Competency Statement: Demonstrate professional leadership and communication skills.

Introduction

As librarians and information professionals, our objectives are based on the information-seeking success of our users. Communication skills are necessary to teach users information literacy and information retrieval, which can then be facilitated toward the synthesization of information into new ideas. Once people become self-sufficient providing life-long learning, our usefulness is often questioned. To maintain the value, visibility, and growth of this profession, it is necessary to compound communication with leadership.

Communication in teaching

Information professionals will find themselves in situations where they may have to teach one-on-one, or to a group. In one-on-one sessions, it is advised to learn more about the user and find out what they already know, confirm with them whether they want to learn how to use databases, or other ways they may want to proceed, and talk through their information-seeking process aloud. (Cassell & Hiremath, 2017). By balancing communication with purpose, librarians can avoid taking up the users’ time teaching already familiar skills, teach at the user’s pace, and conduct a reference request as a teachable moment. Librarians and information professionals can also communicate asynchronously by creating written and video tutorials so that users can learn at their own pace.

In classroom settings, librarians may have the opportunity to collaborate with teachers and faculty to integrate information literacy concepts to learn about how to research and problem-solve in the subject domain of what they are studying.

Empowering users requires openness to initiate, active listening, collaboration, and purposeful communication.

Communication in leadership

Communication in leadership also empowers users, but in a different way. Alesia McManus (2017) writes, “one of the best ways to obtain leadership experience outside of a defined job description is service” (p. 1). Service is defined as, “The action of serving someone or something” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021). For example, communication is essential to management, marketing, and advocacy. These areas are of service to workers, users, and benefactors. The goal to maintain and sustain the organization encourages communicating direction and transparency to these audiences. Leadership communication informs the team where they are going and how they are doing in management, informs users of new policies, programs, and tools at the organization and updates on existing services in marketing, and informs benefactors of strategic plans and performance reports of the organization in advocacy. Transparent communication empowers people by giving them both positive and negative information to make informed decisions, including how to do their job, how to use a service, and how they can help in the best way possible. Empirical evidence shows that people are engaged when communication is used to “share substantial, complete, relevant, and truthful information… in a timely manner, encourage… participation, and convey balanced information that is open to … scrutiny and holds the organization accountable” (Men, 2017, p. 238). Studies on transparent communication have also found that “stakeholders ascribe strong reputation to the organization when it is transparent in the conduct of its affairs” and that when communication is “minimal, incomplete, or untruthful… it loses ground in the court of public opinion” (Men, 2014, p. 265).

It is well understood that transparency invites more open communication and collaboration that can benefit members of a group as they coordinate themselves toward a shared goal.

Evidence

Evidence #1– INFO 284 – Digital Curation – Final Project Group Check-in

In this final project group check-in, I demonstrate my communication and leadership skills by taking the initiative, responsibility, and accountability to write this document. I reference each of us as member #1, #2, and #3 to preserve anonymity and fairness in participation, but for the record, I am member #1. I share our team’s progress, including achievements and remaining issues, and how we intend to mitigate the issues. I then shared this document with my team members to review. It was a chance for me to communicate with the professor, but also with my team members that I had been actively listening to their suggestions and issues and monitoring our progress toward our goal. I invited them to review the document for feedback and add anything they thought was important to share before submitting the progress report to the professor.

This evidence demonstrates my ability to take the reins of a leadership role in the group, communicate transparently, and holding ourselves accountable to the completion of our project.

Evidence #2– Work Experience – Capo Tuning Specs

During my time as a Ubisoft game designer for Rocksmith+, I documented the specifications for a feature that takes the player through a tuning process with a capo. A capo is a device that keeps the strings depressed on a guitar to alter their pitches, and some songs are played with a capo. This document is a blueprint that communicates the feature is implemented by indicating the purpose of each screen element, what text should be displayed, and most importantly, what visual and audio feedback to communicate to the player so that they understand that the string they are tuning was successful or failed. Capo tuning is critical because if the system cannot detect the strings correctly, the system won’t be able to evaluate the players’ performance accurately when they play a song. In the case that string tuning failed, I needed to have the feature communicate to the player what options were available to complete the tuning for an accurate game evaluation. Players could either choose to try the tuning check again and adjust their capo without using the guitar pegs or use a precision tuner to adjust their string pegs with the capo on.

This evidence demonstrates my ability to communicate the direction of product features for stakeholders and instruction to players that teach them how use it.

Evidence #3 – Presentation commentary of “Ask an archivist with Alison Quirion” (External link)

In response to the Entertainment Software Association’s statement on its non-cooperation toward the preservation of games (Carter, 2024), Warren Spector (2024), a famed game designer writes, “The preservation of games and game development materials is not a new problem. It’s been a problem since the medium was first created… The history of how a game has been made is critical to academics and authors of the present and future. A medium’s history isn’t just in the work product – it’s in the work that went into making the product.” (para. 3, 5).

I attended a SJSU Society of American Archivists Student Chapter presentation on game archiving, featuring Alison Quirion, who spoke about her experience archiving at Sony. Along with being impressed by the visual appeal of her pixelated game theme and finding myself nodding my head in excitement and understanding of the meaningful work she was doing, I learned ways to communicate how game development archival would be beneficial to game development companies. I summarized and highlighted some of these points from her presentation and article in Archival Outlook on my Substack blog, which is a personal project to share my thoughts on the importance and benefits of applying LIS concepts to archive game development.

This evidence demonstrates my ability to exercise leadership to learn, communicate, and extend archival practices to a creative industry that is often finding itself too late to preserve its craft.

Conclusion

As a librarian or information worker, I expect to do a lot of public or client-facing work, but also behind the scenes with my organizations’ collections. To balance my time between helping patrons and managing the collection, my communication skills are essential for teaching others how to navigate our collections and how to use information found within it and outside of it authoritatively. Beyond the one-on-one and classroom settings, communication combined with leadership skills are necessary to build relationships and pave the way for my profession, organization, and its stakeholders, including fighting stereotypes and popular culture that treats librarianship as a “low-status profession or not a profession at all” (Keer, 2015, “Librarianship as a profession section”, para. 3). I intend to continue proudly communicating the work of mine and my peers for better understanding and decision-making in my organizations, other industries, and society as a whole.

References

Carter, J. (2024, April 22). ESA says members won’t support any plan for libraries to preserve games online. Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/esa-org-won-t-cooperate-game-preservation

Cassell, K. A. & Hiremath, U. (2018). Reference and information services: An introduction (4th Ed.). ALA-Neal Schuman. 

Jiang, H. & Men, R. L. (2015). Creating an engaged workforce: The impact of authentic leadership, transparent organizational communication, and work-life enrichment. Communication Research, 44(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502156131

McManus, A. (2017). Serving to lead. Reference and User Services Quarterly 57(2), 86-88. 

Men, L. R. (2014). Internal reputation management: The impact of authentic leadership and transparent communication. Corporate Reputation Review, 17, 254-272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/crr.2014.14

Keer, G. (2015, October 30). The stereotype stereotype: Our obsession with librarian representation. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/10/30/the-stereotype-stereotype/

Spector, W. (2024, April 26). Why doesn’t everyone see the importance of preserving our past? Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/game-preservation