Steve Thomas: Ann, welcome to the podcast.
Ann Medaille: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Steve Thomas: Before we get into the book and the topics you talk about there, can you just talk briefly about how you got into the library profession? What attracted you to librarianship?
Ann Medaille: Oh, yes. It’s actually my third career, and I know that’s not an unusual response for folks in libraries. I was a teacher for a while. I taught middle school and high school drama and English. And I did that for a while, and then I worked as an editor for a while, too. I worked in publishing. Actually, I worked with Elsevier.
But I’ve always loved learning. I loved being a part of learning. I love teaching. And then libraries just seem like kind of a natural fit for me with that kind of love of learning. So I’ve now been in libraries for almost 20 years, about 19 years. And I’m the Director of Research and Instructional Services at the University of Nevada, Reno. So I lead our liaison librarian program and our instruction program here.
Steve Thomas: That’s great. That’s great.
Ann Medaille: I didn’t think of it until my husband really said, “You spend so much time in libraries. Why don’t you try to get a job in one?” I was like, “Oh. Oh, yeah.”
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you mentioned that you kind of always liked learning. Was there anything in particular that started that path, or how has that developed as your career went on of wanting to really think about upskilling, learning kind of things?
Ann Medaille: Yeah. It’s true of a lot of us in libraries that we are lifelong learners, that we just enjoy learning, and so we enjoy helping people learn, too. I’ve always been just really fascinated by it, thinking about different ways to help people learn. My last book that I wrote for ALA was on learning theory. It was called Learning Theory for Libraries. So I was really diving into the psychology of how people learn, and I was just really fascinated in what goes on upstairs that makes learning happen, and kinda breaking that down. ‘Cause sometimes the theory, the cognitive components of learning are kinda complicated. So I’ve always just been really interested in that, learning and teaching.
Steve Thomas: Was there anything happening in libraries, either in your experience or just in your research, that made you think you needed to write this book now? We need to take a fresh look at staff development kind of things?
Ann Medaille: Yeah, it really was AI, I’m afraid to say. ‘Cause I know sometimes we’re all sick of thinking about it. But yeah, when generative AI kinda came on the scene in late 2022, 2023, I started implementing a lot of things for our liaison librarians to upscale in AI, to learn about AI. So we were reading articles, having discussions, experimenting with tools, sharing with each other, teaching each other, creating lesson plans, all those kinds of things, that a lot of us were doing at the time.
But it really did strike me oh my gosh, it’s one more thing. Because we’ve all had so much layered on top of our normal job expectations over the years, and even just watching my own liaison librarians, like, how much they are learning on top of what maybe they’re expected to do, things just accrue. And I just kept thinking of, wow, the pace with which we are expected to keep up with these things seems like it’s accelerating. How do we do this? How do we manage this from an organizational perspective, and also just help people, from an individual perspective, keep up and feel good about it, and not feel overwhelmed and stressed and have change fatigue and learning anxiety, and that’s still, that we can get back to learning is something that we all like, that’s exciting. It arouses our curiosity and our interest in the world and allows us to contribute more to the library mission.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you make the argument in the book that we need to change the way we think about this, that it can’t just be, “Oh you need to learn that. Here’s this webinar or go to this in-person workshop,” and that’s not gonna cut it for the pace of change, now, of having to learn these skills.
Ann Medaille: That is not, and I’m hoping that’s one of the major ideas that comes across from the book, that we have to start thinking beyond training kind of as “we provide our library staff with some training, and then we’re done.” And you can see that with AI. We can’t just send everybody to an AI workshop, and then it’s, “Okay, we’re all done. We have now upskilled in AI.” We all know that every month, every few months, things are changing so fast. It’s really developing the capacity to continue keep learning and then support that on an organizational level. How do we just infuse learning into work so that learning is just something that we’re always doing, and we get comfortable with that idea.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And you have a framework of the four E’s. Can you talk about that framework and explain why all four are necessary?
Ann Medaille: Yes. Yes. And this is an idea that comes from an HR consultant who talked about the four E’s in workplace learning. But the four E’s essentially are education, that’s formal education. Experiences, and that means actually doing something, doing the thing, doing a task. Exposures, and that means working with other people who have expertise in an area. And then the final one is the environment, so that’s all of the things that center around being able to learn effectively in the workplace, and that includes time, resources, you are given the support from your manager to do this of course, and maybe you have resources in your environment that support your learning. So that’s the environment. So education, experiences, exposures, and environment are the four E’s.
