>> And I wanted to welcome you all to this presentation this evening. My name is Dana Lema and I'm the President of the SOA Student Chapter for San Jose State. Of course we'll wait for you, yeah. I'll wait, you're important. And I'm happy to introduce tonight's speaker, Tracy Z. Maleeff. Some of you may know her as LibrarySherpa on twitter. She's a former law firm librarian and she now has her own independent information professional business called Sherpa Intelligence. She provides research and social media consulting service to clients with a focus on information security. She's a longtime member of Special Libraries Association and I had the opportunity to meet her at the Special Libraries Association conference in Philadelphia just this past July. She was named SLA Fellow in 2015, and is also the recipient of the 2014 Dow Jones Innovate Award and the 2016 Wolters Kluwer Law & Business Innovations in Law Librarianship Award. And we'll put some information where you can follow her online, her twitter handles, and her website. And I also put at the top of this list, both the websites for the San Jose SOA chapter in case you're interested to learn more about us and would like to join us, and our email. So feel free to reach out to us, and we'd love to have you as part of our group. And so now, I will hand over the microphone to Tracy!

>> Thank you so much, Dana. Thank you so much, San Jose State for having me back again. I have lost track how many semesters I have spoken to the school, but I love it and I'm just thrilled that you keep having me back. So I just want to start with a little bit of a disclaimer, I am maybe not at my peak performance. I just came off of four weeks of pretty much back to back travel, I tallied it up, it was 18,552 miles in four weeks. I'm in Philadelphia and I did trips to California, Bogotá, Colombia, up to New York, that's the quickest one, and then I just got back from Prague, Czech Republic on late Sunday night. So I am a little tired. And this is all work travel. I was working at conferences, speaking at conferences, doing all kinds of things. Both information security related, library related and competitive intelligence related. So we can talk more about my business later, but I wanted to kind of get to some things. So I just wanted to give you a little heads up, in case it's hard to wobble a little bit, you know, it's because I am very tired. So. If you've heard me speak before, specifically on the webinars, I usually do really structured webinars. This one is going to be a little bit more free form because of my apparition. Tiredness! It's going to be a little bit more about story time, sort of, so I hope that's ok. But I just want to kind of impart some of my, I don't know, wisdom, that feels funny for me to say that. But just kind of my experiences, and that I hope that you can learn from them and I have a bunch of slides to organize what I'm going to talk about. Now I'm happy to answer questions in the middle of my talk so please feel free to put them in the chat box. I just ask that you keep it on topic of what I'm talking about, and that's only because I am so known to go off on tangents that I just want to keep it to the topic about the slide that we're on. And then we can make some time at the end if there's something I didn't cover. So that's, yeah, where things are. So yeah, Dana said that I am a librarian who started this business and yeah, I have a lot of stories to tell and things that I hope you can learn from. So let's get started! So, I have pulled together, who doesn't love a work cloud, right? So, I've pulled together some things that I've thought back to myself of, if I was towards the end of this semester of Library School, what were the sort of things on my mind as I was getting close to graduation? So I'm not going to read the word sir. It's there. But I want you to, hopefully some of these are on your mind. Maybe they're not on your mind and they should be. But this is really a pivotal time when you should be really thinking about being strategic with your career. So these are things that you should have in mind, and if they aren't skills that you already have, these are things that you can work on. But I was just kind of predicting what I think is on a lot of your minds, or should be. So the first thing that I want you to do is, I want you to, before you even start making any planning about your future. I want you just to sit and think. And think about yourself. Because, you know, the major breaking point for me of leaving the library and starting my own business, is that I had time to sit and think. And I sat on a train doing a commute from the suburbs in Sarasota, Philadelphia, and I had about forty minutes each way every day to sit and think. Whoops, what happened there, the slide moved. To sit and think about what made me happy. What did I like? What didn't I like? Because now I'm fast forwarding a lot but I had worked really hard to reach a position within a law firm library and after ten years of working in law firm libraries, I felt like I had kind of done everything. I worked so hard to get to a position at a law firm where I had an office with a door and windows and things and I just felt like there was nothing else for me to accomplish. I didn't have anywhere to go up. I didn't have a glass ceiling, I had an opaque ceiling because there was just no advancement. My boss was the director, and she was only maybe a year or two ahead of, or older than me, so it wasn't like she was retiring anytime soon or leaving or anything. And I did interview at other law firms in the city, but it was really more of the same. So what I was able to do was sit on these train rides and really just think back to what it was that I liked doing in the past and what made me happy, and that's what led me to my path. Now, you might be saying, well I'm just starting out in my library career and you already had all this experience. My point of telling you that story is that that sort of introspection is going to help you follow your bliss. And