How to Start Embedded Library Services

by

A recent visit to a friend who manages a special library reminded me of some principles that seem to work well in moving information services outside the library walls and embedding them into customer teams and groups. They are:

1. Start with your friends

2. Lead with management contacts

3. Volunteer!

Due to shortness of time, I’ll cover these one at a time in this and my next couple posts.

1. Start with your friends. By friends I really mean your best customers. Analyze who is using your services now. What groups do they represent? A particular R&D lab? A special project team from Marketing? Probably you’ll find an uneven distribution of customers, with a few groups using your services much more heavily than others. Get an org chart and look at the management of those groups. If you find a couple whose managers use your services themselves, and many of the staff do too, then you’ve identified groups that are probably going to be receptive to the idea that a strong relationship with a librarian can be a great benefit to their work, and well worth the time and resources they will need to invest in an embedded library service.

Next time: lead with management contacts!

Advertisement

One Response to “How to Start Embedded Library Services”

  1. Says:

    […] Shumaker, D. (2012d). How to Start Embedded Library Services [Blogpost]. Geraadpleegd op 13/03/13 van https://embeddedlibrarian.com/2007/07/30/how-to-start-embedded-library-services/ […]

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s


%d bloggers like this: