Libraries, learning and leading
I attended a presentation by Dr Ruth Walkup on ‘Getting the Foundations Right for Leading in a Changing World’. She took us through the evolution of work from the days when people worked to survive, to the days of trade and the era of industrialisation. We have witnessed dramatic technological changes in all sectors of the economy from the 1960s and these still continue.
I will give the library as an example. A card catalogue, which was the entry point to the library’s physical holdings, was used back then. When one visited the library they had to manually go through a card catalogue on their own, select the book they wanted by using entries of title, author, subject or date of publication. They would then find a reference number for the book that was done using the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) for them to pick out the exact book. But now things are different; you can access a library catalogue on a computer and online using Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). Where one goes through the same search process but this time it is done electronically which means it less tiring and less time consuming. Now we wonder what the future will hold and what libraries will be like. Are we going to be using voice recognition technologies where we just say an author’s name and ‘voila’ all his/her publications are revealed to us on a big screen on the wall, and we just click the book we need?
We just wonder, but whilst we are still in the wondering zone we need to go acquire some life skills. Dr Ruth walkup emphasized that we need to be self-aware; that is we need to know ourselves, our passions, strengths and weaknesses. Also we should take time to reflect on ourselves, looking back in the past in order to understand it and do things better in the future. You cannot do away with communication skills, information literacy skills and decision-making skills. Engage yourself in Life Long Learning (LLL) where you continue to upgrade your professional skills. Imagine the Librarian who does want to take a course in computers, where will they be when people don’t visit the library physically but rather ask him/her queries through IMS, Chat or Email. We need to be creative as we face change in order to create opportunities for ourselves and break new ground.
Through inner dialogue we actually get to “know” ourselves better and increase the likelihood of achieving our highest potential.
To conclude Dr Walkup gave us a quote by Alvin Toffler, “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”