you may not know yet what exactly your bliss is, your professional bliss is, but at least knowing what makes you happy and what your likes and dislikes are is going to help steer you. You know, there's really nothing worse than going to a job that you hate and I'm not saying that I hated my job, I'm just saying I felt like I needed another challenge. But I mean, if you're in a position where you're in a job that you just don't like rather than take some irrational course of action of just finding another job, you might just be in more of the same. So some other things I wanted to point out here. Now, I want you all to promise me that you're going to take these net few slides with a grain of salt. This one not so much, the next one definitely with a grain of salt. But in order to have this introspection, you need to understand yourself. And I know this might sound a little hippy dippy and everything, but not only do you need to understand yourself, you need to understand others. Now I apologize if this slide isn't great, I have the actual text of the slide on the next one. But I'm not sure if you're familiar with this whole brain types. There's this whole theory about there's different brain types. And again, I'm not going to read these, but you can take a look and really think of which one you identify with. And then more so, as you start to interview, as you also just go back to your regular job. Some of you are probably already working and will stay in your same job even after graduation. But think about the people that you interact with. Are you a nurturer harmonizer but you deal with a lot of controller managers? So again, a way that you're going to find your professional happiness is getting along with people, and whether or not they're your superiors but, you know. I hate to harp on the whole value thing of how tired our librarians are about proving value, but this is one of the ways that you're going to be able to prove your value is if you tailor your message to the audience that you're delivering it to. A very important lesson that I learned years ago while at the law firm library, is I used to deal with sales reps a lot. And if you haven't the pleasure of that in your professional life, it may come depending on what you do. And I'm not busting on salespeople, my husband works in sales and in training now, but it's a different language that they speak and different motivations. Librarians motivation is to serve their user, a salesperson motivation is to make a sale. So I was at a real impasse with this one sales rep, and I came home and I would tell my husband, I just had this really bad day. I just, I'm just not, I'm butting heads with this salesperson every day and my husband finally said to me, you're talking to that salesperson like they're a librarian. They're not a librarian, they're a salesperson. They're not going to speak your language because they don't know it, so you need to speak their language. So he gave me a couple phrases and a couple keywords and things like that in order to speak that person's language. And I don't remember off the top of my head what they were anymore, it was in context of a certain negotiation I was working on, and I remember talking to that salesperson the next day and saying some of those phrases and those words that my husband taught me. Game changer. All of the sudden, everything was going my way because I was speaking that other person's language. Now, that's one example of a sales transaction, but what if you're trying to sell a member of the C Suite of a company or library director or dean of a university on an idea that's coming from the library? That's sort of a sales pitch, right? So you need to understand how to sale that message to the person who's listening. So it's great if you understand which one of these four that you are, it's more important to understand that the type of the people that you're talking to. And if you're talking to a group, then try to figure out the best you can, who the most are. Are there the most controllers in this group? You know what, then you tailor your message to them first and then you give supplemental information. So this is something really important that I think we don't really cover much in library school. The actual, like, business side of being a librarian. Because whether you're an academia or a law firm or a corporation, there's still always a business side to this, and it may not be an actual monetary transaction, but you're selling the library. You're selling the value of the library to these people. So being able to harness that, not only are you going to make yourself happy because you're going to be less frustrated, but you're also going to probably make a lot of headway of getting things done. So that's one point that I wanted to mention. And this is the one that I really want you to promise me you're going to take with a grain of salt. If you've ever heard me speak before, I usually have a slide, and I don't have it this time, but I have emoji where I talk about my disdain for the words introvert, extrovert, and ambivert. Some of you, I've recognized the names so I don't want to bore you, just in a nutshell. I dislike anything that are labels, because I feel that too often people use them as a crutch or an excuse not to network, not to go out there and do things. But it is still important to kind of understand who you are and what your motivations are, so you know, I know which one of these boxes that I fill, I don't live and die by it. I mean, I know for a fact that I took the Myers-Briggs test when I was in high school and it was something completely different. I'm pretty sure it was one of the introverted ones, and it is not now. So these things can change over time. So this is why it's good for you to understand your motivations and how you deal with things, and to also have an appreciation for how other people perceive things, but just do me a favor and don't live and die by this. I often see people on their twitter profiles, their LinkedIn profiles, put their Myers-Briggs