Finally a Name For All of Us While many SMR International clients and other readers are not affiliated with specialized librarianship, many others are, and the current activity relating to the recommended new name for the Special Libraries Association (SLA) offers a remarkable naming opportunity for all knowledge workers. SLA has long been recognized as …

Very impressed with the thinking of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff and the concept they identify as “groundswell.” In fact, it’s the name of their book from last year (Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies). Published by Harvard Business Press, the book puts forward ideas (and explanations) about how leaders in companies …

Finding myself situated between two very linked courses, I’m surprised at how much of my focus these days is on how we perform in positions of leadership in the organizations where we’re employed. Just completed teaching – with my colleague Dale Stanley – a course in measurement and metrics for knowledge services, and next Tuesday …

Now deep into Ken Burns’ magnificent film on the American national parks, I keep thinking – along with the purely visceral pleasures of viewing some of the most beautiful photography I’ve ever seen – that there is a big, big message here for us knowledge workers. Of course Burns and his team meant for the …

There was a time, not so long ago, when one of my colleagues – a smart man who was a serious student of philosophy and was himself what I could only characterize as “deeply philosophical” – moved over into information management. He become a specialist librarian, had something of a career in that field, and …