First comes the article “Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian”, by Rya Ben-Shir and Alexander Feng, which appeared in the September-October 2011 issue of Bio-IT World and on the web at http://www.bio-itworld.com/issues/2011/sept-oct/reevaluating-role-research-librarian.html . The authors make a great case for the value of embedded librarians in the biosciences and pharmaceutical industries, as key contributors to R&D teams. In the article, they tell the story of a company that eliminated its research librarians (presumably as a centralized function) — so the research departments snapped them up as embedded librarians so as not to lose their services. Need we say more!? I love the fact that this article was written for the pharma R&D audience, not librarians. We need more like it!

Next came word that Buffy Hamilton, the Unquiet Librarian (http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/), will be doing a webinar on embedded librarianship for the American Library Association. It’s entitled “Taking Embedded Librarianship to the Next Level” and will take place on Feb. 22. The description notes that “You create value for your library and your own position within it when you become an instructional partner to faculty and a mentor to student researchers.” Amen!   For more info, see ALA at http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=3663&zbrandid=4634&zidType=CH&zid=9600132&zsubscriberId=1026632089&zbdom=http://ala-publishing.informz.net

Last but not least, today’s email brought a tip to a guest post by Cindy Adams on the “3 Geeks and a Law” blog (http://www.geeklawblog.com/2012/01/law-firm-librarians-out-of-sight-out-of.html) Cindy describes the process of physically embedding librarians in a law firm by moving them out of an isolated central library and into the office areas of the attorneys they are working with. As Cindy says, the librarians “hear what’s going on while visiting the coffee machine or copier. Attorneys stop by their offices, just to visit. By being physically present, we hear what’s going on and have become more proactive in providing research assistance.” Exactly! The comments on this post are also interesting. A few of them cite the problem of librarians losing touch with one another: a legitimate concern, but definitely surmountable, as other commenters point out.

It’s great to see so many varied initiatives in embedded librarianship in such diverse sectors of the profession. What are you up to?

To coincide with the start of 2012, the Embedded Librarian blog has a new URL. You’ll now be able to get to it via http://www.embeddedlibrarian.com or just embeddedlibrarian.com.

If you have the old URL bookmarked, no worries. It will still work indefinitely. It will just redirect to the new URL. And if you are trying to remember the URL or tell a colleague about it, now you won’t have to remember which blog hosting service it’s on — embeddedlibrarian.com will bring you here.

I look forward to sharing more news and ideas about embedded librarianship with you in the coming year, and hearing from you as well.

–Dave

It’s my practice — borrowed from my colleague Dr. Bill Kules — to ask students for course feedback at the midpoint of the term. I ask three questions: what’s going well, what would you change, and what topics are you most interested in covering during the second half of the course.

I administered this survey in my “Libraries and Information in Society” course back in October. In response to the last question, one student responded (anonymously; all responses are anonymous): “feral librarians”. So, I promised the class that before the end of the term we would talk about feral librarians. As the end of the term approached, I knew I had to make good on that promise.

Now, I recalled reading about “feral librarians” a few years ago, but I hadn’t given the idea much thought. So, back I went, first to Google Scholar, the online databases, and ultimately to Library Journal, where you can read the article, “Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals into the Academic Library”, by James G. Neal, at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6304405.html .

As I understand it, the article raises a concern with the trend of hiring people without traditional Library Science degrees, and the acculturation it brings, into various positions in library organizations. The “feral professionals include paraprofessionals with bachelor’s degrees, or less, being given work formerly reserved for MLS-degreed staff; to IT and other non-librarian specialists; to MLS products of distance education programs who may not have been properly socialized into librarian culture; to Ph.D. subject specialists lacking the MLS degree. All are seen as threats to the status of librarians and the cozy monoculture of the academic library.

With my background in corporate librarianship, I wasn’t very sympathetic to the manifestations of the academic caste system I sensed in the article — the idea that one’s role and worth are determined by the letters after one’s name. I am used to a more meritocratic approach — your position and role are based on what you can accomplish. I felt an undercurrent of panic in the article. The “feral professionals” are presented as a disruptive force that library managers must learn to deal with. It’s true that the article ends  on a positive note, saying that the libraries need the diversity these new professionals will bring. But for me, that ending seemed at odds with the tone of the rest of the article. It seems more a grudging acknowledgement of change than a call to leadership.