types in it, and I just think you're just putting too much stock in something that can easily be manipulated. And what I mean by that is I actually know someone who was a professional in the information security world that she was paid to scam this test. That they wanted to prove that the test could be, could be, I don't want to say rigged but you could break the test. So she sat down and took the test what was it, 16 times, with the mindset of well this time I take it I'm going to come out as an IMTJ and she would. And she did that. And she was paid very handsome for that so thus proving the point that someone who was like her psychology smarts, can scheme this test. So you can put yourself in a mindset to force is a certain way. The point of me, you're probably like ok then why are you even showing me this? Because this might come up a lot in the work world. I know that a lot of human resources and managers love to use these things. Just don't make the mistake that I did. Don't take this to heart like I once did. I used to think that this was, that was your only glove. Like, that was it. That was the one that fit and that was it, or Cinderella with the shoe. That was your Cinderella shoe. You know, it's a nice guideline but there are so many different ways out there to kind of help you realize who you are and how you deal in situations. And then just keep it in mind, it's just like a cheat sheet of, ok yeah I kind of identify with that and oh, I have this coworker that I seem to always butt heads with, I think they're an ISTP. Let me see what some of those things are that might help me get along with them better. So that's all I'm saying is just keep these things in mind and it might actually help you get your message through. And yeah sorry, I had a comment about public libraries have to prove their worth to the taxpayer. Absolutely. Any library will have a situation where you need to prove value, prove worth, prove something and that's essentially going to be a sales type of situation, where you're selling a message, you're selling a service. So, let's move on. About two years ago or so, there's a lot of articles out there if you just Google "Future Proofing Career," you'll find a lot of articles. I couldn't really find one specifically that I recommended, and if you like my little futuristic logo I asked PowerPoint to give me some fair used future photos. So there's my futuristic photo. Future Proofing Your Career was an article that I read, was one of the many articles that I read, two years ago. But that really stuck with me. And again, I'm not busting on libraries but I just know that in my situation where I was, I didn't feel future proof. I felt that all it would take would be a law firm merger or another recession or something and my job would be in jeopardy. I didn't feel that I had, that I was future proof in my career and I thought to myself, that I felt too young to just ride out this skillset, this career that I was having, and not updating it. I didn't think that I could coast on that anymore. So that's when I started my introspection and trying to remember what made me happy. And to me, that led me into the tech and information security world. So how do you future proof your career? Well, basically it's professional development. Not only do you need to think ahead to some things, are you concentrated on something that is a technology that's going away? Is there something that you're doing that you know is going away? So how do you combat that? You really dig in professional development. Now again you're probably thinking ok I haven't even gotten my MLIS yet and you're already talking to me about professional development. Yes! You need to hit the ground running. You need to be on top of this because if you look at job postings, you might start to see things in there that's skills that you don't have. So what you do, you create a folder in your browser and you start to save jobs that you think are dream jobs that you're not quite eligible for yet, but you save those jobs and you look at those skills and you figure out ways to work on them. Whether it's a move or another class or just going to things like meetups. Meetup.com, say I'm going to just give tech as an example. But say you realize that learning how to code would be beneficial to the part of librarianship that you want to get into. Well then there's all kinds of free and low-cost ways you can learn to code. There's a thing called girl develop it. You can go to their nationwide. There's all kinds of things you can do. So start thinking now about things that you might be lacking skill-wise. And I know this seems overwhelming when you're still in library school, but what happens is when you graduate you realize how much you don't know. And you look at all these job postings and it looks very overwhelming. And just as a quick side note about job postings, still apply for jobs even if you're not 100% qualified. If you don't tick all the boxes. Remember that job postings are that companies wish list dream list that they put out there. There's a very famous study from Harvard Business Review, that is some statistic about I would say it's a statistic along the lines of, women only applied for jobs if they met 60% or more of the qualifications where men applied for jobs if they met something like 30% or less of the qualifications. Don't quote me on that exactly, but it was just to give you an example of the disparity. So, two things. Don't be afraid to apply for things, but again keep in mind, so is say you do apply for it and you get rejected, well that's your professional development list right there. So that you know that you can work on that. So, just trying to give you some ideas of things that you can look for because future proofing is a term that I would never have thought of until I saw that article and it really hit home for me that you're right. It's like, oh, they're right. There's something that, and is there anything that I'm doing that I'm not completely, I didn't feel like that I was irreplaceable and