Emerging Leaders 2019 Team ReportProject Team G: International Peer-Mentoring: A Pilot Project

Project Host Unit: ALA International Relations Round Table

EL Team Members: Kelly Grogg, Adrienne Keane, Georgina Rivas-Martinez, Trina Rivera, and Stacey Shapiro

Member Guide: Dr. Muzhgan Nazarova

Staff Liaison: Delin Guerra

Project Description: Building on the success of the International Librarians Network (ILN), which was discontinued in March, 2017 this project is an attempt to start an international peer-mentoring program within the IRRT. IRRT was one of the original partners of ILN. One of the major goals of this project is to facilitate the international exchange and partnership between

library professionals in different countries, building global networks and supporting knowledge and information exchange among colleagues around the world. One of the initial stages of the project, in addition to proper advertising and marketing among the national and international members of ALA including the IRRT members, will be to create a special space on the IRRT

website as a part of one of the IRRT committees where interested individuals can apply and the information will be entered in the database. The role of the IRRT team working directly with this

project will be finding the right match and coordinating this partnership. As it is clearly indicated in the title this project is a pilot and depending on the results on how successful this

project will be it will continue or discontinue in the future. The model of the IRRT Sister Libraries Committee coordinating the partnership between the libraries will also be used.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our Project Architect Brenda Hahn, Delin Guerra, Joan Weeks, Grace Yan Liu, Muzhgan Nazarova, and the rest of the ALA International Relations Round Table

Executive board for their assistance. This project would not be possible without their sponsorship, guidance, and support.

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ContentsAcknowledgements......................................................................................................................................................................1

Introduction.................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Research........................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

ILN Resources.......................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Research on Virtual Peer Mentorship...............................................................................................................................4

Existing Mentorship Programs............................................................................................................................................5

Program Design............................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Application.................................................................................................................................................................................5

Matching..................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Marketing strategy and materials.......................................................................................................................................6

Website...................................................................................................................................................................................7

Blog......................................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Email....................................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Social media......................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Evaluation...................................................................................................................................................................................8

Recommendations for the Future............................................................................................................................................9

Funding....................................................................................................................................................................................... 9

Partnerships................................................................................................................................................................................9

MentorNJ............................................................................................................................................................................... 9

IRRT Sister Libraries Committee...............................................................................................................................10

IFLA..................................................................................................................................................................................... 10

Works Cited................................................................................................................................................................................. 11

Appendix 1................................................................................................................................................................................... 12

Appendix 2................................................................................................................................................................................... 14

Appendix 3................................................................................................................................................................................... 15

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IntroductionTeam G was tasked with implementing a pilot program for an international peer-mentorship within the International Relations Round Table (IRRT). This program was modeled on the International Librarians Network (ILN) peer mentor program, which ended in 2017. The expected goals of this project were to:

● Facilitate the international exchange and partnerships between library professionals in different countries

● Establish and build global networks among information professionals● Support knowledge and information exchange among colleagues around the world

In addition, the group was also expected to produce a marketing strategy and materials to promote the program among the national and international members of ALA including the IRRT members. Finally, the group was asked to create an assessment survey to evaluate the success of the program.

The outcome of this project is the International Librarians Mentorship Program (ILMP). This program was established with the goal of becoming a sustainable international online peer mentoring program within the IRRT that serves as a resource to connect librarians worldwide.

Research

Before beginning work on the International Librarians Mentorship Program (ILMP), Team G conducted a review of the literature on the topic of mentorship programs to learn as much as possible about the benefits of mentorship programs, as well as their common pitfalls.

ILN Resources

The most valuable articles were published by the ILN about their successful program, particularly Kate Byrne, et al.’s “The Final Report: Running an online, international peer mentoring program”, which documented the processes used to run the ILN over its four-year lifespan, as well as their lessons learned. The report also included crucial information on the ILN’s organizational structure, volunteer management, marketing, and financial and legal considerations.

