Impostor syndrome featured in a few people's #blogjune posts in 2015. I wrote about some confidence issues I was experiencing as a librarian working in a university where IT services and the library are fully converged. Convergence is not a new thing in universities, but there is not that much written about whether this kind of environment could or should influence the skills and knowledge that people in library technology teams should seek to develop.

In my experience so far, success in a converged environment requires me and other members of my team to become (even more) hybrid professionals, able to wear library and IT hats at the same time or to switch between these as we need to. My professional education as a librarian, and probably more importantly the values of the library profession, do inform all the work that I do but I need to be credible and competent in forums where most if not all of the other participants will be IT professionals. Something that I have been pondering lately is what it would mean to fully embrace being an IT professional as well as a librarian. While most librarians I know are avid users of and advocates for technology in the context of our industry, that doesn't necessarily make us IT professionals. IT professionals have their own qualifications, career pathways, specialisations, professional organisations and values, and these are sometimes not well understood or respected by librarians.

This year professional development (PD) is emerging as the unofficial #blogjune theme. I don't have an approach to my professional development plan that is as comprehensive or as structured as Alisa Howlett's approach (seriously impressive!), but I do take a lot of time to prepare for my annual performance plan discussions with my director. This year, as part of that discussion, I flagged my intention to focus on the IT aspects of my role and came up with three activities:

1. Participation in Women in Technology (WIT)

One of my PD goals for the year was to find an IT community of practice that would enable me to do some networking with people other than librarians.

I picked Women in Technology for a few reasons. Some librarians in my network are members. My university is involved in promoting WIT internally, since WIT's focus is not just on IT but also on life sciences. And as a feminist, WIT's vision to "advance, connect and empower women in technology and life sciences" is one that I can whole-heartedly get behind. So far I have signed up to receive email newsletters and joined the WIT LinkedIn group. I haven't yet gone to any events but I hope I will get to at least one later this year and will make a point of meeting and talking to at least one person that I don't know.

2. Enterprise Architecture

An IT colleague that worked with me on a project mentioned that he thought it could be useful for me to investigate getting some training in enterprise architecture, specifically in the TOGAF framework. In TOGAF the purpose of enterprise architecture is described as "to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the business strategy". There is a lot of crossover between what enterprise architects and what information managers are trying to achieve in an organisation like mine.

A training course and certification would be a huge investment both financially and in terms of time, but fortunately there are some good free PD options available. The first of these is a free online four-week course, Introduction to Enterprise Architecture. This is offered under the Open Universities Australia Open@Study branding, is presented by a well-known industry practitioner, and is really highly rated by students. One of the architects at my work had done this course and also recommended it to others.  He also pointed me in the direction of an overview video on YouTube provided by the same trainer.



My colleague noted that the Open2Study module is based around a formal course structure and doesn't go into the more practical aspects of application, while the YouTube video covers practical application as well. So I am planning to start with the video and then move on to the online module later in the year if I feel like I need that extra level of detail.

3. Service management

I'm currently undertaking some in-house training that will lead to a certification. On Thursday this week I will sit an exam (my first since about 1990 - eek!) for the ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. ITIL was originally created by the UK government's Office of Government Commerce to help implement an efficient framework for IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL has changed since its introduction in the 1980s and now offers a more generic lifecycle approach to service management covering strategy, design, transition (change management), operations, and continuous improvement.

I am finding some of the jargon in ITIL a little alienating but the core concepts are very applicable to my work as the manager of a library technologies team. Although both are a bit out of date, this 2007 blog post and 2008 journal article are good place to start if you want to understand more about how ITIL service management concepts can be applied in libraries.

Impostor syndrome seems to be emerging as a theme in posts and comments this #blogjune: both Kate Davis and Kathryn Greenhill have written great pieces about this. I appreciate people's willingness to share their vulnerabilities in this way. There is something reassuring about knowing other people feel the same way, even if it's a little dismaying to see how these feelings hold us back from contributing fully in our workplaces and developing as professionals.

A few months ago I spoke to my supervisor about some insecurities I had about my new role. My place of work has a fully converged library-IT structure, so much so that we do not even have "the library" as an organisational division, just library services that are delivered out of different groups  in ways that (hopefully!) maximise the use of central infrastructure and encourage innovation and collaboration by different types of information professionals. As a middle manager within this unusual organisational structure, I'm expected to contribute to operations, planning and strategy for systems and services that are well outside my own area of expertise. This was implicit in the position description for my job but it has still been a surprise and a challenge.

Although the primary focus of my team is on library systems, scholarly repositories and publishing platforms, I represent my director and my portfolio in a range of forums where IT infrastructure, application and support across all areas of the university is discussed. In these forums I often feel nervous about speaking up. I worry about making a fool of myself and about making my director or my colleagues look bad and this can affect the way I contribute. What I had observed, and what I talked to my supervisor about, was a tendency to start any comments I was making with something along the lines of "I'm not a technical person, but..." Obviously if you want to build credibility, being tentative and giving people a reason to dismiss what you say before you even get started because you obviously don't even believe in it yourself is not really a great start.

