybe someday have liaison staffing implications here if our subject assignments become partly informed by data? But I have to bear in mind business librarian friends like Ash Faulkner from Ohio State and Min Tong from U. of Central Florida who have over twice as many students in their liaison roles as me. Props to those hard-working professionals working their lean liaison programs.

Over 125 folks have filled out the survey my friend Betty Garrison from Elon University and I created on experiences with business librarian organizations. The results including the comments are very interesting and we look forward to writing them up. With Betty’s permission, I might share a few findings and comments from survey here this summer while writing about ACRL 2019 and BLINC programming. BLINC’s spring workshop in mid-March focuses on social entrepreneurship — outreach, services, instruction, and resources.

I also hope to write more about our explorations of librarian (and liaison) workload and evaluation guidelines. That task force has identified some interesting guideline examples from other libraries. Eventually our revised guidelines (if approved by our librarians) will help us better define and manage workloads plus expectations for scholarship and professional service. But on to…

Today’s topic

In outreach and teaching opportunities, I’ve been thinking about this more.

We are teachers, research consultants, and economic development partners who frequently make first contact with students, professors, deans, entrepreneurs, and/or eco dev leaders. So we need to establish strong, favorable first impressions through delivering a concise, effective sales pitch — we are selling ourselves as liaisons.

In the 2018 edition of USASBE’s Annals of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy (sorry, no open access), the lead-off article is “What I’ve Learned about Teaching Entrepreneurship: Perspectives of Five Master Educators”. One of those five “master educators,” Luke Pittaway (Ohio University), wrote of his very mindful work in his classroom before the students show up for the first class session. Some of this mindfulness applies to introducing ourselves as liaisons.

Professor Pittaway enters the classroom quite early, turns up the heat (wow I’ve never been in a classroom in which you can control the heat! What a luxury), writes his contact info and class learning objectives on the board, powers up the projector while opening Pandora for some Latin Jazz, and reviews his printouts of the student names and pictures. Finally the students begin to trickle in.

Professor Pittaway shakes each student’s hand as they enter the room and chats with many of them about their backgrounds. He asks them to set out their name tags out on the desks (table tents — a stable of MBA education). Finally he begins class not by going through the syllabus but by asking the students about entrepreneurship and getting them to talk and share.

Of course, professors and librarians don’t always have that much time before a class begins. Yet this is a good example of trying hard to make a good first impression.

[This article is also interesting for illustrating the biggest debate in ENT education — should educators focus purely on teaching students to become entrepreneurs, or should they also help students launch ventures while still a student? Strong views on this issue with ethical and educational arguments. There’s also the too-rarely discussed issue of privilege; students who are largely paying their own way through college (as do many UNCG business students) can’t spend 20-30 hours a week outside of class working on a venture.]

Building your liaison pitch

There is much in that story we could apply to research instruction, but let’s try to apply those ideas to our first contact situations as subject and functional liaisons. We need to communicate that:

  1. We care (we want the students, professors, entrepreneurs, the center etc. to succeed)
  2. We are engaged (often illustrated in part just by showing up. Assuming we aren’t stuck at the reference desk for many hours a week, which some business librarian friends report is still the case)
  3. We provide needed expertise and resources (your functional and/or subject knowledge, and perhaps also your library’s databases and physical spaces)

Point #3 becomes our value proposition as liaisons. Instead of pitching our business model in the elevator, we need to pitch the value we bring to the table as a library liaison. Or, if you prefer, we need to have a prepared yet authentic-sounding answer to this question our patrons might be thinking: “How can you help me with my research needs, or with my class, department, or center?”

Preparing our pitch to answer that question helps us use patron-centered language, as opposed to the language used in our library goals, the ACRL framework, etc. Those documents are written for a different purpose.

Our liaison pitches can be used in:

  • A class (whether in a one shot or the first day with an embedded class)
  • A welcome video
  • Meeting a new prof, department head, student, etc.
  • Random encounters in the business school hallways, a special event you are attending (crashing or invited), or indeed in an elevator

Our pitches need to vary by target audience. In my case, the Geography grad students have very different needs compared to the evening/executive MBA students. Or the PhD students in our Consumer Apparel and Retailing Studies program, the new head of Economics, or the head of our campus entrepreneurship center. Or the Action Greensboro officers working to keep more young professionals in the city.