that's a scary feeling. That's a scary feeling so I have been working hard. I started my business just this year, February this year, and I'm doing things that are unique and doing some interesting things and I'm trying to make myself as future proof as possible, and I would like you too, as well. So, networking. And with people, not with computers. And I, the coded organization was called a girl developed it. Girl developed it. I put it in the textbook. And you could also go to, I want to say it's meetup.com. I think it's .com and not org. I don't know. But it's meetup. So either girl developed it or meet up if you're interested. I'm thinking specifically of coding classes, but yeah girl developed it and then, for meet up if you just put in, if it's a software or some sort of any topic honestly, you're going to find anything on meetup. And you can do that. I'm sorry, I just want to say the last thing about that is, don't be afraid to leave some session early if you don't like it. I've paid $25 to go to a ruby on rails class and I left about a quarter of the way in because I knew that I did not like it. And I had no interest in it. And I tried and it was a very intense hour that I was there or whatever it was. And I just knew, to me it was worth $25 to scratch that off my list of I know that I never need to look at that again. So don't be afraid, or don't think it's a waste of time if you go to something and it doesn't resonate with you. Because you know what's so valuable? You know that that's information that you can discard. Then like ok, I can rule that out. Then all of the sudden your circle of interest gets smaller and smaller and it gets easier to make a decision. I think there's a whole fear of failure thing and I suffer from it as well, but you feel like you're a failure if you go to a session and it didn't resonate with you or you don't want to leave early. Something like that. You know what, your time is valuable. If you are absolutely sure that some coding class you're sitting in is not for you, you know, then leave. Then you know what, check it off the list. Look for something else and keep going. So, networking. I have the old timey bike here because I tell a much longer story about my whole struggle with bike riding. I'm terrified of bike riding. The feelings that most people get about networking with people are the feelings I get when it comes to bike riding. And the reason that I used the old timey bike is because for most people, bike riding is not a terror-filled anxiety-filled activity as it is for me. But it's still awkward. So it's something familiar like riding a bike, but it's awkward because you have this giant front wheel and little wheel, and what do you do with it? And you wear a top hat and things like that. So, networking. This is also when I kind of get into the whole introvert, extrovert, ambivert thing. I hate when people use those terms because like I said I think people use them as excuses and good or bad, extroverts also use that as an excuse for bad behavior or rude behavior or something like that. I feel like I've talked about this a lot already in past sessions so I'm just going to go over it a little bit but, you have to understand that networking is building relationships, and I like to see it as a seesaw sort of thing. It's what can I do for you, what can you do for me? What can I do for you, what can you do for me, and I'm actually seesawing back and forth in my chair right now. That's what I think people don't get about networking. If you Google networking, you'll see all kinds of articles of you know, does it make you feel smarmy, and just very negative aspects of networking that drives me nuts! Because I see this and I go well you're not doing it right or if the person comes across to you as being smarmy, then they're not doing it right. Networking is relationship building, and it doesn't mean that you have to be best friends with this person that you meet, but if you talk to someone at a professional event, follow-up with them over email or LinkedIn or something like that. Have a cordial relationship. Ask them questions. Especially when you're first starting out. Like, ask questions, be curious, people love to talk about themselves. And it's relationship building. What you want to have around you is a sounding board of professionals. Now if some of them turn into friendships, then that's just gravy. But that's not the goal, because I think that a lot of people think that the goal is to all of a sudden form all these tight friendships. No, that's just a bonus. What you just want is you want a circle around you of professionals that you trust that can be your sounding board for advice. And what I highly recommend is making that circle diverse. And I'm talking about age and distance. Having a perspective, an international perspective on a professional problem works wonders of trying to solve it. Diversity of thought solves problems. So not only diversity of thought in a company is good, but diversity of thought for yourself. So for example, when I was in charge of SLA's 2015 annual conference, I was the conference chair, one of my first jobs was to assemble a council, and I remember thinking to myself, I made it as diverse as possible and I specifically wanted people whom I knew that I would probably disagree with when we were having, deciding on sessions and things like that. But I valued their opinion. I valued hearing them disagree with me because I knew that what they were saying was valuable. And that's the kind of people that you want in your inner circle. That's really what networking is, is developing that relationship. And I always use the analogy of cultivate your network like a garden. So yes, you need to water the plantsfrom time to time, and you can't keep going to the same one all the time or it's going to, you just can't keep picking the same plant all the time because you're just going to rob thesoil of its nutrients and it's just going to wither away and die and you can't neglect some or it's going to wither away. So don't