The Embedded Librarians Café

Happy New Year!

I’m using the holidays to catch up on my reading. An item in American Libraries Direct, Aug. 13 was entitled “12 Tools That Will Go the Way of the Fax and CDs”. It cited the author as Dave Pollard, who was a well received speaker at the SLA Conference in 2007, so I followed the link to Dave’s blog and his 12 predictions. It’s at .

It turns out that Dave’s prediction no. 7 is “Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content.”

The good news is, Dave actually has a prescription for corporate librarians to succeed. He says, “With luck, they’ll learn the employer’s business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information.”

That’s exactly what I believe that successful corporate embedded librarians are doing! So, while I don’t fully agree with Dave’s prediction (see my comment on his blog), I think that he’s got part of the answer. I think that the embedded services model is one that enables librarians to overcome the barriers that have sometimes existed between them and their customers and to make their services truly and directly valuable.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2009 at 12:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.