Some examples

For a research workshop:

“I am your business librarian, which means I am your personal business research consultant. I will help you save time, reduce stress, and probably help you get a better grade on this project.”

I use this one a lot. Yes, it’s not intellectual. But this message resonates with students. They hear I am on their side. Usually when I say this, I get both eye contact and some head nods from the students. The professor (even if sitting in the back of the room focused on grading) sometimes pipes up with a verbal “Yes!” as confirmation.

In my for-credit research class, I have told the students I want them to become “more effective and efficient researchers” and “more comfortable searching for numeric data from datasets.” But those students have already signed up for a 3-credit class on ENT and eco dev research, so they are already pretty crazy umm I mean committed.

Sometimes I talk about how employees increasingly want to hire recent graduates with skills in “big data” and “data analytics.” The professors also add a “yes” to this. Perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to use such language regarding skills using ReferenceUSA, SimplyAnalytics, or American FactFinder. But I do anyway.

An addition for a team-based experiential learning class:

“I have a list of your teams and their topics and have already done some pre-research on your industries and markets in order to learn where your research challenges will be. So if I don’t get to your topic today in our workshop, get in touch with me next week for some customized research support.”

I try to avoid telling students to see me when they need “help.” Some students perceive “needing help” as a sign of failure on their part. Instead, say something like “need some research suggestions” or “want to explore this research option [ex. mapping data] with me.”

Plugging library subscription databases:

“Through this research guide I made for your class, you can access expensive research tools that are free to you as students. They give you information and data you can’t find via Google. These are some of the same research tools that major corporations buy for their own needs.”

[Then show a pre-looked up example of industry growth projections, or mapped consumer spending data — some research need straight out of their project description, a need I remind them of.]

Sometimes after they have used some of the databases, I ask the students to guess the commercial cost of an individual IBIS or Mintel report. Usually the students underestimate the prices at first. I respond “higher, guess again!” until they get close. Then I show the actual cost using marketresearch.com (pulled up before class began). “Information has value!” sez the framework.

For PhD students:

Emphasize your skills in identifying possible datasets they could use, teaching citation management software, and conducting citation analysis to identify seminal works and the core authors.

To students in general (via a script for a short welcome video when I became the Geography liaison recently):

“[camera mode] Hello! My name is Steve Cramer and I am the Geography librarian. My focus as a librarian is on teaching research strategies and sources and providing research consultations. Each year I provide dozens of hands-on research workshops for my academic departments and provide hundreds of consultations. Each spring semester, I also teach GEO 530, (which by the way has no prerequisites.) [switch to screencast showing the GEO subject guide] I try to make myself as approachable as possible and answer questions as quickly as I can. My contact information on the right side of this guide [zoom in] …so please let me know what I can do to help you save time and improve your research. [back to video] Thank you and have a good semester!”

Hmm that pitch could have been more student-centered, which something like “When you need data or articles for your research projects, please let me know and I’ll…”

To new, untenured professors:

Here is an email template I use each summer. I haven’t looked at this since last summer. It would be more interesting if I worked in something specific about the prof, like their teaching or research focus.

“Subject: Welcome from the UNCG Business Librarian
Hello, Professor X. [Your dept head] told me you were joining the faculty this fall. As the librarian for [Dept X], I would like to welcome you to campus. If there is anything I can do to help with your research and library needs, or if you would like an orientation to the library’s digital and print resources and services, please let me know anytime. I also provide research instruction, consultations, web guides, and screencast tutorials to a number of classes each semester and would be happy to help your students, too. The library XX portal is http://uncg.libguides.com/xxx. I look forward to meeting you, and hope you have a good fall semester.”

