Ethics and the dynamic organisation / Prof Deon Rossouw
We learnt about the overview of the following:
- core ethics concepts and distinctions
- why ethics matters
- building ethical organisations
There is no institution that functions without Good ethics. Business ethics are the values and standards that determine the interaction business and its stakeholders. Values refer to convictions about what is good/desirable/ important. Strategic values in organisations are about direction. We need convicted individuals that know how to do their jobs. Ethical values determine how we interact as individuals at work. As libraries, we must treat our clients with respect so to retain them. Institutions must build and maintain cultural ethics for their organisations.
We learnt about the strategic importance of for business which is trust and unlocking human potential.
Trust is built by the following:- openness
- competency
- integrity
- benevolence
- history of interactions
- job dissatisfaction
- high employee turnover
- absenteeism
- theft
- sabotage
- inhabitance of creativity
Innovative gaming for Information literacy / Bettie De Kock
It is highly important that libraries become innovative and come up with new ideas. The following are examples of new ideas that libraries need to implement
- get online tutorials for information literacy
- avail up-to-date information brochures
- have an "ask a librarian" online facility
- have library competitions on how to find information from books, sets of encyclopedia, etc
Client Services / Hilda Kriel
Everyone in a University is the library competition. We depend on the same bag of money. We have to have a reason to get more or equal share to everybody else's.
As a library, we have to work hard to make everyone to take us serious and value us as a unit. The following are some of the environmental indicators that we need to look into:
- staff perceptions about the library
- clients perception about us
- client satisfaction
- readables (spine labels, shelf guides,etc)
- financials (charges for photocopies, etc)
- cultural - disables/physically challenged clients
Advocacy Toolkit / Karin Kitching
Library advocacy is about building trustworthy relationships and maintaining them. It is about increasing the perceived value of the library and creating support for the library among customers.
As librarians we always need support for funding among other needs, we therefore must constantly create visibility and awareness of the library.
We have to identify strategic contacts and treat all of them like Presidents.
We have to give our contacts a chance to tell us what they expect of us.
We have to develop a "ready to deliver speech" to use as an elevator speech for the library
We were given guidelines on how to write an elevator speech for our libraries.
Generally, Karin informed us that the US embassy will be opening a Virtual library and we are welcome to join to have access to it. The library will have 25 databases to access. She also encouraged us to apply for a Fulbright scholarship and handed application forms to all of us.
Mobile Technologies / Janice De Wee
This was a practical session using our smart phones. We were given instructions to download some reader software that would enable us to use the smartphone for the session. We created twitter accounts for ourselves and interacted.
We were shown how to use Bluetooth and shared some data via it.
As libraries we need to learn to use the mobile technologies to attract more Digital generation.
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