Guy St. Clair was recently invited to write for the re-launched Information Outlook, the professional journal of the Special Libraries Association. Guy had previously written SLA at 100: From “Putting Knowledge To Work” to Building the Knowledge Culture—A Centennial History of SLA (The Special Libraries Association) 1909-2009, published in 2009.
An online version of SLA’s centennial history can be read at https://www.smr-knowledge.com/smrshare/sla-at-100-from-putting-knowledge-to-work-to-building-the-knowledge-culture-by-guy-st-clair-excerpts/.
Prior to that, he had written articles about specialized librarianship, knowledge services, and related subjects, most of which can be accessed at the SMR International site (https://www.smr-knowledge.com/smrshare/), SMRShare, SMR International’s corporate knowledge capture site.
For the re-launched journal, Guy wrote the following, published in mid-February, 2024:
SLA at 115: Welcoming Our Future
As much as I love history—conducting research to bring the past alive—and writing about the past, this paper of necessity concerns itself with the future. At this time in SLA’s history, we must give attention to how we, as members and participants in one of the most important professional organizations in our field, can rebuild and reframe the Special Libraries Association. What we have been until now is our past, and if SLA is anything, it is an organization of the future. So we must continue to build our future, bringing again the best of what we have brought to the library and information profession during our many years, but we must also do more.
In a way, this article is a continuation (of sorts) of SLA at 100: From “Putting Knowledge to Work” to Building the Knowledge Culture, the association’s centenary history published in 2009. The epilogue of that book recommends that we members embrace the strengths of specialized librarianship, capturing what we have learned about our organization, our profession, and our societal role since SLA’s founding in 1909.
Now, in 2024, we must review what we are and attempt to identify what we can become. For that, our first step is to build a clearly defined purpose that will take our association to new heights of success. We will build into that purpose the commitment that specialist librarians will continue to provide the highest levels of service to their employers, to their users, and to the industries and communities of which they are a part.
It won’t be a sad story. Your author—even at this stage of the game—is not shy about expressing his good thoughts about this much-appreciated professional association that has been so important to so many of us for so long.
Indeed, and possibly because I am by nature an optimist, I wasn’t shy about expressing my positive outlook about SLA. Here’s another quote from the association’s history: “At the beginning of its new century, SLA is strong, and specialist librarians have now arrived at the critical juncture of their ambition, if—as a professional discipline—they choose to embrace this splendid opportunity as their destiny and their responsibility.”
Writing those words, I was seeking to connect our history to our organization’s famous motto—“putting knowledge to work”—and to how it linked to our current work in our centennial year. And I deliberately used it in the subtitle of the book because, to me, the motto described exactly what we specialist librarians had been doing throughout our history. Our members used it—and adhered to it—for many years, but even though the motto fell by the wayside (apparently having been discarded at some point in recent years), it had been an important feature of SLA’s “big picture” for a long time, a solid part of our association’s overall character.
Nevertheless, remembering that motto and its long connection with our association can still be an effective exercise. Simply put, the idea of putting knowledge to work gives us a framework for understanding that in the fifteen years since the publication of the centennial history, we’ve been left not only with our history. We are now also challenged with many new issues, situations, and ways of working that many of us might not have expected. So the motto—straight-forward as it is—takes on new relevance for those professionally engaged in specialized librarianship.
And the motto connects directly with the second section of the book’s subtitle: “building the knowledge culture.” It’s the natural result of what we do as specialist librarians, for in our work with information management, knowledge management, and strategic learning, we are bringing all the elements of our work together in what I like to call “knowledge sharing.” Ergo: a knowledge culture.
So our goal with this exercise is to look forward, to think about how our association might move into a future that will incorporate its fine history and at the same time continue to provide excellence of service for both its members and the institutions and organizations which engage with our members for their professional expertise. Let’s look at how we—individually and collectively—think about ourselves and our association and let’s put into our thinking ideas that our members, leaders, and staff might include in creating a specific statement of purpose.
The idea isn’t new. Indeed, it goes back to Seneca, in one of his most quoted statements: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” OK. That makes sense, but what was Seneca saying that applies to SLA’s future?
It’s not hard to figure out, for Seneca, being a philosopher, was (according to most who write about him) interested in recognizing that philosophy is meant to be used, not just undertaken for idle intellectual entertainment. For us in SLA, the idea of knowing “which port” we’re sailing to is simply another way of thinking about how we will deal with the vagaries of work. Seneca is telling us that, no matter what we’re trying to do, to succeed we must have a purpose. We must know what we want to the end result to be before we attempt to plan for how we’ll get there.
And how do we do that? We ask a simple question: what do we want the Special Libraries Association to be? It’s an approach we can take up with two specific examples I’ve come across, both—it seems to me—worth sharing.
In the first, we go back 100 years. I found it in the archives of the Century Association, an organization in New York City, now 175 years old. The club’s members are authors, poets, artists, and amateurs of letters and fine arts, and in 1922 they were celebrating the club’s 75th anniversary.
In his remarks for the occasion, the club’s president, lawyer, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Elihu Root (1845-1937) referred to the club’s original purpose in a commemorative address for the occasion. As I read his words, it seems to me they can reflect the very direction (in my opinion) we at SLA need to consider today. The club’s founders, he said, “formed an association not for the purpose of doing something, but for the purpose of being something.”
