Competency M

"Each graduate of the Master of Library and Information Science program is able to...demonstrate oral and written communication skills necessary for professional work including collaboration and presentations."

Introduction

Communication is probably the single most important skill that librarians must acquire. Whether it is in a face-to-face, one-to-one situation such as helping a patron to find materials or one-to-many as in a physical presentation or in a virtual situation like on-line meetings, phone conversations, and written material such as emails and reports meant to communicate ideas, communication is the bedrock of what we do. As a research scientist, I have to communicate every day with many different people, either in virtual meeting spaces, through papers and presentations, and in numerous emails to describe my work, collaborate with others on projects, and to convince my manager I am still an asset to the team. Librarians need to communicate as teachers, as sources of information for patrons, as marketers for the library (perhaps to update social media), to develop personal and institutional goals and objectives, work on project teams, and maybe even sometimes to resolve conflicts involving patrons or employees of the library. So, while there are different types of communications such as oral and written communication, there is also the situations in which communication occurs, each with their own set of advantages and challenges. Before presenting my evidence, I will discuss the situational aspects of communication within oral and written communication for face-to-face and virtual communications using various technologies for communication.

Oral Communication

Oral communication is spoken communication. It can be face-to-face, meaning the communicants are physically in the same space. This includes one-on-one speech as well as one-to-many presentations in which the speaker gives a talk on some topic of interest to the audience and many to many, such as group meetings or collaborations.  It can also take place virtually in which case it can be audio only, the telephone being the most obvious example, or visual and audio, such as the use of a conferencing system in which participants can see each other through the use of webcams or other imaging technology.

In face-to-face communications, body language and facial expressions are important non-verbal factors that should be considered by the speaker, as listeners will be very cognizant of what the non-verbal cues convey (Hunt and Grossman, 2015, pp. 102). For example, if I’m telling someone how happy I am about their contribution to our joint project, but I’m doing it with my hands on my hips or wagging my finger at them, they will not believe I really think they did a great job. For communication to be effective when speaking to individuals let others talk without interrupting, listen actively, try not to argue, keep speech as simple as possible without being condescending, get a handle on the level of understanding of the person being spoken to, and try to keep the conversation on topic (Evans and Ward, 2004, chapter 12).

Presentations, such as lectures in a teaching situation or organized conferences require different skills. For many it is easier to talk to one person or a few people in an informal situation than to stand at the podium in front of a room full of people. As librarians, we may be called to communicate in a situation where we will have to do lectures as an instructor, present research, or even to convince the library board of directors to cough up some funding for a project. As a researcher myself, I have had to do many presentations and the best thing about doing them is that each is an opportunity to improve my presentation skills. I’m also very glad that no audio or video record exists of the first professional talk I gave at a conference in 1993. The Stanford Medical Career Center has a good article on presentation skills that closely mirror my own beliefs such as being fully prepared by making sure you understand your audience. This helps to ensure your talk will make sense to them and, while it isn’t advisable to use a lot of acronyms, there may be a few that your audience is expected to know. It is still a good idea to define the acronyms when used the first time.    It is also very important to know how much time you will have for the presentation so you can prepare enough, but not too many, slides (Stanford Medicine Career Center, 2016). I typically create a slide for each minute I have for the presentation, but don’t count title and acknowledgement slides. Another consideration is to use slides only as a reminder of what you want to say. Don’t put too much information on a slide and be a bad presenter by reading your slides word for word. Use more images than text, they are usually easier to process. Think about what questions the audience might ask and be prepared to answer them. Finally, be relaxed when speaking, most people would rather watch a human than a robot give a presentation.

In contrast to the face-to-face, in the same physical space communication, virtual communication requires additional considerations if people are to be understood correctly. When meeting remotely Scott Hanselman (Hanselman, 2010) suggests that we speak slower since there could be lag causing delays on the listener end. In some cases, such as I’ve experienced in Collaborate, the audio may suddenly speed up to the point where the speaker sounds like Mickey Mouse as the technology tries to catch up with the speaker. If presenting materials such as slides, the presenter should not assume that the information will load at the listener site as quickly as at the speaker’s site. Speakers should pause between slides, especially if they are pointing out something on the slide to allow listeners to be literally “on the same page”. Speaker microphone volume is important for the listener and if too low will affect understanding even if the listener has her volume cranked up to the highest level. And, as hard as it can be at times, pausing to make sure another speaker has finished speaking before speaking yourself helps keep people from talking over each other. It is also probably a good idea not to use jargon or acronyms if possible since they can easily be misunderstood. If using video, in my experience it is best not to be any closer to the camera than you would normally be in a face-to-face, for obvious reasons. An entertaining and very true to my experience on how people experience remote communication can be found in Trip and Tyler’s YouTube video (Tripp and Tyler, 2014).