keep going to the same person all the time, don't go to someone so infrequently that you have to remind them who you are when you contact them. But even if you don't have anything going on, remember it's a seesaw. It's not about what they can do for you all the time, it's what about you can do for them. So maybe you see someone had a job change on LinkedIn or something. Just reach out, oh hey, what's your new job? Is there, or do you know someone who is looking for a job? I saw this job opening, would it be good for you? And I know that might sound, some people might say that sounds very exhausting and a lot of work, but I think that most librarians are naturally curious and curious about topics and books and things and subjects, be curious about people. Be curious about the people that you want to surround yourself with. Be interested in, they're alive, and not to the detriment that you don't give yourself self-care, but be interested. Be interested. Know what they're going through. Offer them something. That's what networking is. So like I said, it can be awkward at times, I know that the thought of going into a room filled with librarians at one of the annual conferences can be intimidating, but I could talk about more of this another time because I want to go on to some other big topics. But there are ways you can walk around with someone, you can have an app that calls your phone every fifteen minutes and you can take a phone call. If that's what you need to get out of a loud, crowded room for a few minutes to catch your breath and go back in again. But remember, networking is something that's going to help you professionally, so it is to your advantage to do it and if you struggle with it, there's so many different little tips and tricks and things that you can do to kind of get through it. And then maybe you can just move all of those relationships online and that's less stressful for you. So there's ways to do it. So like I said, it's going to be like riding a bike, it's going to be familiar activities to you, it just might be awkward like the old timey bike, but you can do it. Ok, first of all I thought this graphic looked like a rugby scrum, so it's like a rainbow rugby scrum. But so any resolve. So speaking of things you don't want to do, like networking, is getting involved. So this is talking about professional associations, but not just professional associations but even within your organization. Now, for example I volunteered at the law firm to be on the Diversity Inclusion Committee. Now, it was open to anyone at the firm and it was typically just attorneys that joined. But I said that I was interested and they were happy to have me and they did have some other staff people on board, but I looked at that as, I was representing the library. I was going to remind this council full of mostly attorneys that the library was a viable and valuable resource within the law firm. And plus I am interested in diversity inclusion. But it served multiple purposes and it really wasn't that much extra work. So getting involved is not only going to help you, your career, it's also going to help your library through visibility and it's also just going to help people in general. So that all kind of mixes with all the previous slides because it's going to help your networking, it's going to help future proof you, and it's also going to help with your interpersonal skills and resume building and then that can evolve into speaking. Because once you get involved in associations, what always comes next? Programming. They're going to need someone to talk who can do presentations. I can honestly tell you that starting off doing presentations within library associations is one of the best experiences that you can have because it really is low pressure. I know that public speaking terrifies people and that feels like pressure, but you're in a room full of your peers who are just as terrified as you are! To even just be sitting there. So, you could not have a more sympathetic audience, so I want everyone to realize that. That even though it might be a room full of say 100 people, at an annual conference or more, but you're surrounded by your peers of sympathetic people. You can't ask for a better experience than that. So I think that it's really beneficial to get involved because that's another way that's going to help you professionally. And I know that there was once upon a time when I had a little bit on anxiety when I was told, oh you have to give a speech in front of the legal division. I panicked for a little bit and then I got over it, and now you can't shut me up. I'm talking here and there and everywhere and I'm doing things. And the worst thing you can do is hand me a microphone at a conference because I will not let it go. Talk to Computers and Libraries this year, they could not get the microphone out of my hands. It's been a great experience. And I'll also say, when Heather, she and Heather presented at the Medical Library [inaudible] and she was super nice and helpful and supportive. Thank you! Thank you for chiming in with that. Yeah, like I said, my experience has been that librarian audiences are just super, they get it. And most of them are too terrified to get up and speak so if they see that someone's getting up there, they understand, like they get it. They understand. Yeah, it's been a great training ground for me. Don't be afraid to apply for things. And I'm actually, I started down the path of I've been applying to speak at information security conferences, and believe me that was very hard for me to get over because that's a whole different world, right? But it's a very similar kind of audience, and a lot of them have similar personalities to librarians. I'm going to disagree with your comment of used to being quiet, but whatever. I have never been quiet in my life. So, yeah, so that's been a new experience for me. So again, if you want to start branching out, you can start to go into parallel industries and start talking to them or start talking to the public if you're