We’ve been accustomed to thinking, like you said, of training, upskilling, professional development just in terms of that first E, that first formal education piece. And that’s not to say that it’s not important. It is important, and it’s essential. There are times when we need a webinar, or we need a workshop, or we need a short course, or we need to read a training manual or watch an instructional video. All of that’s essential. We don’t wanna get rid of that. But we’ve all had the experience I’m sure where you watched a webinar or you attended a workshop and you thought, “Yeah, this is some really good information. That’s good stuff.” But then what happened? You never got a chance to implement it, and you forgot it.
So there has to be this kind of through line of, okay, you’ve got the formal education. Now you have experiences, workplace experiences that allow you to implement it. In other words, you practice. And then the exposures. You work with other people who can help you along the way. And then finally, the environment is all set up to support all of that. So it’s essential, and that’s why we need to support continuous learning.
But I think even with AI, when we’re talking about that, it would be hard to say, “Okay, just start doing a task with AI,” without maybe having some kind of formal education. Having learned a little bit about, like, how these tools work, that’s kind of the formal education piece, then you can implement it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And you talk about like stretch assignments and other on-the-job things. What makes a stretch assignment a particularly good way to implement new skills?
Ann Medaille: Yeah. It’s a good way, and really one of the best ways to implement skills. So a stretch assignment is a task that’s a little bit out of the ordinary for somebody. They’re capable of doing it. They’ve got the skills, but it’s out of their ordinary work tasks. So you want it to be just at the right level, something that they’re capable of doing, but it’s gonna push them a little bit. It’s gonna be a little challenging to do that. But stretch assignments are really one of the best ways that people learn and grow their skills on the job. Sometimes they can take the form of team assignments. That can be especially helpful, especially if somebody gets the opportunity to work with somebody more experienced that’s helping them along the way. But those stretch assignments are a wonderful way for people to grow. Sometimes managers are really good at picking, “okay, like I see, you’ve gotten to A, B, C, and D. The next step is E, so let’s push you a little bit here into this stretch assignment. They can see what skills, or they should know really, what skills their people have and what they need to grow.
But the important thing about, that I love about stretch assignments is that they’re free. I think a big issue that comes up with upskilling and really thinking about upskilling is “Oh my gosh, what is this gonna cost our library? We don’t have, like, a huge, professional development budget to really develop our people.” That’s just the reality of it. But stretch assignments, they’re one of the best ways to grow your skills, and they cost nothing.
Steve Thomas: And another important category is just the more one-on-one of either mentoring or shadowing somebody, and that’s a different kind of learning, learning from someone individually instead of just trying to push yourself on your own skills.
Ann Medaille: Yes. Those exposures. Yeah, there are a lot of ways to set them up, and sometimes they take some thought, too. Even establishing a good mentoring program, you have to have a little bit of thought and planning about how to execute that effectively. But yeah, there are a lot of good ways to work one-on-one, or even in teams with people to get exposure to others. So the mentoring’s effective. Managers often serve as coaches. They serve in a coaching capacity all the time.
But there are other things, too. We do a lot of library instruction in our program, and so we’re always observing each other teach. So even just that watching piece can be effective. Some job shadowing can be effective.
In my library too right now, we’re having lightning talks for AI experimentation. So people are taking AI tools, experimenting with them, and then we come back and we have lightning talks where people give a 5 or 10 minute presentation on what they did with their experimentation, and really again exposing others to what they’re doing. So there’s a lot of ways to implement that.
I think some things that are really effective too can be kinda larger group settings, like a community of practice. Setting those up can be really effective, where you kinda have ongoing meetings or discussions or learning from each other. There are lots of different ways to set up those exposures. Sometimes even an effective Teams channel where people can ask questions. A lot of newbies coming into an organization, they might not always know, they might not always have a channel of some kind set up where they can ask those more experienced people, or just they need to know that they have permission, that they’re welcome to do so. So just setting those channels up can be really effective for the exposures.
Steve Thomas: Just to make it really concrete in people’s heads, is there a topic you can think of that you can apply the four Es to? Like, how would you implement an AI thing with using the four Es?
Ann Medaille: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s something I did and our organization has done here. Maybe if your goal is to think about we wanna integrate AI into what we’re doing in the workplace, or we wanna have better AI literacy skills, or maybe our public services people wanna be able to teach AI literacy, you start with education, right? So making sure people get just the formal education and what they need to know. How the tools are set up, the ethical components of using the tools, all of those kinds of things that they need to know about them: webinars, workshops, short courses, those kinds of things can be really helpful.