The ILN was an incredibly successful program that eventually grew to serve over 5,500 participants from 130 countries. ILMP replicated many aspects of the ILN. ILN highlighted their success through regularly evaluating participants of the program, who regularly stated that this

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program helped them to see librarianship on a more international scale and look at the profession as a whole, outside of their own “day job”. The ILN also reported that 95% of the participants intended to enroll in a future program round (Byrne 8, “The Final Report”). With the positive reputation of this program, Team G felt little need to reinvent the program, but rather to adjust the ILN to fit within the American Library Association and ensure its long-term sustainability. For example, we pared down our organizational and volunteer structure, social media outlets, and website content in order to make the program more manageable for a small volunteer staff.

We were also able to benefit from the ILN’s lessons learned. For example, the ILN initially launched without a code of conduct. However, after there was a complaint about inappropriate conduct in the pilot round, they drafted a Code of Conduct that participants were required to sign, which prohibited unprofessional communication, including solicitation. After some discussion, we chose to require applicants to accept a simple agreement mandating professional conduct in order to participate in the ILMP (Byrne 11, “The Final Report”).

After reviewing ILN’s program model, many of their difficulties were financial and staffing constraints. Over the years, ILN grew into a large program, affecting the ability of the volunteers to run the program and forcing ILN to expand their website and email support, which led to increased costs. In attempts to cover costs, partnerships were formed with IRRT, Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and Information Science Program at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which met operational costs (Byrne 10, “The Final Report”). For the ILMP program, IRRT will be co-hosting the webpage, which will help reduce these ongoing costs.

Research on Virtual Peer Mentorship

“Rethinking mentoring: Online, international peer mentoring with the International Librarians Network” (Byrne) provided a more in-depth look at the benefits and challenges of online peer mentoring. The ILN based their program on the principle of professional reciprocity, “that all participants have something to contribute and something to gain from each other regardless of career stage or sector” (Byrne 4, “Rethinking mentoring”). This was also practical, as it can be difficult to recruit enough mentors to be matched with mentees seeking professional guidance (Byrne 5, “Rethinking mentoring”). In addition, we found that people typically feel more comfortable sharing in a peer mentorship model, particularly with regard to some of the more emotional aspects of work (Lee 116). Since the librarians in this program will be working in such different contexts, we felt the participants had the most to gain from a mutual sharing of knowledge rather than a traditional mentor-mentee relationship.

It’s particularly useful for peer mentoring to take place virtually in the field of librarianship due to the number of one person libraries, and small staffed libraries. It’s generally not appropriate for managers to mentor their employees, and in many libraries, this doesn’t leave very many

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options for mentorship (Ritchie 223). Virtual peer mentorship negates many of the pitfalls of typical mentorship that may take place in libraries today.

While there are challenges to an online mentoring model, including varying time zones and setting expectations (Byrne 6, “Rethinking mentoring”), we believe that the benefits of this model outweigh the disadvantages. Many communication tools allow for asynchronous communications (e.g. email), and participants will benefit from a global professional network.

Existing Mentorship Programs

In addition to the scholarly research, there are also several existing mentorship programs within ALA that provided valuable guidance as we established our own program. Elizabeth Serrano, the Membership and Marketing Specialist at the American Library Section for Children (ALSC) provided us a copy of their application and walked us through their manual matching process.

In addition, we also reviewed the mentoring programs of REFORMA National, LLAMA, and MentorNJ, among others. MentorNJ’s system of creating a database where mentees could choose their own mentor was considered, as well as the application processes for mentorships in REFORMA and LLAMA. We compared applications, matching processes, program length, and other aspects of the various mentorship programs.

Program DesignFollowing the model established by ILN, Team G chose to create a similar peer-to-peer mentoring program, accepting librarians with any level of experience and a desire to build professional connections and learn from peers and colleagues. In order to keep the program manageable and sustainable for our small volunteer staff, we limited the first round of partnerships to 50 participants. The first 50 eligible applicants will be accepted, while making sure that each participant can be matched with a partner from a different country.