in a public library. Start doing presentations. Most people are very sympathetic because again, think about it. You're not going to be keynoting, you're not going to be paid thousands of dollars to keynote a huge conference. You're going to be doing your own slides at some volunteer organization. So again, people get it. If you fumble, if you get paid a lot of money to speak as a keynote and you fumble, then that's a problem because you're expected to deliver. But if you're a volunteer at a library conference, people are going to be ok. So, yeah. And I've gotten to the point now where I have been paid to gibe keynotes at some conferences, and I've gotten to that point. And I would not have been able to make that journey if it weren't for just starting out with small things, like speaking at the SLA Legal Division Breakfast and just taking any opportunity to present at library conferences, because the consonance grows, and the consonance grows, and you just build on that. And sorry, question here. Are you advocating speaking as a way of networking experience, or more of a way to build another career income stream? Um, I was talking about the first way. The money part I was just talking about the, I was giving an example of if you are paid to speak, you are expected to deliver. And therefore that's a high pressure situation. I was just contrasting that with a librarian conference where everyone knows you're volunteers and that everyone's up there. Um, I just threw in about me being paid to speak to again show the evolution, because my current situation is that I have my own business, I'm not in the library, and that's part of my business now. So I hope that helps, does that help? Yeah, I apologize, that was unclear. No, what I'm advocating you to do is to do these speaking engagements to get confidence, to get your name out there, to get experience, and for networking. Because people will start to recognize you. So that's what I meant. I was just comparing and contrasting of how low pressure it is compared to someone who is in a position to get paid to speak. So, like I said. Get involved, whether you like it or not. Alright, so I love this graphic, too. So for fun later, just fill in the blank what you think they're saying to each other. So this kind of harpens back to the other slide that I was showing you about knowing yourself, but knowing other people. Communication is so key. You know, you need to understand yourself in order to communicate, but I just can't, im so sorry, think of everything as a reference interview. You want to be able to understand what that person is thinking the best that she can so that she can get your message across. And this is, I just don't even mean like trying to talk to your boss or sell an idea. I like that one, that's a good one. Yay! But even just dealing with coworkers. Just communicating effectively because your coworkers can be part of your network, and also if you just have a pelastent working environment with your coworkers that just makes your life easier. But communication in other ways, too, is promoting yourself. Having, you know, I'm going to get this person maybe in a second but thinking about what you do what to promote about yourself out there. Do you want to put yourself out there? Do you want to create a library Sherpa entity like I did? Which, by the way, mother's necessities, mother of invention. I had to come up with something because at the time, where I was working, they would not let me use the firm's name to publish, and then I was starting to get flack for using my own name on things, which in hindsight is really ridiculous but at the time I was new and younger and I was like, ok. So I had the idea of, oh, well if I create this persona I can be that. So that's how library Sherpa came about. So for the longest time, nobody knew that library Sherpa was me. I outed myself at a conference when I was speaking, I just kind of threw in, a throwaway line. Hi, I'm Tracy Maleeff and you may know me on Twitter as LibrarySherpa. And at the time, I had a blackberry and I had it up on the podium to help me keep time, and all of the sudden it started buzzing like crazy because everybody started tweeting, oh my god, library Sherpa just, like we know who library Sherpa is now! Like, I didn't realize it was going to be that big of a deal. But between my blackberry blowing up, not in the Samsung Galaxy sense, and the gasp that came from the crowd, I was like oh! I'm on to something here. Like, this name is a, means something. So yeah, communication is key and now some people talk about postmasters about going to practice your speeches. I'm going to say make your own decision on that. I did not have a great postmaster's experience. I went once and I think the feedback I've heard a lot, and I'm curious if anyone's had a good post master's experience, is that it's a lot of very polished, very rehearsed, very Ted talk sort of way that they talk about things, and that just doesn't feel natural to me. So I kind of rather just babble on in my slight Philadelphia accent and tell stories and it seems to be entertaining that way. But figure out what works for you. But just remember, communication is very key. And written communication, too. Try not to, figure out whether or not it's acceptable to use Emoji at work. At a law firm, things are a lot more formal, and you have to communicate differently. And I've heard some other corporations here I know librarians work, that even the email communication is very formal, and things like that. Just keep that in mind, because that's going to help, again, that's going to help with your career development. Because if your bosses know that you can communicate with the upper management, then they might put you as the one to go pitch things and you to talk to them. And believe me, the better that you can communicate verbally and in written correspondence with senior partners of a firm or deans or a university or higher level management, that's better off for you. That's going to distinguish you. So, communication is