And then moving into the experiences, you’re gonna think about what are some actual tasks that people can do. People are doing a lot of experimenting with it. But, for us, in my department what we’ve been really trying to do is create some AI lesson plans and really integrate AI into our teaching, or at least address it in a responsible way in our teaching, depending on the faculty that we’re working with. So okay, so now we have this task. We need to create lesson plans. We need to try them out. We have something we can do. Or maybe we’re gonna integrate AI into a metadata project, or we’re gonna implement it into an assessment project, and we’re gonna use it to analyze our results. So we’ve got some projects set up. We’re gonna do it. People are assigned. Maybe they’re in teams. Something like that, that people are actually doing it.
And then the exposures. AI is interesting because a lot of people is it’s not been around so long that everyone’s an expert in it. So sometimes setting it up in some team formats where people can learn from each other’s experimentation can be really helpful. But even when it’s not something like AI, like I said, on an assessment project, if you’re doing, let’s say a user assessment where you’re doing some surveys or you’re doing some user interviews or something like that in that case, and you’re gonna maybe use AI in the analysis, it could be really good to pair the newer people who are interested in that with the more experienced people who have done surveys before or interviews before, those kinds of things, and they have a foundation for how they might integrate AI into that kind of analytical process. So that would be how you could do some of those projects with the exposures.
And then the environment. There’s a lot that you can do with the environment. Something that, and this isn’t free, but something that some libraries can do and are doing is providing licenses, so software licenses and AI tools so that people can actually, try them out. So that’s one thing in the environment that you can definitely do. The environment is complicated, and sometimes I think that might be the thing we think about the least, in some libraries, not all libraries have provided staff with, let’s say, their own workspace where they could experiment with a tool or their own computer. So we have to actually give some thought to, like, how people are set up to actually do some learning, or do some experimentation and work on these projects. Is there space set up? Do they have the right tools? And then is there other things that we can provide in the form of manuals, documentation that kind of thing as well?
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and that’s an example of a training, I think, that you would wanna continue because it’s a emerging technology. It’s a rapidly changing technology, so it’s not gonna be, “we did the four E’s, now we’re done, and we’ve learned AI.” Like you said, you gotta go back through it and keep updating things as you go along, and that may be going back to the beginning with more education, or maybe it’s just using some of the E’s again to keep things up to date.
But I think the really important thing is the four E’s are a wonderful implementation plan for training, but the thing you said at the beginning was, “We had a goal.” It’s like you have to develop your goal first. It’s like you don’t wanna just say, “Okay, we gotta learn AI, so let’s just learn AI.” It’s like but AI for what purpose, and how is that gonna fit into our organization? So I think it’s important to have somebody, even if you can’t afford to have a position like you or like you’re the manager or whatever, has to figure out why people need to learn this skill.
Ann Medaille: Yes. And that gets into something I didn’t really talk about just in writing this book. It was how I did my research. So I was really not just interested in the library portion of thinking about how we in libraries upskill but I also wanted to learn what were corporations doing to help their staff upskill? Because they also have a very pressing upskilling imperative, and what were they doing? And I was just wondering what libraries could learn from the corporate world about that.
I interviewed people from libraries, from public libraries, academic libraries, state libraries, some consultants about what they were doing. So these were people who were, maybe they were leading professional development at their libraries, or leading national programs, or just involved somehow in learning new skills, learning library skills. So I interviewed 42 library people. But I also reviewed corporate training literature, and I listened to almost 100 interviews with people involved in the corporate learning and development space, about what corporations were doing, ’cause I was wondering what we could learn.
So what made me think of that is you talked about the connection to goals. And in the corporate world, there’s often a very pressing goal connected to the need to upskill. They have a product they’re selling they have a service they need to deliver, and it needs to happen now and their staff need to learn these skills to make it happen soon. Because their sales are riding on it or whatever. The need for up-skilling and the implementation of up-skilling is often very clearly connected to a goal, and that is something I think that we can make sure that we’re doing in libraries too, is okay what will really help us achieve our goals, our mission as a library and meet our user needs?