ILMP is designed to start with 50 participants, with applications accepted from July 1-August 1. The program itself will commence September 1 and will run for four months, from September through December. Participants must have reliable internet access, fluent English skills, and be able to commit one hour each week to participate. The preferred forms of communication (email, Skype, etc.) must be established by the two parties. In order to assist with communication, a variety of topics will be posted on the ILMP blog monthly. Participants also have the option to choose a project to work on together and implement at their home library. At the close of the four months, participants are able to share their experience on ILMP’s blog.

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ApplicationThe application is available online as a Google Form (https://bit.ly/2WM68OC) to ensure that the applications will be automatically archived. All applications will be stored using Google Drive, allowing designated volunteers to access the applications at any time. All accounts and documents have been shared to the email irrt.mentor@gmail.com.

The application asks about country of residence, type of library, and areas of professional interest. We want to ensure that each librarian is paired with someone from a different country. In addition, we wanted to give applicants the option to request a partner from a particular type of library (academic, public, school, etc.) Finally, we also wanted to allow applicants to be matched based on shared professional interests. We also ask what the participant hopes to gain from the program to provide us with feedback on how we might adapt the program over time to better meet participant needs (see Appendix A).

Matching Participants will be matched based on their country of residence (to be paired with someone from a different country), type of library (if desired), and professional interests. We did not include experience as a factor in order to keep the mentorship relationships peer-to-peer. According to the ILN, “approximately half select ‘any’ when defining their partner’s characteristics,” which reminded us that the most important factor for most participants is getting the opportunity to be paired with a library professional from a different country (Byrne 5, “Rethinking mentoring”).

For our first pilot round, we will be matching applicants manually, making country of residence the highest priority (making sure to match each applicant with someone from a different country), type of library second (making an effort to honor requests to be matched with a librarian from a certain type of library), and professional interests third.

The ILN started with a manual matching process; however, once their program began to scale, this process became unsustainable and partnered with a technical consultant to develop an automated matching script in Windows PowerShell. As our program continues into the future, we plan to explore options for automated matching as needed.

Marketing strategy and materialsSince the program is sponsored by the International Relations Round Table, the program adapted their logo to use on its website and marketing materials. The team plans to advertise at ALA Annual and solicit applications for the first round of participants there, as well as advertise through student and international organizations, such as IFLA. The ILMP also plans to partner

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with IFLA and the IRRT Sister Libraries Committee to promote the program among their members through their listservs and social media.

WebsiteThe creation of the website was successful thanks to the help of Joan Weeks, IRRT webmaster. Joan assisted us in creating the wireframes which she then uploaded onto the IRRT website to create our webpage (http://www.ala.org/rt/irrt/irrtmentorprogram). She clarified the standards for an ALA webpage and provided advice on how to keep navigation easy for the user. Our webpage is embedded within the main IRRT site, thanks to their sponsorship of the ILMP. With Joan’s input, a logo was created to subhead each page and indicate the relationship of the International Librarians Mentor Program with IRRT.

Each team member helped to complete one of the following pages for the website. The About page describes the program, history, and requirements to participate. The How to Apply tab lists the application deadline of August 1st, and states the requirements to participate. There is a link to the Google Form application at the bottom of the page. The Communications tab discusses expectations for the collaboration between participants and lists topics that could be discussed. The Participants Stories tab links straight to the blog where we hope librarians will share their experience in the program. We also included a Volunteer tab that highlights the available volunteer positions and the expected time commitment for each position.

Please find our final webpage at http://www.ala.org/rt/irrt/irrtmentorprogram.

BlogWe created a blog on our website in hopes that participants will share their stories and experience from this program. Included on the blog are topics to help encourage conversations between the librarians. Blogs are scheduled to be released monthly to help keep participants engaged.