key. And then, social media. So, yes. I know. We all love cat photos and I love seeing what people had for lunch, but remember that there's actually ways that you can use it, #TotesProfesh. I would say for professional stuff, my opinion is Twitter and LinkedIn. Now, on Twitter for example, you don't have to push information out. You can just absorb it in. There's lists that you can follow, there's people that you can follow, you can search #LISJobs if you're job hunting, you can get a lot of information from Twitter without even logging in, first of all, and having an account. Or if you do have an account, because you're going to need that for lists and things like that, without pushing anything out. Because a lot of people say to me that they don't have time to Tweet and things like that. Well, I' not even talking about Tweeting. I'm just talking about using Twitter for the information that's out there. They have something ridiculous like 313 million monthly users. That is a ton of user generated content that is out there, and there's so many ways that you can go into the advanced search, because Twitter does have an advanced search and this is a whole different talk that I usually give about data mining off of Twitter. But there's so many features like the lists and like the advanced search page that you can just pull information out. See who thought leaders are in your areas interests. Who are the other librarians on Twitter? Just follow them and see what they're saying. Follow publications, things like that. You can search for jobs. LinkedIn, LinkedIn is LinkedIn. Everybody hates it but everybody uses it because it's what people do. What LinkedIn has, as you're probably aware, is they have that blogging feature that I believe they call Pulse. That's another way to get your name out there if that's what you want to do. If you have something to say about library world and you want to get it out there, rather than create a whole separate blog you can just use LinkedIn and put that out there, and what they do, and I know this for a fact, is they actually someone is looking at these blog posts. If they like them, they will promote them on their own and LinkedIn will push it out to even more people. This happened to my husband. He wrote a really good blog post about a year and a half ago, and he received some notification that it was going to be marked as blog post of the day or pulse of the day or something like that. And LinkedIn themselves pushed it out way beyond his network and he had a ridiculous amount of hits on his blog. So again, if you're looking for low maintenance, low stress, it's already built in to LinkedIn. And keep your LinkedIn profile current. Try not to use a selfie as your photo. Try to get a real, professional photo. Now, you may be saying well how am I going to do that? In the mall, there's a place called Picture People. I'm pretty sure it's nationwide. I actually just got a coupon the other day in the mail. For my professional photo, I paid twenty dollars. And they do professional photos. So I paid twenty dollars and I have this nice professional photo that they took multiple poses of and let me pick which one, and that was it. And you know, I use it for things. So there are ways for you to get professional looking LinkedIn and professional looking information to put yourself out there. As far as some of the other social media things, Facebook I personally don't advocate it for professional stuff. But that would be your call. So that's up to you. I just think that Twitter and LinkedIn is really best for professional... Facebook maybe if you limited audience. Because again, think about do you want your boss or your future boss to see some of the things that you post. So keep that in mind, because again this is the world we live in. And the reason why I just wanted to mention social media is I think that a lot of people forget to think about it and the professional uses for it. And that you don't even necessarily have to be a contributor pushing out. There's so much that you can just pull in. LinkedIn has a lot of advanced research functions as well that you can just pull information out. The only asterisk I will mention here, is remember that these platforms were not created as search engines, so they're a little wonky. But they do have some functionality. So not everything always works great, but there is a lot of information. And like I said, there's all kinds of museums and archivists and libraries on Twitter. If you just want to follow them, you know, it's a great way just to learn and just to see who the people are and things like that. So don't forget about social media as a form of professional development and as for networking as well. So with that, that has just been my information, and I'd love to spend the next of however many minutes we have here just taking any more questions. While you're thinking of questions, I'm going to give you all a search stream of how to find lists on Twitter because you actually can't search for links of Twitter. You have to go to Google to search for lists. They took away their functionality a couple of years ago, and I never remember the search stream so you'll have to give me a minute. But while I'm figuring it out, definitely please ask me questions and if there's anything that was unclear that I said before. Ok, so in the chat box is what you put into Twitter to get a list. So you can use whatever search term you want, I just use library in there. Yeah, there's a lot of jobs. The one thing that I want to mention is, when you're job hunting, don't limit yourself to the words library or librarian. Remember that this MLIS degree gives you a particular set of skills and a lot of other industries don't use the L word. You're welcome to call yourself whatever you want. I still kind of refer to myself as a librarian, it's what distinguishes me in the information security world, and they understand that we have a certain set of skills that goes with that. But when you're job hunting and you're setting up searches and looking