The in-person pitch to a new prof can be more challenging since it’s more conversational. You have to remember your core points and try to work them in without sounding like you are giving a speech. Lots of new professors have never talked to or worked with an academic librarian before. Some profs come from countries in which librarians have limited roles. So try to work in that:

  • You serve as a teacher and research consultant, as well as a librarian who oversees collections (mostly electronic) in the new prof’s subject area
  • You have worked with other professors (perhaps including the department head) in that department on research and teaching
  • You might be going through (or have gone through) the tenure process yourself
  • You can provide guidance on navigating the library’s ejournals, citation management software, and other research needs
  • While budgets may be tight, you can certainly pursue acquiring datasets and other resources the new prof might need for their own research agenda.

Wrapping up

Some of these liaison pitches could certainly be improved. I hope you found the examples interesting and are thinking about your own pitches. A vendor recently told me that I would be good in sales (she may have been buttering me up). I replied that sales is part of being a liaison — we just call it outreach.

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Snow day today! We got about 18 inches on Sunday. Campus will probably be closed on Tuesday too, although the snow is melting pretty fast.

Full group at the BLINC workshop

Almost the full group at the BLINC workshop

At its August workshop, BLINC (Business Librarianship in North Carolina) focused on ReferenceUSA and Proquest business content. Both products are available state-wide through NC LIVE. InfoUSA’s David Turner, an old friend of BLINC, came over from Omaha. New friend Jo-Anne Hogan, ProQuest business content manager, came down from London, Ontario. David and Jo-Anne talked to us about their new content, their third-party data acquisition process, and interface issues and options. The librarians asked many questions and made a number of suggestions. That was basically it for the workshop agenda.

For our December workshop last week Wednesday, BLINC returned to its roots: sharing, networking, and learning from each other.

We met in Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte, courtesy of UNCC Business Librarian Nicole Spoor. BLINC planned this workshop with Carolinas SLA. There were five special librarians present along with 15 public and academic librarians. Having those special librarians aboard enriched our discussion. We welcomed several first-time attendees at a BLINC workshop, including one MLS student.

The morning focus was “selling ourselves as information professionals.” Today I’m mainly writing about that discussion. But here was the full agenda:

9:30-10 Socializing and morning snacks
10-10:30 Introductions; what’s going on with your position or at your library
10:30-11:45 Selling ourselves as librarians and information professionals
11:45-1:15 Lunch on campus
1:15-2: New techniques for business info teaching & training (BLINC/CABAL Richmond workshop highlights)
2-2:30: Short report on the ReferenceUSA User Conference in Omaha; NC LIVE request for feedback on searching ProQuest market research reports;
2:30-3: Brainstorming BLINC programming at the NCLA 2019 Conference

Sara Thynne (Alamance Community College) and Betty Garrison (Elon U.) summarized the instruction sessions at the BLINC/CABAL workshop from last summer. Both Sara and Betty were speakers at that event. Beth Scarborough (UNC Charlotte) described her experience at the ReferenceUSA User Conference, and what she learned about how InfoUSA collects and verifies its data.

We also asked Susie Corbett, Vice President, Library and Information Technology, of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, to tell us more about her interesting institution (a “public-funded private non-profit”) and the drug pipeline and venture capital databases she and her team use in their information center. Both the public and academic librarians thought this was very interesting.

Today’s topic

To help facilitate a good discussion and sharing of experiences and skills, we sent out these discussion questions ahead of time:

  1. To whom are we selling ourselves?
  2. What does each group of people care about? (What are their motivations or needs?)
  3. How can we align our messages with our organizational priorities?
  4. Formats of outreach: in person, email, social media, print, meetings, events? Pros and cons of each?
  5. Stories of successful outreach you can share? Not so successful stories, or still in progress?
  6. How do we measure success or outcomes in selling ourselves?
  7. How can leverage the special powers of introverts toward effective outreach?

We began our discussion with the first question, using a big white board to segment our markets. So the first step: identify your different targets or types of customers for outreach. Most of those groups have different needs. So your outreach message and strategy need to be customized for each group.