Finally, I don’t think you can talk about oral communication without mentioning multi-media, and perhaps this is really a third type of communication. In today’s highly connected participatory culture, everyone is a content creator and that includes video creation. YouTube, Vimeo and others make it very easy to create your own learning experiences for distribution across the globe. As information professionals we may be called on to create video materials for our workplace including things like short courses, infomercials and the like, and we should be able to communicate via recorded materials at least as well or better than in a face-to-face physical space situation.

Written Communication

Written communication runs the gamut from emails and interoffice communications to published peer reviewed journal or conference articles. Librarians may produce formal communications such as policies and procedures, annual reports, newsletters, staff hours, mission statements, and goals and objectives. On the other hand, informal communication may include things like email and meeting minutes (Evans and Ward, 2004). In all cases, it should be clear from the writing the intent of the work such as to inform, persuade, market, discuss, report, etc.

For research, writing is the most important activity done because without it, no one would know about the research. The type of research can dictate the organization of the writing, for example, descriptions of both qualitative and quantitative research should always contain a “purpose statement” that describes why the research is being done and what is hoped will be accomplished. But there is a significant difference between the purpose statements of different types of research approaches like qualitative and quantitative studies. For qualitative research writing, the purpose statement should discuss the central phenomenon that is being explored in the research. It does not have to be very specific since this type of research is typically more exploratory. However, for a qualitative study, the purpose statement is much more precise by describing the variables being used in the study and how they will be measured or observed (Creswell, 2014, chapter 6).

In the past few years, libraries have embraced social networking as a marketing tool for services and communication. It is important to create information in a way that users are used to seeing and using it. According to the demographics published by the Pew Research Center on Facebook usage, the largest user group is 18-29 year olds. The same is true for Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, but not for LinkedIn (Duggan, 2015). Understanding this would mean that librarians should consider using different language for the 18-29 demographic than they might for LinkedIn, which is an older audience. Because LinkedIn is a more serious, business-oriented site, the language should be more professional than for the other social networks where a more informal tone is probably more appropriate.

Another type of written communication that is relevant for librarians is electronic chat. Many libraries have embedded, real-time chat applications on their websites that allows people to contact librarians on-line. Most on-line conferencing systems and virtual worlds have chat capabilities that allow attendees to ask questions of presenters without vocally interrupting the presentation. It also allows attendees to converse in a non-distracting way. This type of communication, while written, is by nature less formal, as the time between request/question and response is typically much shorter than it is for formal letters and even email. Chat sessions are similar to one-on-one, face-to-face communication because it involves communication in real time. In this case, it is important to be respectful and very clear with questions and responses so the person on the other end of the chat has a positive experience.

Because written communication is so important, getting as much experience of writing for various intents is key. Additionally, it may help to read some good books on good writing in general (Strunk and White, 1979; Zinsser, 1990; Packer and Timpane, 1997) or for specific purposes such as research (Booth, Colomb, and Williams, 2008; Creswell, 2014). It also helps to find examples of the type of writing you would like to produce to get a good idea of styles.

Evidence

The first piece of evidence I would like to share is a recent presentation I did for my INFO-282: Grant Writing course last fall. This is a 5 minute talk that turned out to be one of the most difficult I’ve given, mostly because of the amount of information I needed to convey in only five minutes. (The absolute hardest was a 2 minute presentation in a “Lightning Round”.) The information needed to cover the grant project I worked on during the semester. I worked with a local elementary school on a grant for a combination of a HP Sprout computer together with a 3D printer so we could create a maker space in the school library for use by girls. I needed to present background information, such as the fact that the school was a “Leader in Me” school and this affected how the maker space would be used. We are also targeting the equipment for use by girls in an effort to encourage more girls to consider S(cience), T(echnology), E(ngineering), and M(ath) careers, so I needed to present some facts on why it is important to get girls engaged with technology very early. Additionally, I needed to cover the budget and how we would evaluate the success of the grant if we were to receive it. This was one case where I broke my “one slide per minute” rule, because if I didn’t, the slides would have been even more crowded than they already were. As it was, the feedback I got said that one of my slides had too much information. However, most of the feedback I received from the instructor was positive: “The PPT slides were colorful and information rich. The data in the atom spaces was very clever and although just a bit small, the information was critical to give the context for why STEM. The Covey Habits was easy to remember and flowed through the presentation. I think the slides might be a little dense with data - especially slide 4. Assessment data on slide 7 was will done with just the right amount of facts. Although the first four habits line the left hand side, you could alternate with 1-4 and 5-7. Little too much data with budget and evaluation on the same slide, but two slides would have been great. Good information. The passion and interest come out effortlessly. Good work. Save for your eportfolio.”