Yet wasn’t until we were in the middle of the discussion in class that I realized what was really troubling me about the article. It was that the direction of change was portrayed as being almost all one-way: the feral professionals invading our libraries and upsetting our library way of life. (Yes, there’s one sentence about librarians taking on new roles, but it doesn’t lead anywhere.)

What we need a lot more of, in my opinion, is writing about librarians busting out of the libraries and bringing their unique skills and perspectives to their colleagues in administration and the subject departments. Not only writing, though, but leadership that makes it happen. Let’s mix it up. Invite those “feral professionals” into our organizations where they can add value, and push outward to explore and seize opportunities for librarians beyond the four walls of the library.

My research has brought me into contact with library managers and embedded librarians who are doing just that. So, I conclude that this whole “feral professional” thing is a digression. At best, it’s only half the story of building diverse teams, including librarians, in organizations. Let’s get on with the real work at hand.

This is a supplement to the final report that Mary Talley and I co-authored in 2009. In this supplement, I report on six site visits that I made during June of this year. Three visits were made to institutions of higher education; two to for-profit organizations, and one to a not-for-profit corporation. Two were re-visits (one educational, one professional services firm) to organizations that Mary and I visited in 2009 and documented in an appendix to our final report.

The six organizations were chosen because of a sustained record of successful embedded librarianship. In each visit, my focus was on practices that contributed to success — especially management practices, and the roles of library managers and information user group managers. I talked to at least four individuals at each site — a mix of librarians, library managers, senior managers, and information user group members. (At one organization, I was unable to talk to information users due to a scheduling problem.)

I’m working on analyzing and synthesizing the results for future publication, but I wanted to make the writeups available for those who might be interested in the meantime. If you go over to the SLA site and read them, I hope you’ll come back here and post a comment or otherwise give me your feedback.

p.s. I want to thank the folks at the Special Libraries Association for funding the project and for their patience as I’ve worked away at it over the past 3+ years.

If you attended Internet Librarian last month in Monterey, CA, I envy you. I’ve always wanted to go and have never been able to.

Ok, but why am I mentioning it here? Well, it’s because you might be interested in the Tuesday morning keynote by Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life project. You can view his talk at  http://pewinternet.org/Presentations/2011/Oct/Internet-Librarian.aspx. It’s a very interesting and entertaining survey of current trends and their impact on librarianship.

One of the five questions he sets himself to answer is, what is the future of reference expertise? His answer highlights two strategies for librarians, one of them being — embedded librarianship! He suggests several roles for embedded librarians, including Scout, Synthesizer, Organizer, On-call information provider, and Steward of social capital. The other strategy is what he calls the “knowledge concierge” or “knowledge valet”. He says that it has similarities to embedded librarianship, but a different sensibility.

It’s an hour-long presentation and I think you’ll find it well worth your time. But in case you can’t spend an hour, the embedded librarianship reference starts at about minute 36.

As for me, I’m going to go find out more about information valets.

One question had to do with the organizational model for administering embedded librarianship. Should the librarians continue to be part of a library or information services unit, or should they be hired and managed by the information user group they work with?

While local circumstances may drive adoption of a decentralized model, in general my preference is that in an organization large and complex enough to have a number of embedded librarians, it’s better for them to be part of a centralized unit. My primary reasons have to do with the reachback, workload sharing, and knowledge sharing opportunities that centralization offers.

Embedded librarians tend to experience peak periods of demand, when they’ve got more work than they can handle. Also, they often have responsibilities that don’t stop if they go on medical leave or even (believe it or not) take a vacation! In a well-managed central library service, the library manager can create mechanisms so that the librarians back each other up, and can pick up the tasks when necessary.

When library staff become embedded, generally they don’t all become embedded. There continue to be some tasks that are better performed centrally: these may range from basic document delivery work to negotiating and managing complex and expensive enterprise-wide content licenses. Keeping the embedded librarians connected to the central library service strengthens communication and collaboration between the two: the embedded librarians can refer some tasks to the central library, and also provide their insights to help inform service and resource decisions.

Finally, the embedded librarians are likely to use many of the same tools and encounter the same problems in their work. Clearly they constitute a community of practice, and they have their own knowledge sharing needs for professional tips, tricks, techniques, and problem solving. The central library connection facilitates communication and collaboration among them.