Please see our blog at: https://connectinglibrarians.blogspot.com

EmailEmail will be a vital marketing tool for the International Librarians Mentorship Program. However, an email is only as useful as its mailing list. In order to ensure as many people as

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possible are receiving information about the ILMP, we have been slowly compiling a mailing list with groups and people who may be interested in participating in this program. In addition, IFLA and IRRT have committed to help promote ILMP among their members. We also plan to send this email out to a number of library and information science programs for them to distribute to their staff, students, and alumni. The informational email text is as follows:

The International Peer Mentorship program, sponsored by the International Relations Round Table of the American Library Association, welcomes applications for their peer mentorship program. This program will begin in September 2019 and will continue until January 2019. Participants will be given prompts to discuss with their partner and will be asked to complete a blog post discussing what they learned from their experience.

Librarians of all experience levels and all countries are encouraged to apply to this unique mentorship experience! In order to be considered for the program you must have:

● Reliable internet access● Fluent English skills● Ability to commit one hour each week to participate● A desire to build professional connections and learn from peers and

colleagues● Ability to commit to a collaboration for four months

Applications for this program will be due on August 1st, 2019. Please visit http://www.ala.org/rt/irrt/irrtmentorprogram/how-to-apply for more information and email irrt.mentorship@gmail.com with any inquiries.

Social media Canva was used extensively to create the social media marketing tools. An image of a map was created using Canva that is easily replicable among many different forms of social media and can be used over and over again without any copyright issues. This way, each email blast or Facebook post will have the same branding and include the IRRT logo to easily distinguish our program (see Appendix 3).

EvaluationWe also created a brief follow up evaluation that participants will receive upon completion of the program (see Appendix B). This will allow us to continue to improve over time and better meet the needs of our participants.

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Recommendations for the Future

Funding One of the key challenges that ILN faced was a lack of funding, especially as their program grew to over 5,500 participants. Indeed, this was one of the factors that eventually led the program to be discontinued. With this in mind, we knew that finding funding sources would be a major challenge for our program as well.

While we did a scan for available funding opportunities, as Byrne explained in “The Final Report”, “the ILN’s innovative approach and global, pan-specialist nature did not fit well into existing funding channels” (12). While they were eventually able to partner with a few organizations (IRRT, ALIA, and QUT), these partnerships were not enough to sustain the program over the long term. Due to lack of funding, we also decided to follow in their footsteps and rely on a volunteer staff in order to get the program up and running. However, as the ILN discovered, “it is difficult to operate a sustainable business model entirely reliant on volunteers” (Byrne 13, “The Final Report”). While we have two team members who have offered to stay on and run the program after the Emerging Leaders project has ended, the sustainability of the program may ultimately be affected unless funding sources are found. While we made great efforts to increase the sustainability of our program by keeping it small and manageable for a small volunteer staff, the program would undoubtedly become more successful if we were able to expand and include more participants.

Our recommendation to IRRT would be to fund a permanent part- or full-time position to run the ILMP as soon as possible. This will allow the program to grow beyond its initial 50 participants and take advantage of the robust partnerships built up with the Sister Libraries Committee and IFLA. In addition, we also recommend that IRRT establishes legal status for ILMP through incorporation as an association, as ILN eventually did (Byrne 11, “The Final Report”). This will facilitate fundraising on behalf of the program.

Partnerships

MentorNJDuring our research phase, the Emerging Leaders group reached out to other organizations that had already set up a successful mentoring project, one of which was MentorNJ. This mentoring program began in New Jersey in 2015 to foster mentorship in the state among librarians. In conversation with Mi-Sun Lyu, the creator of MentorNJ, we discussed how we could collaborate. The team looked at the organizational structure of MentorNJ, with a mentor directory and a hands-off approach to matching (participants choose their mentors from the online directory).

