My latest research on embedded librarianship has just been published on the Special Libraries Association website at:
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.
The Embedded Librarians Café