Archive for September, 2008

What I Did on My Summer “Vacation”

September 15, 2008

Yikes! It’s now after Labor Day in the U.S. and almost 3 months since my last post. Time to get in gear and start blogging again.

It was a productive summer in pushing forward on studying and thinking about embedded librarianship.

My co-investigator, Mary Talley, and I completed the first phase of our SLA-funded research project. Our survey received exactly 1001 responses. We are busy analyzing them and planning for the second survey in our project, which will be targeted to a sub-group of the respondents to the first survey.

I also submitted the draft of a guest column on embedded librarianship, which I hope will be published soon.

My favorite quotation from the summer on embedded librarianship comes from the well known pediatrician and author T. Berry Brazelton. Speaking to an audience at the American Library Association conference in Anaheim, he called on public librarians to become “embedded in the family”. (Voeller, S.L. “Brazelton Encourage Librarians to be Part of the Family.” Cognotes, 2008(4): p. 6.) It’s not quite the same type of embeddedness that corporate and academic librarians tend to think of — I can’t quite picture the children’s librarian going over to library users’ houses for dinner every night — but in pointing out the importance of relationships, Brazelton’s message has a fundamental harmony with the other conceptions of embedded librarianship being written and talked about today.

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