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Lyu was also interested in possibly setting up a future librarian job exchange program in which librarians from the United States and around the world could switch jobs for a short period of time and experience life in a different part of the world. Our goals closely align, and Lyu suggested that the directory could be run through the MentorNJ site that is already established. MentorNJ is expanding to allow librarians from Maryland to join the directory, and the site could continue to expand to allow to host the ILMP. MentorNJ gets steady funding from the state of New Jersey for the upkeep of their program, which is why a partnership would make good financial sense in keeping the International Librarian Mentorship Program sustainable year after year. Due to the fast paced nature and quick turnaround time of the Emerging Leaders project timeframe, we were unable to collaborate with MentorNJ. However, in the future, the committee should reach out again to Mi-Sun Lyu and MentorNJ about a partnership with the International Relations Round Table and ILMP.

IRRT Sister Libraries CommitteeWe also met with the IRRT Sister Libraries Committee to learn more about their matching process and also to establish a partnership for cross-promotion. Like MentorNJ, they take a hands-off approach to matching, allowing libraries to browse their directory of “Libraries Seeking Sisters” and reach out to libraries that they would like to partner with. We also established a partnership with the Sister Libraries Committee in order to cross-promote both programs at ALA, IFLA, and among our member base. In addition, one of our team members has since joined the IRRT Sister Libraries Committee and will be able to serve as liaison between the two program.

IFLAFrom the beginning of this project, we understood that IFLA should be an important partner in this project. They are a large, international library association, and perhaps the organization best aligned with our goals and objectives. Early on, we met and established a partnership with IFLA, who has agreed to promote the ILMP program on their listservs and social media. We recommend continuing to work with IFLA to strengthen our existing ties and to maintain open communication regarding funding and long-term sustainability. If the first round of ILMP is successful, we may be able to obtain increased financial and in-kind support from IFLA, and in return, as we continue to grow, we will become a more valuable partner for IFLA as well.

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Works Cited

Byrne, Kate, et al. “The Final Report: Running an online, international peer mentoring program.” Figshare. August 2018.

Byrne, Kate, et al. “Rethinking mentoring: Online, international peer mentoring with the International Librarians Network.” Figshare. June 2016.

Lee, Jongwook, et al. “Peer relationships and mentoring between LIS doctoral students.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, vol. 49, 2017, pp. 115-124.

“Libraries Seeking Sisters.” ALA, http://www.ala.org/rt/irrt/irrtcommittees/irrtsisterlibrary/sisterlibrary/libraries-seeking-sisters. Accessed May 23, 2019.

Ritchie, Ann et al. “Mentoring in Professional Associations: Continuing Professional Development for Librarians.” Health Libraries Review, vol. 16, 1999, pp. 216-225.

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Appendix 1

International Librarians Mentorship Program Application The first 50 eligible applicants will be matched and paired to begin the program on September 1st. Participants must communicate with their program partners and the admin in a respectful, courteous and professional manner.

Last name: First name:

● What country do you work in?

● How long have you worked in libraries?

● What type of library do you work in?○ Public○ Academic○ School○ Special

○ Museum○ Archive○ Urban○ Rural

● Do you prefer to be matched with a colleague in a specific type of library?○ Public○ Academic○ School○ Special○ Museum

○ Archive○ Urban○ Rural○ Any

● Select three areas of professional interest○ Administration: Collection Development○ Administration: Library Management○ Professional Issues: General Career Development○ Professional Issues: Leadership○ Public Service: Reference

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○ Public Service: Youth Services○ Public Service: Teen Services○ Public Service: Programming○ Special Libraries: Academic○ Special Libraries: Government○ Special Libraries: Solo/Nonprofit○ Technical Services: Cataloging/Metadata○ Technical Services: Vendor Relation○ Technology: Emerging Technologies/Makerspaces○ Technology: Web Engagement/Social Media ○ OTHER

● What do you hope to gain from the International Peer Mentorship Program?

● Are you interested in volunteering with Connecting International Librarians Mentorship Program afterwards?

Please submit this application to irrt.mentorship@gmail.com

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Appendix 2ILMP: Follow-Up Survey (adapted from Project Outcome)

1. Did you learn something helpful by participating in ILMP?

2. What did you like most about the program?

3. Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

4. How did you learn about this program?

5. On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that you would recommend this program to a colleague?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Appendix 3Social Media image