And that’s really what we wanna always be thinking back about, okay, connect to goals. What are we trying to do here? What’s important for us to do here? ‘Cause otherwise, we could upskill all over the place. There’s so much to learn, it’s overwhelming, but we do need to be sure that we’re always connected to our mission and purpose.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and that’s why it’s nice when you’re in an organization that can afford to have someone specifically for that position, but somebody needs to be doing that filtering because like you said, there’s so much to learn. How do you work, even personally with your organization, so people are not overloaded with too much training, but then they’re getting enough.
Ann Medaille: Yeah, they really need to be integrated into what people are trying to do. So I like to work them into our goals. And at this point, I’m not talking about the whole organizational goals. But, in my library, for example, every year we’ll create goals for the year. And I think it’s really effective if we can work learning into those goals. For example one of my librarians she works with the sciences, and she has really noticed just how many of the graduate students she works with really struggle with research organization and productivity. They get stalled with the overabundance of information that they’re dealing with when they’re doing a big project like a thesis or dissertation and sometimes they just can’t move forward. And so she noticed the problem, and she really wanted to help them with research productivity. So one of her goals was to create some kind of learning module, some kind of short course, and also a workshop that she could teach on productivity. But worked into that, she was going to learn about productivity tools, productivity software, productivity methods. So the learning was worked into the goal, and then she was able to achieve that this year.
Although that does illustrate, oh, one more thing, right? In addition to knowing all this about science librarianship now here it is. And this is just another example of okay, maybe 10 years ago we weren’t asking librarians to learn about productivity software but it seems now our students have a real need and real interest for it. Let’s be responsive to that. And I think that’s somewhere the library could help.
So I like to really work it into goals. Like, how does this connect to what you’re trying to do as an individual or what we’re trying to do as a department? And then on the library level, I think, when we can work them into strategic planning, not that strategic planning is happening, all the time, but every time we come into a strategic planning part of the cycle, a year for strategic planning, can we connect those upskilling, those learning goals to the actual goals of the library? I think that’s really important too.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I was thinking when you were talking about the businesses do this kind of thing as well, when there’s a new iPhone dropping, basically everybody in every Apple store, the day that comes out, has to already know how to use all the new features and have to be able to show it off. They gotta get it early and get training to get that. Everybody in every AT&T store, every Verizon store, like, all these people have to know when a customer comes in day of the drops how to use this thing and show it off so you can sell it. ‘Cause if you don’t know it, you can’t sell it. And I don’t know how they do all their stuff, but, clearly it has to be done last minute and get it out there, but it’s definitely important to the businesses, too.
Ann Medaille: Yeah, it sure is, and it’s not so different from what we’re dealing with, in terms of helping, people often use their phones to access our materials or access our e-books or use a new interface or whatever. We’re constantly keeping up with that stuff too.
And I think we just have to, ah, just breathe and acknowledge that, yeah, it is a challenge. It’s not impossible, and sometimes it wears us down a little bit. We do suffer from that change fatigue, but, maybe we also need to, for ourselves and for our colleagues, just always remind each other about the importance of just keeping focused on the mission.
I don’t think it means that we need to jump on every technological trend either. And I think actually in libraries we’ve been pretty good about that. I think we’re, I think we often take a cautious attitude, maybe because we’re so used to people trying to sell us stuff. I don’t know. But I think we’re responsible stewards of our collection, and we understand the importance of being responsible with our money, making responsible choices, and not just jumping on everything. So I think we are good about that, and I don’t think we want to jump on everything. We do wanna be cautious about what we’re gonna focus our time and attention on.
And we can’t do everything, and we have to give people permission to stop doing some things too, which is sometimes hard for library employees because we care so much. It’s hard for us to give things up, but sometimes we do have to make some space. Like you were saying, if you want people to have some time to upskill, it is not gonna happen probably by watching a one-hour webinar once a month or by expecting people to upskill in their free time. That is not going to happen. That is never going to happen. We have to just kinda think more strategically about how to make it happen on an organizational level.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Do you have any advice maybe, of how to know which ones to jump on? Like AI, most people have decided “okay, this is it…” But then I remember, this is forever ago, 15, 20 years ago, ALA Island on Second Life, and it’s like, “probably went a little too far into Second Life there. That was not actually a thing.”
Ann Medaille: Oh, the Second Life craze. So yeah.
Steve Thomas: Yes. So how do you know when it’s Second Life, and it’s oh, it’s just gonna be a couple years and fall apart, and when it’s gonna be AI, which probably is not gonna fall apart as a technology.