I know that this is not rational. I know that I have successfully managed complex projects with technical aspects and have learned enough of the lingo to be able to effectively work with software developers, business analysts, systems administrators, storage analysts and other types of IT professionals. I know that I have skills and experience that other people in these groups do not, including an understanding of critical legal and regulatory requirements like copyright, recordkeeping and privacy. I know that there is a need for people who can build bridges between hard core IT professionals and other groups of users and stakeholders, and that is one of my strengths. I know that IT managers come from a variety of backgrounds and cannot have in-depth knowledge of everything, and that by the time they reach middle or senior management their technical skills must necessarily give way to other types of expertise anyway. I know that succesful IT programs need more than just technical understanding and that the soft skills that librarians have can make all the difference. And I know that my seat at the table has not been given to me by accident because someone failed to notice I am a complete fraud.

But knowing all this doesn't always make me feel any better, and I am trying to understand this so that I can change it.  I do think that diversity is part of the problem: I went to a meeting this week where I was the only woman and there were eighteen men: I have joked in the past that this will be the closet I will ever get to feeling like Julie Bishop! Librarianship is a female-dominated profession and being visibly in the minority in workplace situations rather than in the majority must affect me somehow. Being an introvert makes some of these situations challenging, and being a perfectionist can also lead to unconstructive behaviours like failing to speak up for fear of making a mistake.

Anyway, here's what I am doing to try to address this. I would love to hear from you if you have any strategies of your own that you think I should try!

1. I've acknowledged this is a problem that I need to address. I've talked about it with my supervisor and other colleagues and I'm talking it about it here. No regrets.
2. I've identified this as a professional development need and am considering how best to build my IT skills and knowledge through internal training courses, external events (the CAUDIT Leadership Institute might be a possibility) and self-directed learning.
3. I am preparing for meetings well in advance, so that I can think through and write down my concerns rather than try to verbalise them on my feet during the meeting. If you are responsible for organising meetings, please people, send out agendas and papers in advance to help everyone make their best contribution.
4. I've had positive feedback from a senior staff member about my participation in at least one of these groups, and I have tried to take this on its own merit, and to consider that how I come across to others and how I feel on the inside could be quite different. I've realised that I can help others that might be feeling like me by preparing them for what the meetings will be like, trying to make them feel comfortable during the meeting (it isn't hard to give someone presenting to a committee a warm smile and your attention) and providing positive feedback after meetings about the contribution someone has made. Doing this for other people helps me be less hard on myself too.
5. And finally, I'm removing the phrase "I'm not a technical person, but..." from my vocabulary. I am a technical person, and I need to start seeing myself that way and presenting myself that way to others.

Last year's #blogjune was a great experience for me: I read more, wrote more and felt more engaged with library colleagues. You might think then that I would have used that as inspiration to keep writing more on my blog, but you would be wrong!

Part of the explanation for the lack of activity on my blog and also on Twitter is that I started a new job in October last year, as the Manager Content and Discovery Services at Griffith University. This was a big change for me and not one that I had been expecting to make. In their book, The Accidental Systems Librarian, Engard and Singer report on the results of a survey that found the majority of systems librarians have 'accidentally' ended up in their roles: "Given the variety of ways a person can become a systems librarian, we come to the role with different combinations of skill sets, knowledge, and comfort with technology." Basically I saw a great opportunity to work for someone I really admired as a leader and decided to go for it.

While I don't regret the decision for a moment, it has been very challenging. Overnight I went from being located outside of traditional library structures (in an eResearch Services team) and working as a project-focused semi-specialist in an emerging area (research data management) to managing a team of mostly librarians. I've had to learn a lot of generic management-y things (budgets, reporting, HR, health and safety, enterprise architecture, activity-based costing); project work has prepared me for some of these, but not all. I've also had to get up to speed on a number of technologies I knew little about, not having worked with commercial library systems since managing projects involving Endeavor's Encompass around ten years ago. I'm fortunate in having a highly knowledgable and patient team, who have guided me through not just our integrated library system and discovery layer, but also interlibrary loans, proxy services, link resolvers, e-resource management tools, library stats packages, subject guides, course reading list solutions and open access journal publishing. (Thankfully, responsibility for self-checkout machines is not on this list!)

On top of this, I'm project managing two projects in areas that are more familiar to me: the upgrade of one repository with new functionality for storing and streaming multimedia collections; and a complete overhaul of another repository for institutional publications. And then there's juggling any number of other new initiatives (hello ORCID identifiers) and still trying to help out when I can with the evolution of research data services at Griffith.

Perhaps more important than all of these technical developments, for the first time I've had to think about longer term strategies for helping a team of experienced library professionals stay motivated and resilient in the face of some big changes to the kind of work they do and the systems they work with now. Singer and Gordon put this quite nicely: "Our primary goal is to facilitate those changes that help our institution carry out its mission. A secondary role is to help our fellow librarians adapt to these inevitable changes."

It's no wonder then that my own professional activities have taken a bit of a backseat over the past eight months. There is no more room in my brain! So, this year's #blogjune for me will be, hopefully, a chance for some much-needed reflection on my new work life and the things that I am learning.

Thanks to Con Weibrands (@flexnib) for getting the ball rolling, and to Peta Hopkins (@petahopkins) for providing an easy way to see what all the other participants (just download the OPML file and add it to your reader).

References
Engard, Nicole C., and Rachel Singer Gordon. 2012. Accidental Systems Librarian (2nd Edition). Medford, NJ, USA: Information Today, Inc.