Book reviews: Managing Your Brand: Career Management and Personal PR for Librarians

Citation

Omidkhah, S. (2016), "Book reviews: Managing Your Brand: Career Management and Personal PR for Librarians", The Electronic Library, Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 000-000. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-11-2015-0217

The importance and role of people, staff, or to be precise, human resources to/in individual, organisational and social success is a generally accepted reality. To do information/knowledge work properly, recognize opportunities and threats, leverage knowledge, build capability and meet users’ information needs in libraries, librarians must prepare themselves to cope with the ever-changing conditions and keep their communication channels, promise, reputation and readiness. This seven-chapter book aims to spell out in detail some practical things that every librarian or academic can do to avoid some common pitfalls and to adopt positive habits and practices early on to get onto the right footing. As an introductory discussion, Chapter 1 – Getting started – is an overview of the objectives and structure of the book. It poses some questions such as “Where are we heading?” and “What do we want?” and underscores the usefulness of a personal mission statement and roadmap. Chapter 2 – Planning your pathway – deals mainly with goal setting and how it will be reached. Taking a synergetic approach, Chapter 3 – Counting your assets – indicates that meeting long-term goal(s) needs a strategic plan implemented with the joint contribution of various assets from skills to knowledge, people, communication and so on. Highlighting that “librarianship is the core of every librarian’s job” (p. 57), Chapter 4 – Librarianship – justifies the great significance of having a scientific/professional view towards career management and excellence for librarians. Chapter 5 – Scholarship – focuses on scholarship (researching, speaking, writing, publishing and editing) as one of the most influential ways by which librarians can prove themselves and contribute to both their profession and knowledge via creating new knowledge. Chapter 6 – Service – covers how librarians can stabilize and advance their career(s) through providing right services at library, institutional and community levels. Finally, Chapter 7 – Building walls towers and bridges – reminds librarians that job success and development is not an accident, its price must be paid in full, in advance and it must be supported and sustained by change management (versatility or flexibility), a futuristic strategic view and substantial endeavour based on careful planning. In addition to the good structure and easy-to-understand text of the book, its content follows logically, fortified with theory and practice. One point I took from reading this book is that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. Accordingly, in any job situation, librarians must manage their brand and so equip their toolbox with vision, insight, attitude, behaviour, skills and practices that make a difference and increase their capacity. Librarians and information professionals will find this is a thought-provoking book.