White board work

White board work

Here is what we came up with for “whom are we selling ourselves to”:

Public libraries:

  • Small business owners
  • Nonprofit leaders
  • Entrepreneurs and “wantapreneurs ”
  • Chambers of commerce/other eco-system groups/small business centers
  • Local government officers
  • K-12 students using the library, and their teachers
  • Library department heads and administrators
  • Job seekers

Academic libraries:

  • Schools, colleges, other academic units on campus
  • Academic deans and other administrators
  • Faculty
    • Untenured
    • Associate & full profs
    • Named professorships
    • Department heads
    • Adjuncts
    • Whoever is teaching online classes
  • Campus partners (writing center, career services, etc.)
  • Students
    • First year
    • Upper-level
    • Graduate
      • Professional program (MBA, MS-Accounting, etc.)
      • Academic (PhD programs)
    • Online students
    • Adult students
  • Early or pre-college students on campus
  • Incubators, entrepreneurship centers
  • Library department heads and administrators
  • Job seekers

Special libraries:

  • Small business owners
  • Nonprofit leaders
  • Incubators
  • Pre-ventures
  • Consultants
  • Other librarians
  • Local professors
  • Colleagues and other departments in the organization
Public librarians small group disussion

Public librarians small group discussion

Some overlap in groups, as we expected. We get pretty nuanced. For example, MBA and PhD students have some pretty different needs. For any campus that has diverse graduate programs, generalizing about the needs of graduate students (“our grad students need this…grad students want that…”) isn’t a very thoughtful or effective way to support them.

After developing those lists as a big group, we broke into small groups by type of library: special, public, academic. We had about 25 minutes for the break-outs. Each team wanted to talk longer, but I was a meanie and asked them to come back into the big group for our summary of small group thoughts before lunch time.

Special librarians round table

Special librarians round table

I joined the academic group. They focused on outreach to adjuncts and teachers of online courses. Often those faculty have full-time jobs in addition to their teaching gigs, adding another barrier to our outreach efforts. Ideas and programs mentioned:

  • UNC Charlotte has a “library faculty engagement award.” (Nicole mentioned that a business prof recently won this award, but donated the prize money back to the library to help fund a new business database subscription that the business school really wanted!)
  • Creating local “READ” posters (using local faculty and students as the featured readers)
  • Offering adjuncts library spaces for their office hours (could be a small study room or just a table in a public room)
  • Getting on the agenda for required online educator orientations
  • Creating modules for classroom management systems

I didn’t take notes when we reassembled as a big group to share key points from the break outs, I’m sorry. I was standing down in front of the classroom moderating the discussion.

Academic librarians small group

Academic librarians small group

Attendees thought our outreach discussion that morning was very useful but could have used more time. Lesson learned. We could have budgeted an hour after lunch to continue discussing outreach, but there were other topics we wanted to talk about too (and a couple of time-sensitive requests from NC LIVE and NCLA). Hopefully in our 2019 workshops, we will build on what we started at UNC Charlotte.

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WFU building in the Winston-Salem Innovation Quarter

WFU building in the Winston-Salem Innovation Quarter after an evening storm (Bailey Park in foreground)

The Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians was back in downtown Winston-Salem last Friday and I enjoyed being able to walk over to it from home. The one-day conference met in new Wake Forest University space in the Innovation Quarter, built from RJ Reynolds tobacco factories. BLINC had a workshop over here in 2015 hosted by the Forsyth Technical Community College’s Business & Industry Services. It’s exciting to see these sturdy, tall-ceiling, big-window spaces converted to new uses and bringing more employees back downtown. (There are also lots of new residential spaces nearby, although affordability and gentrification are becoming more of a problem.)

The latest hurricane moved through North Carolina Thursday afternoon. I had a fun 9:30am research workshop for an investments class (and most of the 48 students were there!) but we learned then that classes would be cancelled at 2pm. Three big trees were down on the highway between Greensboro and Winston-Salem on my way home in mid-afternoon. Our region had localized flooding and power outages, but no deaths. Several speakers at the conference were unable to get to Winston-Salem (including the morning keynote, who had to provide his talk online).