Ann Medaille: Okay. So there are definitely some concrete things we can do to try to get a sense of what’s coming and what we should prepare for. I think some of the most effective things that library leaders can do is actually make sure to talk to their staff, because often each person in whatever area they’re working in, they have an idea of things they’d like to learn or what’s coming in their area or things they’re gonna need to work on in the next year or two. So they’re keeping an eye on those things.
But we can look at our peer institutions, we can look at job postings, we can do environmental scans and see what’s going on in our current environment, our campus, our community. We can certainly follow tech trends and keep an eye on those things. Think about our own strategic priorities and other libraries, just kinda keep an eye on those things. So those are some of the things we can do.
That said, we can’t predict everything. There’s just no way. Like you said, Second Life seemed like a great idea at the time, but this is really important. I think knowing that we’re not, we can’t predict everything, and that we can plan a year or two out, but planning five to 10 years out is becoming increasingly difficult. But what that means is that our library workers have to be agile. They have to have some resilience in regarding change, and they have to be willing to learn.
When I did my interviews with library workers a lot of them talked about agility as they thought it was the most important skill that library workers could have, just this ability to be adaptable and learn new things as time went on. I don’t know if we’d call it a skill or could be an attribute or a characteristic, but I think it’s something that we need to cultivate in library staff and even hire for. We can look for those characteristics when we hire. But just the willingness to be okay with not always knowing what we’re gonna need to learn in the next year or two or five years or what have you.
And that also means sometimes learning is uncomfortable. I can definitely say that with new technologies, there are times when I’m like, “Oh, this looks hard. Can I do this? Am I capable?” So sometimes you have this moment where it’s like, “Oh, I’m uncomfortable.” And often learning at the beginning is uncomfortable, and we have to tell people that “It’s okay. It’s okay to be uncomfortable. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s all right. You’re not gonna be overly judged if you learn something new and you can’t do it expertly right away. We don’t expect that. So we are having to create supportive environments where people feel safe to experiment, that it’s okay, that if they make mistakes, it’s okay. No, we’ll get there. We’re supporting you. You’re not gonna be evaluated next week on this skill.”
So that’s important too, I think. That agility, willingness to learn, and having these safe, supportive environments where you can do it without dire consequences, if you fail.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. The ability to fail, letting people fail, you know, not continuously on the same topic over and over again, you need to learn from your mistakes. But it’s okay to try something new. Like nobody said we should close down the ALA now because they went too far into Second Life. It’s like, no. It’s just, sometimes you move into something and you put a lot of energy into it, and that’s not what it is gonna happen. But mistakes are okay, and don’t freak out about that.
And I was thinking when you were saying that learning hurts sometimes, that, like, stretch assignment is actually a really good word because when you’re out of shape, stretching does not feel good at all and it hurts. But once you’ve done it enough, then stretching can start feeling good ’cause you’re getting used to it. And that’s actually a good word I think.
Ann Medaille: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: Agility, adaptability, flexibility, things like that. Are there other foundational skills like that, that you think are really important because technology keeps changing so quickly that we need to have?
Ann Medaille: Yes. Yeah, and that was an interesting surprise for my research just in interviewing 42 people involved with this, how much they talked about the importance of those Quote-unquote, “soft skills.” Sometimes I hate to use that word because soft skills makes it sound like they’re easy. So we think of hard skills as like those technical skills or those kind of disciplinary specific skills and soft skills, sometimes they’re called human skills or I often use the word foundational skills. But those are the things like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving.
Those are becoming more important than ever because they’re so bound up with the technical skills. How important now is it to be able to work across teams if you’re working on some kind of technical assignment? It’s critical, so you have to be a good collaborator. Communication is more important than ever. And so when we talk about, oh, critical thinking with AI, right? We’re just going back to the basics with what we’ve all been talking about all along with information literacy skills and what we bring as library staff, really helping people be critical thinkers, which means we have to be critical thinkers ourselves.
So those are more important than ever, and I think it’s sometimes with the term soft skill, sometimes we think of those things as easy. They are so not easy at all. Sometimes I think it’s easier to help people upskill in some of the technical skills than it is in some of the foundational skills. Communication. If you don’t have good communication skills, do you think you’re gonna learn it in a month? That’s really hard.
It can be hard for people to recognize, too, when they have a problem in those areas. Everybody kinda thinks they’re a good collaborator, a good communicator or a good critical thinker. So it can be difficult for, let’s say, a manager to help an employee recognize when, maybe you have a problem in this area and then it can be hard to develop authentic training situations, too, for critical thinking, that’s hard.