What we’re talking about, really, is a matrixed organization, where librarians “live” in one organizational unit, but join other units where they are needed to participate in projects or ongoing functions. If you’re interested in matrixed organizations, you might like to read an article in the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review. The article is “Building a Collaborative Enterprise”, by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher, and librarianship’s own Laurence Prusak. Here’s a salient passage: “The matrix structure has been tried by many firms during recent decades, and its failure rate is high, so people often assume it’s a poor model. But matrix structures actually offer a huge competitive advantage precisely because they are so hard to sustain. They both support and are supported by the other features of the collaborative model…” (p. 101)

I’d add that a matrixed organization in which librarians are matrixed, or embedded, where they are needed, is an organization that really brings information and knowledge to bear on critical elements of its work.

Nothing really new in that, but it got me thinking once again about disintermediation and librarians and how I haven’t blogged about the relationship between disintermediation and embedded librarianship. After all, we librarians are another group of intermediaries whose prospects have been affected by new technologies. Everybody has heard about how Google is going to put us all out of business.

That’s overstating it of course. Rumors of our professional death have been exaggerated – but there’s no denying the general trend of disintermediation.

The question is: in an era of disintermediation, what do you do if you are the middleman? You can stand around and wait to get cut, or you can move. Where can you move to? Either end of the transaction you formerly mediated. For librarians, in one direction lies the creation and operation of tools for content producers, or becoming a content producer yourself. In the other direction lies becoming so close to a group of information consumers that you become one of them — perhaps the arch-consumer for the group.

Initially I was thinking that the latter alternative was the embedded librarianship alternative, but as I consider it, maybe there are embedded opportunities in both directions. One thing for sure, you don’t want to get caught in the middle.

I’m moved to make that generalization by a recent article, “Is the Informationist a New Role? A Logic Model Analysis”,  by Diane Cooper of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. (Journal of the Medical Library Association, July 2011, 99:3; Health Module p. 189.)

In the article, Cooper (herself an Informationist at NIH) uses the logic model analysis technique to explore differences between the “general medical librarian” or GML, and the Informationist. (I would characterize the Informationist as an embedded librarian.) Suffice it to say, Cooper finds several important differences between the two, in terms of the way they conduct their work and the results they produce. She closes with some observations about the importance of these differences: “Our users are changing, and our work environment is changing. We may need to redefine the role of librarians to address the changing library environment” and, most directly relevant for me as as a library science teacher, some comments about the educational changes needed to prepare librarians for these new roles, including technical writing and writing for publication; knowledge of health care; evidence-based practice; and biostatistics.

I think this is a very useful article in clarifying the differences between embedded librarians and traditional public services librarians. While some of the details will vary from specialty to specialty within the profession, I think the general principles she outlines are broadly applicable, and she raises some fundamental questions about the education of the next generation of embedded librarians. It’s worth a read!

Notice I didn’t end the title of this posting with “Vacation”. This summer hasn’t been a vacation, but it has been fun, a lot of work, and above all, interesting. I spent June making research visits to six organizations, three in higher education and three in the private/corporate sector. I recorded 17 hours of in-person interviews and conducted other interviews by phone.

Naturally, then, I spent much of July writing all that up into case study reports that I hope to publish later this year. (I have one more to do plus further editing and correcting.)

I’m still sorting out in my mind what the big lessons were that I want to write about, but a couple of the points that stuck with me make a kind of good news / bad news story.

The good news is that these six institutions all have strong, successful embedded librarianship programs, and they are getting stronger. The librarians are having more influence and contributing more to achieving organizational goals — be they student learning objectives in higher education or business initiatives in the private sector.

The bad news, given the employment situation in librarianship and the U.S. economy as a whole, is that the growth in embedded librarianship is taking place largely by redirecting staff from traditional work to new roles and responsibilities. Some of the organizations I visited have added a few staff, but others have accomplished their embedded initiatives entirely by transitioning staff to new roles.

I realize this is what has to happen. Librarians, like everyone else, have to redirect the resources we have to the uses that are most productive. We have to achieve more with what we have. But I hope that down the road we’ll see more organizations hiring more librarians to pursue the opportunities that we all know are out there.

Meanwhile, my hat is off to the managers and staff of the organizations I visited. They are doing a great job with difficult challenges. Without exception, they were positive, energetic, engaged, effective. I look forward to sharing more details of what they are doing in the not too distant future.

Updated from a workshop I’ve given several times previously, it will explore what embedded librarianship is, summarize the common threads of success, and offer some techniques you can use whether you’re just getting started or looking to strengthen an initiative that’s already well underway.

If you’re coming to Websearch U, I hope you’ll join me — or maybe this will be your reason to attend! Either way, I hope to see you there.

Details are at www.websearchu.com .