As mentioned here in 2014 and 2016, this is not a conference about entrepreneurship librarianship, although a few business librarians usually attend each year. “Entrepreneurial” in the conference’s name is defined as “innovation”, so the topics of the speakers and discussions are broad. As an attendee, I focused on supporting as many of the business librarian speakers as I could. One of those business librarians was Ash Faulkner, whom Carol and I joined for dinner downtown Thursday night. The sun came out an hour before sunset.

“Retiring in 2055: Evolution and Education a Long Library Career”
Ash Faulkner
(Ohio State University Libraries)

Ash Faulkner

Ash Faulkner

Abstract: “As a librarian at the beginning of her career, the presenter has devoted considerable time to considering the future of libraries and librarianship. In this presentation she will discuss her views on the evolving roles of librarians and how she has prepared for these changing needs. Discussion will include the utility of basic business knowledge (gleaned from an MBA), the importance of understanding data and the growing need to understand statistical analysis and software, how to utilize professional organizations and personal networks to address learning gaps, and best bet resources for individual learning pursuits. The presenter will discuss her views of current and future librarianship, as well as those found in the literature and through conversations with other early-career librarians.”

A financial planner told Ash that she could expect to retire in 2055. In this discussion-oriented program, Ash explored trends in librarianship and the workforce in general to guess what the nature of her career might look like up to its end.

She used Mentimeter to display her slides and enable instant feedback from the participants. We discussed ideas like digital nomads and the gig economy applied to librarianship. Ash speculated on the future of librarians:

  • “Yup, data” (increasingly important)
  • Boutique service (emphasis on specialized services)
  • Increasing collaboration…to integration
  • Fewer professional librarians
  • Self-service (less interaction with librarians)

She also speculated on gap areas in our skills and education:

  • Deeper subject expertise
  • Finding data
  • Data management
  • Statistics
  • Basic business knowledge

Some of the discussion was on near-future trends but it was interesting speculating on the long term possibilities.

 “An Entrepreneurial Approach to Helping Entrepreneurs”
Kassie Ettefagh, & John Raynor (High Point Public Library)

John Raynor and Kassie Ettefagh

John Raynor and Kassie Ettefagh

Abstract: “The High Point Public Library was tasked with finding a way to help support the city’s strategic plan to increase population, create new housing and employment, and create a vibrant downtown. Focusing efforts on entrepreneurs, job-seekers, and current small-business owners, HPPL designed a plan to provide personalized research sessions, one-on-one training with databases, social media usage advice, and space for job-related programming. Three Business Librarians work with Chamber of Commerce, small business expos, city council, and more. By changing its methods of providing information and trying to be more proactive, HPPL has evolved to better serve entrepreneurs, job-seekers and small-business owners.”

Kassie and John are BLINC friends whose outreach and consulting work at the High Point Public Library have always been impressive. They discussed their library’s proactive engagement with the local business and nonprofit community, inspired by the embedded librarian model of reference service.

The business librarians promote the development of ongoing, productive relationships between the library and its customers. Getting out of the library to build relationships with clients is key. “We need to leave the library and show the community what a powerful tool we are,” John advocates.

This embedded work is the library’s response to the city’s strategic plan, which promotes entrepreneurship city-wide but with emphasis on downtown. The library also created a dedicated business center in the library for training and hosting local organizations. The library has partnered with many local organizations supporting entrepreneurship, economic development, and nonprofits. The librarians now help steer entrepreneurship to relevant support groups.

The library had a preliminary goal of 12 client consultations a year, but now averages around 150 per year. The librarians use NC LIVE databases (such as ReferenceUSA and SimplyAnalytics) and High Point GIS data, but also provide some tech training, such as basics of using social media. Some clients want to learn how to use the databases themselves, so the librarians are trainers as well as research consultants.

Kassie and John provided several happy customer testimonials and some examples of research projects. One example: when the city tore up Main Street for a long, comprehensive utilities rebuild, the library organized downtown businesses to collect feedback and complaints about the road closure, and to help those businesses promote that they were still open for business. Now another chunk of downtown will be ripped up to build a new minor league baseball park. The city asked the library to repeat those coordinating services for that neighborhood. State legislators are also hearing about the library’s business and nonprofit outreach.