I think more than ever, I think it’s important when libraries are hiring, or really anyone is hiring, but when libraries are hiring, to pay attention to those soft skills that people have, foundational skills, coming in. ‘Cause you do want people to come in with a certain communication, collaboration, problem-solving, all those things that I talk about. Listening, maybe add creativity if that’s important to your library, a user focus, customer service, those kinds of things knowing that they could be hard to train on the job, but if people come in with those skills and come in with a willingness, an ability, a flexibility to learn, you can train them in other things. For new employees, you’re gonna have to train them regardless. They’re not gonna come in knowing everything about your library, so you definitely have to train them about the environment and probably some skills, too. But I think yeah, those foundational skills, they’re not going away. They’re more important than ever. More important than ever.
Steve Thomas: I’m just thinking, if there’s a manager listening, number one, go read the book, but is there anything else you can tell them that if they don’t have this kind of culture of upskilling in their library, how can they get started in getting that in the culture?
Ann Medaille: Yeah. And that word culture, that’s really it. I think we wanna build toward cultures of continuous learning where we’re becoming learning organizations. And it is hard, and it does take a while. And I think when we’re talking about culture, we’re talking about what we do, how we get work done, and that involves our just normal behaviors and practices and processes to get work done. So those take some time to change.
But there are some formal things that a manager or an administrator can do to start. Like I said earlier, working learning into job expectations, creating forums where people can talk about learning. So whether that is a manager starting it or even an individual worker starting, let’s say, a community of practice, or starting some kind of discussion group where people are talking to each other about what it is they’re learning, that can be really important. For administrators, I think some libraries, they will have somebody designated to be in charge of learning and development, and that can be really helpful to just have someone or a group of people, a group of champions in your library who are paying attention to this and can think about how they can do it. Some libraries will have whole committees, dedicated to thinking about that, and that can be helpful too. So those are some kind of concrete things that one can do.
But what we’re aiming for is we’re aiming for organizations where people are comfortable learning together, comfortable discussing what they learn with each other, so sharing. We want organizations where accomplishments are celebrated, hopefully connected to learning, where administrators call attention to “look at these wins that we’re getting as a result of our learning.” And where there’s kind of a culture of just dialogue where we talk to each other and we question each other and that’s just what we do. That’s part of being a learning organization.
And I think working together as teams. Team projects can really be helpful when we’re learning together or we’re trying to do something together that might require a little bit of learning too. That kind of, that collaboration, that can really support a learning environment as well. So all of those are things that we can be thinking about in terms of changing the culture to really becoming a continuous learning organization.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and having that commitment to it, like this is what we’re gonna do now. And, almost back to what we said before of having goals, like now one of our goals is that we’re gonna be a learning organization.
Ann Medaille: Yeah, and I think it even helps when managers or administrators will talk about their own learning, talk about how they’re learning or talk about challenges that they’ve had with learning. But they’re just talking about it. That can just be helpful too, just to have those models in your organization talk about their own attempts and struggles with learning.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And most of what we’ve been talking about in this conversation are in the book. And so people can follow up and learn more about that kind of stuff. But then I’m curious, just in your researching and writing of the book, did that change anything about the way that you think about learning and professional development?
Ann Medaille: Oh my goodness, yes. It really did. It really just made me realize how important it is just to continually be talking about it and trying to just always be integrating learning into work. Those are always together, that learning isn’t a separate thing that we do, that we’re always integrating it into work and talking about it with each other. I think that’s really important. So yeah, so I am always asking people now, “Okay, it’s goal time. What are you gonna learn this year? How is your learning? What do we need to keep learning?”
So, yeah, I did learn a lot about how to really kinda make that happen just in my own area.
Steve Thomas: No, that’s great. And again I recommend people go get the book ’cause it’s been helpful to me so far just in my work, and I think it’ll be helpful to everybody else, especially if you’ve heard this conversation and are going “Yeah, she’s saying everything that I wanna say.” You’ll definitely much more, fleshed out ideas of what we’ve talked about here. And Ann, I appreciate you so much for coming on the podcast and talking about the book. Again, it is called Upskilling for Library Workers and available from ALA and everywhere that you get books. I’ll have a link down in the show notes for people to get that. But I appreciate your time and your knowledge that you shared with us.
Ann Medaille: Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure.
