SLA Illinois Chapter Connecting People and Information

I am reprinting my earlier posts from the discussion lists here for commenting purposes:

As your Alignment ambassador, I thought I'd share a few  of my thoughts about the proposed name change. I'll keep it brief, and I'll copy this over to the web page so that you can comment and share your thoughts as well.

Do I love the new name? Well, I'm following the Twitter hashtag #slaname, and like others I have to say that I don't love the acronym. I can't help but picture the coupons I get from LubePros in the mail when I see it in print. The name as a whole, though, when said out loud, isn't bad, it's just different. I think it speaks to the value that we provide in an organizational "speak" kind of way that our stakeholders will understand, which is the whole point of the Alignment effort. The questions and thoughts that go through my head around it are:

1. Gee, I really expected the word "information" to be in there somewhere. Did they find that the word did not deliver the high value add of our services that "strategic" and "knowledge" did? I'm assuming that's the case. Also, with IT associations and such, there might be a lot of gray area as to who "owns" the "front side" of knowledge services.There aren't a whole lot of knowledge management organizations out there, and since our profession finds itself more and more in the role of championing that cause, maybe we should welcome those folks into our fold as well, and be able to benefit from having them share their know-how and partner with us.
2. Is "knowledge" too trendy and ephemeral? I don't know, I know that when people hear "knowledge management," they find it kind of scary, but they do like "knowledge sharing." Again, we do provide and facilitate the exchange of strategic knowledge. I've had the word "knowledge" in my position title for seven years now. We probably have everything to gain from putting a stake in the ground and officially claiming to own and lead it. It opens us up to working in just about any department!
3. What happened to the international focus? It was my understanding that the association wanted to promote its global reach more openly, so I was surprised that there was no "International" or "Global" in there. I suppose an association is an association, and maybe in a global world, they felt that the explicit mention was a redundancy.

Admittedly, I think it would have been better had the association's board not given us a choice as to whether the name was going to change, but had provided us with a few choices of name on which to vote. That's not the way it happened. Oh well, I can't control that. Long story short, though, I'm going to support the new name, even though it will be an adjustment, because I don't think that in the current landscape, we an afford to wait another few years, and I think that we need to keep moving forward in our work and not get hung up in "paralysis through analysis" over a name. Shakespeare's "A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet" (Romeo & Juliet) and all that.

If you've read the book "Who Moved My Cheese," you know that it is the mice who look for new cheese that survive when the old cheese starts drying up. Sitting in one place waiting for the cheese to come along is just fruitless. If you haven't read that book, now would be a good time. It only takes an hour.

Give it some real thought before you toss it out on principle. I think broader is better than narrow in the current economic climate and with the world of information changing so rapidly.

Second Post: For clarification purposes and in response to negative feedback about the acronym ASKPro, I thought I'd share that SLA HQ has specified that the vote only refers to the actual name "Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals" and not the acronym.

I thought I'd also share an anecdotal story from a conversation with a fellow librarian colleague here at Y-USA - one of three whom we have on staff on my floor who work in the Research and Planning department and none of whom are current members of SLA (but have been in the past). I had shared the announcement about the proposed name with these three colleagues and so, when I met one of them at the coffeepot earlier today, I asked her what she thought about the new name.

She told me that she found it very intriguing, as it fit her role and responsibilities so much better than SLA did. She added, "I might actually join something that sounded like that, but I haven't worked in a library in years!"

Just food for thought.