Really good stuff – high impact and progressive. Kudos to Kassie and John (and their former colleague Vicki Johnson) for their excellent work, but also to library leadership for funding these positions and the business center.

“The ROI of ROI Outreach”
Amy Harris-Houk & Maggie Murphy (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Abstract: “Liaison librarians in the Reference, Outreach, and Instruction (ROI) department of UNC Greensboro’s University Libraries have collaborated on educational programming with regional high schools, the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, a nearby retirement community, and a grassroots political advocacy group in Greensboro. Through these collaborations, our information literacy programs have reached a range of audiences, from middle-schoolers to retirees. However, while these opportunities have raised the library’s profile in the community, they are not without downsides. This session will discuss our collaborations, how these partnerships began, the lessons we have learned, and balancing the time commitment associated with community outreach with other duties to maximize return on investment.”

My colleagues Amy and Maggie discussed their recent outreach and programming to groups outside of the university. With implications for liaison work (and workloads), they discussed how to prioritize such outreach, and balance “departmental work with our core constituents with community outreach”. They also presented a SOAR (strengths, opportunities, aspirations, results) analysis for evaluating the impact of the work.

“Growing and Evolving Education: Librarians Developing and Implementing Community Health Literacy Workshops”
Sam Harlow (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Abstract: “In order to align with the University Libraries strategic plan to increase both general information literacy and health literacy efforts in the community, UNCG Health Science librarians developed a series of workshops on “Finding Health Information on the Internet.” In these workshops, librarians covered website evaluation, database recommendation, search strategies, and created a LibGuide for community members interested in finding health information. This presentation will cover outreach and marketing strategies when reaching out to community partners (such as churches, local hospitals, and university staff); successes and failures of presenting to community patrons; future plans for health literacy workshop expansion; and ways to further engage your community in information literacy workshops and conversations.”

My colleague Sam followed up with a description of a community engagement project she implemented along with Lea Leininger, the UNCG Health Sciences Librarian. They have provided 5 workshops so far. Challenges include communicating the medical terminology, dealing with different levels of technology, assessing the workshops, and participation.

Other conference notes

 The opening keynote speaker was Patrick Sweeney, Political Director for EveryLibrary, the only PAC for supporting libraries. I didn’t know anything about this organization. He challenged our traditions of feel-good marketing (all those ALA posters) and instead asserted that the goal of advocacy is driving public library supports to action – doing something (donating money, fundraising, or voting). He asserted that libraries need to use data analytics on its financial and voting supporters and make decisions based on that data. Libraries need to understand their communities – demographics, lifestyles, and attitudes/politics [there’s the business librarianship connection] – and craft their messages to match, not just speak from a librarian echo chamber.

Timothy Owen, Assistant Librarian for the State of North Carolina, discussed telling stories. He also provided examples of problems in data visualization and asked us to figure out what was going on.

lunch outdoors at the conference

lunch outdoors at the conference (opposite direction from the first picture above)

Half the value of a good conference is networking, and this conference enabled that in the breakfast social and lunchtime. Several new and veteran BLINC members, plus other friends from the area, attended and updated each other on what was new in their lives. (The newest downtown brewery is one block from our conference location, in the old power plant for the RJR factories – I was surprised there was no night-before or right-after social planned there.)

Epilogue:

I had to miss this session due to an overlapping event:

“Reaching Campus and Community with Entrepreneurship Research Workshops”
Meghann Kuhlmann & Sara Butts (Wichita State University)

Abstract: “Wichita State University (WSU) has positioned itself as an “innovation university” with strong emphasis on invention, small business incubation, and economic development across the region. WSU Libraries launched the Entrepreneurship Research Series (ERS) of workshops in Fall 2016. Each semester since then we have offered 6-11 workshops on intellectual property and market research topics relevant to inventors and prospective business owners. Workshops are open to students and the community. Successful outreach, with marketing beyond our traditional patron base, has led to increasing our visibility as a Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC) and partner in innovation support and promoting use of our business and intellectual property resources. We’ll discuss the opportunities and challenges of creating an entrepreneurship education initiative aimed at both campus and community members including alignment of the library initiative to university goals, community outreach, partnership creation, and managing multiple priorities in an academic setting.”