The next piece of evidence I am using is a presentation I did for INFO-287: Traveling through Space and Time – Life in Tudor Times and in the fall of 2013. For this class, we were required to research one aspect of the Tudor time period and present our project as a lecture during a virtual “Renaissance Fair”, held at the end of the semester. As part of the Renaissance Fair, we also created a virtual exhibit which displayed objects and information about the same topic. I chose to do my project on Tudor Architecture. My audience included the other students in the class, the instructor, as well as any other person interested in the topic, as the event was advertised to librarians, museum curators, and other educators who have a presence in Second Life. I tried to tell the story of architecture in Henry VIII’s time and show how the architecture reflected a change in culture from one of trying to protect oneself to display of wealth (i.e. castles to Manor homes). I believe the presentation was successful as I was asked to present it again by the director of another educational island called “Renaissance Island”. I did that in January 2014.

The third piece of evidence is a paper I presented at the Archiving’15 conference in May, 2015 (Franks and Vans, 2015). The paper was presented at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles on May 20 and covered work I had done on preserving objects and events in virtual worlds. Coincidentally, we talk about how events and communication about those events can be preserved using social media channels.

The final evidence is a machinima, or video of immersive world activities, that I made for INFO-287: Traveling through Space and Time: The Birth of Florence, which I took in the spring of 2014. The machinima was an assignment in which we were required to do a video as a character we chose from Renaissance Florence. We were required to talk about the culture in which our character was immersed, aspects of living such as food, clothing, and homes, and about a famous historical event in which our character may be been involved. I think I found my true calling in this one, as I made a 23 minute video about my character, Catherine de Medici. I took an event, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which Catherine played a mysterious role and wrote a script detailing the events of one day. I posted the machinima to my YouTube channel and as of February 17, 2016, it has 7,689 views. It also won 1st place in the Adult Division of the Curriculum Content Category in the International Society for Technology in Education’s annual ISTE’2015 EduMachinima Fest (VCARA Blog, 2015).

Conclusion

Communication is probably the single most important skill needed by information professionals.  It is needed on a daily basis when talking with people or sending email. It is needed for every project, whether individual  or collaborative, in order to demonstrate progress to the people who have a stake in the work. It is needed for pretty much all library activities including patron-facing functions like instruction and materials location. Effective communication, both oral and written, are key to the information professional's success.

References

A. Marie Vans. (2016). Publications. ResearchGate. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/A_Marie_Vans/publications. Accessed February 17, 2016.

Booth, W.C., Colomb, G.G., and Williams, J.M. (2008). The craft of research, 3rd edition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Creswell, J.W. (2014) Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches, 4th edition. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Duggan, M., Ellison, N.B., Lampe, C., Lenhart, A., and Madden, M. (2015). Demographics of Key Social Networking Platforms. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms-2/. Accessed February 16, 2016.

Evans, G.E. and Ward, P.L. (2004) Management basics for information professionals, 2nd edition. Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc. London.

Franks, P. C., & Vans, A. M. (2015). Preserving Virtual Worlds Educational Events using Social Media Networks and Cloud Storage Services. In Archiving Conference (Vol. 2015, No. 1, pp. 56-59). Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

Hanselman, S. (2010) 30 tips for successful communication as a remote worker. Retrieved from http://www.hanselman.com/blog/30TipsForSuccessfulCommunicationAsARemoteWorker.aspx. Accessed February 16, 2016.

Hunt, D. and Grossman, D. (2015). The librarian’s skillbook: 51 essential career skills for information professionals. Deborah Hunt and David Grossman, San Bernardino, CA.

Packer, N.H. and Timpane, J. (1997). Writing worth reading: The critical process, 3rd edition. Bedford Books, Boston, MA.

Stanford Medicine Career Center. (2016). Presentation skills. Retrieved from http://med.stanford.edu/careercenter/management/presentation_skills.html. Accessed February 16, 2016.

Strunk, W. and White, E.B. (1979). The elements of style, 3rd edition. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, NY.

Tripp and Tyler. (2014). A conference call in real life. Youtube video. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ. Accessed February 16, 2016.

VCARA Blog. (2015). Marie Vans receives 1st place award from ISTE's 2015 Edu Machinima Fest. Retrieved from https://ischool.sjsu.edu/vcara-blog/marie-vans-receives-1st-place-award-from-istes-2015-edu-machinima-fest. Accessed February 17, 2016.

Zinsser, W. (1990). On writing well, 4th edition. Harper-Collins Publishers, New York, NY.