It’s an idea that connects to leadership, and one that—in our focus—might permeate throughout SLA, and not just to the association’s elected leaders. All of us—members, officers, staff, vendors, and all others who support SLA’s goals—are positioned to think “big picture” about SLA. And in doing so, we subscribe to the famous leadership recommendation of McKinsey and Company: “to continually renew [the] organization.”
Which leads to the second (and similar) concept I mentioned, as we seek to find our purpose for SLA. It was promulgated by the late and world-renowned leadership expert Frances Hesselbein (1915-2022). Often referred to as the “dean of leadership development,” Hesselbein became well known for her skill in teaching those of us interested in understanding and managing our leadership skills.
One example of how Hesselbein thought about leadership fits neatly into place here, whether we occupy “official” leadership positions or not, and it links directly to Root’s example. In a Q&A session following a presentation for cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Hesselbein was asked what she thought was the key point of leadership. Her response:
“Leadership,” she said, “is a matter of how to be, not how to do.”
So what is it we want the Special Libraries Association to be? Can we define our organization’s purpose?
Obviously, at this point in my life, I am not positioned to tell you what to do, what to propose, or, indeed, what to be. I can, though, if you will permit, return to my remarks when you presented me with the association’s John Cotton Dana award. In fact, I cannot say it any better or any clearer now than I did then, and I ask you to read over, ruminate, and discuss what I said.
In that presentation, I referred to members of SLA as knowledge services professionals. As such, you are building and implementing the prototype and inspiration for the knowledge culture in your parent organizations and—as I see it—in society at large.
And that knowledge culture will lead us, I predict, to a “golden age” in the management of information, knowledge, and strategic learning in the organizations, businesses, institutions, communities, and in any other situation in which our knowledge services expertise can be of benefit. That and, yes, in society itself.
It’s now recognized that coal and oil fueled the advances of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Computers and microprocessors fueled the advances of the Technical Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. And knowledge—and those of us who understand the importance of knowledge sharing—will fuel the advances of our own time, now and into the future. It will be a time that I predict will come to be looked on as our new—and thrilling— Knowledge Revolution.
And it will be the knowledge strategists and the knowledge thought leaders—that’s you, the members of SLA—who will be managing and leading this effort.
No one knows better than you how to develop knowledge, how to share knowledge, and how to use knowledge. And you delight in—for it is your professional calling—you delight in playing a leading role in ensuring that the Knowledge Revolution is every bit as significant and as critical for all our citizens as were its predecessors.
And I believe—as strongly as I have ever believed anything—that it is through you that the Golden Age of Knowledge Sharing will be achieved. It’s not me, it’s not my generation. We’re just those who came before you and, we hope, helped inspire you to move in this direction.
So that’s our challenge: to put us on the road to finding a purpose for our association. And bringing to a conclusion our thoughts about how we in SLA might create our organization’s own future, for ourselves, for our employers, for our professional colleagues, and for anyone else who comes to us to benefit from learning about knowledge sharing—then to go forward and advance their own success, in whatever goal they are seeking.
That’s what SLA can be. Not what it can do. That will come later, of its own accord, as you decide what specialized librarianship can be. And once you decide on the Special Libraries Association’s purpose, you will succeed. And do what you need to do.
References
Hesselbein, Frances, Marshall Goldsmith, and Sarah McArthur, Work is Love Made Visible. Hoboken, New Jersey, 2019: John Wiley and Sons, 2010.
Root, Elihu. Commemorative Address – Seventy-Fifth Anniversary. New York: The Century Association. 1922.
St. Clair, Guy. “Knowledge Services: Your Company’s Key to Performance Excellence.” Information Outlook (2001): 5.6 (p.6).
St. Clair, Guy. Knowledge Services: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century Organization. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2017. [A free PDF version is available at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110465525/html to download directly.]
St. Clair, Guy. From One-Person Library Management to Knowledge Services. [Published at Guy St. Clair’s blog Sharing Guy’s Journey, June 23, 2019.
St. Clair, Guy. SLA at 100: From “Putting Knowledge to Work” to Building the Knowledge Culture—A Centennial History of SLA (1909-2009). Alexandria VA: Special Libraries Association. 2009. [Although the book is out of print, a typescript version is available at https://www.smr-knowledge.com/smrshare/sla-at-100-from-putting-knowledge-to-work-to-building-the-knowledge-culture-by-guy-st-clair-excerpts/]
“What is Leadership?” McKinsey Insights. (August 17, 2022). https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-leadership
About the Author
Guy St. Clair is a writer and editor living in New York City. He is the Series Editor for Knowledge Services with De Gruyter Saur in Munich and Berlin.
A member of SLA since 1972, Guy St. Clair speaks affectionately about how he “would not have had a career” if it had not been for his many years of volunteer work with the association. He was given SLA’s Professional Award in 1989. The citation for the award reads: “Guy St. Clair is credited in the information profession with recognizing the role of one-person libraries in the library community.” He was recognized with SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award in 2019, being cited for his lifetime achievement and for “exceptional service to the association and to the library and information profession.”
As an author, Guy St. Clair has written fourteen books on various subjects relating to library and information science, information management, knowledge management, and knowledge services. He has also written two organizational histories, including SLA at 100: From “Putting Knowledge to Work” to Building the Knowledge Culture—A Centennial History of SLA (1909-2009). During his years as an SLA member, Guy St. Clair’s professional articles have been published in both Special Libraries and Information Outlook.