These librarians were unable to fly in due to the storm:

 “How to Never Underestimate Librarians as New Commercialization Partners”
Yvonne Dooley & Steven Tudor (University of North Texas)

Abstract: “As higher education evolves and re-imagines information exchange with industry, an increasing number of universities are creating and expanding Technology Transfer Offices (TTO) to commercialize faculty created intellectual property. This exchange fosters technology-based economic development and entrepreneurial success. Conference attendees will learn about the successful alliance between UNT Libraries and the Office of Innovation and Commercialization, where the library moved outside its normal sphere to help create a patent internship program. Presenters will explain how this collaborative partnership works and provides win-win situations for all parties involved. Attendees will also learn new ways librarians can advance innovative community initiatives, position themselves as trusted partners, and create professional experiences to prepare students for valuable career opportunities.”

I also missed this interesting talk about managing liaison workload. App State is a UNC campus, so I should reach out to Jennifer about sometime. Sounds like her idea for engagement plans might be relevant to my last post about the lean liaison model. (I learned that Ask Faulkner covers 8,000 or 9,000+ students on her own, another example that dwarfs my situation.)

Enterprising Liaisons: Evolving Engagement
Jennifer Natale—Appalachian State University

Abstract: “Liaisons have responsibility for multiple academic departments and/or student populations and are pulled in too many directions in the middle of the semester, leaving themselves unable to accomplish all the liaison activities. Enterprising librarians can stay ahead of the curve by building a profile of the academic departments or student populations they serve and developing an engagement plan for the year. In this workshop I will outline key concepts within a profile identifying ways liaisons can intersect with their departments or student populations. The profiles will then provide the foundation for generating an annual engagement plan and allow you to balance your workload throughout the year. Engagement plans, and some technology tools, can be implemented in part or in whole and as an individual or liaison team.”

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Summer ends early when you work at UNC Greensboro. We are already two weeks of classes into the fall semester.

This fall, all three of my embedded classes feature significant changes. Perhaps the biggest change is with ENT 300, a feasibility analysis (pre-business plan) class required of all Entrepreneurship majors and minors and all Arts Administration majors. This is a team-based, research-intensive class in which the students create a major report to decide if a business or nonprofit idea should move forward to the business plan phase.

This semester ENT 300 is asynchronous online for the first time. A gutsy experiment? My workload for this class could be much less or much higher, I don’t know yet. We shall see. (The spring section will continue as an on-campus night class.)

MBA 741, the capstone course Orolando Duffus wrote about a few years ago, has a new professor, Dr. Beitler. But after two evening classes so far, the nature of this class is very similar and my role (based on Orolando’s successful embedded work) is unchanged.

Today’s topic

The third class is MKT 426: International Marketing, the oldest ongoing story at this blog. The class is dominated by Export Odyssey, an exports promotion and experiential learning project in which the student teams try to make a sale to a new country market for a North Carolina manufacture.

From the BizEd photoshoot

From the BizEd photoshoot

Working closely with this class was my first embedded librarian role. The class helped me gain teaching experience that I couldn’t get from one-shot instruction and also helped me get involved in the local economic development ecosystem. And it was a lot of fun although also at times challenging and always time consuming. Collaborating with Professor Williamson gave me confidence to pursue other embedded opportunities, such as getting involved with cross-campus entrepreneurship.

The rest of this post updates the story of this embedded role. I’ll also touch on workload and sustainability – issues always behind the scenes in embedded work.

New professor, same project

Last year, I wrote about Professor Williamson wrapping up his phased retirement, and the hiring of the new international marketing professor, Dr. Bahadir. We made the adjustment of working together as co-teachers. We also like each other. But it is a different relationship than I had with Professor Williamson. It would have to be because the professors are different people.