for things, remember to look for things other than the word library or librarian because honestly, the people that write up these job postings don't even necessarily, they might not even know what sort of words to use that maybe they don't know to tailor it to a librarian. So keep that in mind. And then that gets into a whole personal thing of whether or not you want to call yourself a librarian. There's some people who don't want to use that word. Other people, I would say if you can't live your life and not in a library and not calling yourself a librarian then that's fine and that's completely your prerogative to do so. Then you might want to tailor your search to an environment that will let you do that. No, the [inaudible] has a list of terms to use. Yeah. Or just keep an open mind and just look for skill sets rather than titles. Because titles can always be changed. You want to look for the skill sets when you look for jobs. But yeah, there are some people that I meet, that they only want to be called a librarian and they only want to work in a physical library. And that's great. That doesn't bother me or anything, that's great. But so for them looking at a corporate environment probably isn't the right move. Because chances are, where they work would not be called a library and they wouldn't, may not be called librarians. So it depends. Just keep in mind what you're getting with this degree is a specific skill set and what you want to do with that is up to you. And that's hard, believe me. I struggled with that for a while and I'm even being told more and more from some tech people, I've actually had tech people pull me aside and say, you might want to lose that whole librarian shtick. Like, well kind of who I am and it's, the L word is in my master's degree. And pretty much every job I've had in the past few years. So yeah, I had someone speak to me very frankly about two weeks ago and said, you might want to reconsider having librarian all over your resume. And I was like, ok. I understood. It was in the context of a much longer conversation, I understood their point, and yeah. It's something that, you know, it was hard to hear at first and I'm still kind of struggling with it and I'm still kind of figuring things out, but for the moment an independent and I can call myself whatever I want. So, I am, I just also like to stick with Sherpa because that seems to cover everything. And the other, it looks like we're approaching 10:30 Eastern, 10:29 Eastern. Any other questions? I hope this was helpful! Dana said there's a lot of caller improved information literacy especially around news right now. Have you mentioned to many people that those skills MLIS folks have? Yes. Yeah, exactly. There's so many things out there that you can do with an MLIS degree. Just like I said, when you're searching for jobs, search for skill sets. You can search for title, but a title's superficial. Look at the skill set. What is it that they want you to do? Because you might be surprised, you might be surprised that the companies that are looking for your skill set. I had a very uncomfortable interview many years ago at an architectural firm that the job that they posted was clearly meant for librarian, but when I went in for the interview I had really awkward comments made to me like, you know, well you can take your own title for this job, but you're not going to use the word librarian, are you? And ultimately, and I was basically like two hours of just bad. Of just ignorance. And ultimately I withdrew myself from consideration for that job because I told them that they insulted me and they insulted my profession, and I didn't want to work at a place that felt that way about libraries and librarians, and I basically had like an epic rant on the telephone withdrawing myself from consideration. And I felt good about it. Why would you want to work at a place that didn't respect your degree and all, so yeah. Oh yes, someone said they searched MLIS on LinkedIn and found Knowledge Manager Data Analysts. Yeah, exactly. So remember, keep an open mind. I hear some students say, I went to an ALA mid-winter a couple of years ago and heard some students from a different university complaining about how they couldn't find jobs and things like that and just kind of hearing them, they were thinking very narrowly. And I'm sure, I know job hunting is hard, but in this specific example, the feedback I was getting from them is that they weren't looking past the words library or librarian, is the feedback that they gave me, and that was very frustrating. I had to open their eyes, and like, you need to expand that a little bit, because not everybody puts everything in a nice, neat box like that. So. So, cool. So where are we now? Any other questions that I can answer? I hope this was--

>> Thank you so much Tracy, that was great. I don't see any more questions. I see that Kate did post an article that has job titles that people can use.

>> Yeah that's a great.

>> So we've got lots of them.

>> Excellent. Good. Yeah. So yeah, those things I talked about. Like I said, networking is key, but the first thing I want you to do is your introspection. You have holidays coming up, we have winter coming up, maybe a snowy day coming up, just look out the window with a cup of tea, and just kind of thing. What is it you want to do? What makes you happy? What motivates you? And the rest will all fall into place.

>> Wonderful. Thank you so much. We're so glad to have you here.

>> My pleasure. And oh yeah, I forgot what audience I was talking to. Or rain, I said snow. I guess rain.

>> We had a little rain two days ago. Yeah.

>> But yeah, or whatever. Or just sit out in the sun or something like that. But anyways. Just yes, take some time for yourself, whatever the weather may be. And good luck with the end of your term, and if you're graduating congratulations and good luck! So there's my contact info, and have a great evening everyone!

>> Thanks so much Tracy!

>> Thank you Tracy! This is [inaudible] and it's nice to hear you!