Professor Bahadir teaches more Export Odyssey research methodology than Professor Williamson did. So I’m not formally teaching as much as I used to in class. I miss that a little. But he is the professor of record on the syllabus, and he feels responsible to know all the Export Odyssey material. He learned all that very quickly.

BizEd photoshoot

BizEd photoshoot

I continue to attend most class sessions but decided to skip a few sessions early in the semester when class content focuses on core concepts, not the Export Odyssey project. Those sessions don’t involve the students learning research strategies and so I think my time is now better spent elsewhere on those days. (Sometimes, like both class days this week, I have one-shot instruction for other classes when MKT 426 meets.)

I used to put so much time into this class (including research consultations, team counseling, and consoling upset students). So being able to adjust my role and the workload in this project has been nice.

This fall there are now two 75-minute sections with a 15-minute break in between. So an almost 3-hour time commitment to this class each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. For past ten years or so, there was only one section.

Utilizing my professional network

Professor Bahadir recognized how time consuming it is for the student teams to recruit their own manufacturers. We give them four weeks to do that at the beginning of the semester, limiting the time the teams have to develop their export marketing strategies. So Professor Bahadir asked if we could pre-recruit manufacturers to assign to student teams.

Through partnering with Professor Williamson, I had met officials from several export promotion agencies. I began inviting those folks to have lunch or coffee with Professor Bahadir and me to see if their agencies could help recruit interested manufacturers. We ended up talking to representatives of the U.S. Department of Commerce (the local office), Small Business and Technology Development Center (SBTDC, a UNC system organization), the Triad Regional Export Initiative (a grant-funded local organization on whose advisory board I serve) and some folks from state government. I enjoyed introducing everyone at those lunches.

We did end up with four student teams out of ten working with companies recruited from the SBTDC. The SBTDC became part of the support network of those teams, and attended class a few times. We hope to have more pre-selected companies in the future. Professor Bahadir is coordinating this work now that he had met everyone.

(Earlier this month, I wrote an external review for a tenure candidate in a rural part of Ohio. She is doing amazing work supporting her regional entrepreneurship eco-system and received really strong reference letters from economic development officers. I hope she writes an article about that important and interesting embedded work. )

A real Export Odyssey textbook

Cover of Export Odyssey textbook

Cover of Export Odyssey textbook

This summer, Kendall Hunt published the Export Odyssey textbook. Professor Williamson and I used to create a home-made project textbook for the students that the UNCG bookstore printed and packaged like a course pack. Through some other professors in the business school, Professor Williamson learned that Kendall Hunt was interested in new content. We pitched the idea to KH’s local rep and they agreed. We spent nine months updating and improving it.

We had to rewrite the book to accommodate non-UNCG audiences. I cut out most of the references to commercial databases in favor of free sources (mostly .gov sources like export.gov) with the exception of ReferenceUSA. We also greatly improved (IMO) coverage of the 4 P’s in the context of export marketing and provided updated case studies.

The plan was to sell the book as an e-textbook for $50. I liked the cheap price. Alas, the price has gone up already. So much for affordability as a selling point.

The MKT 426 students are using the new textbook this fall. A few professors from other campuses are apparently peer-reviewing it. We will see if any other international marketing classes pick it up. And then see what the feedback is.

BizEd article & photoshoot (in the library!)

Final story today. In May, the communications department of the UNCG business school was finishing up an invited article about Export Odyssey for BizEd, the magazine of AACSB International (accrediting body for business schools). The magazine wanted to include a picture of the instructors and some students. So we invited some students from the teams that worked with SBTDC-recruited companies. We also wanted an attractive location for the photoshoot, so instead of the business school, we ended up…in the library’s Special Collections reading room, ha.

The campus photographer took a zillion pictures, as they tend to do at photoshoots. You can see the one that BizEd decided to run at the article, but above are two rejects I liked (although I look kind of inebriated in the group portrait?) The diversity of those students is pretty typical for UNCG – we are almost a majority-minority campus.

Most of the students were about to graduate, so they were a little giddy that afternoon. Professor Bahadir and I enjoyed that symbolic wrapup of the project. It was the end of our first year working together on Export Odyssey and it went pretty well.

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