The Embedded Librarians Café

I’ve recently learned a new word that I like a lot. It’s more than the word of the day — it may be the word of the year. You  won’t find it in the Britannica/Webster’s dictionary or the OED. There’s no Wikipedia entry for it (somebody should take care of that!) Based on a quick review of my university library’s discovery service, Google Scholar, and Google, it appears to have been coined in 2007 by Gunther Eysenbach of the University of Toronto.

The word is “Apomediation”. Here’s how Eysenbach defines the role of the “apomediary”: “The agents that replace intermediaries in the digital media context may be called ‘apomediaries,’ because rather than mediating by standing ‘in between’ (inter-) consumers and the services or information they seek, they ‘stand by’ (apo-) and provide added value from the outside…”* In other words, the apomediary isn’t a gatekeeper standing between information and the information seeker (the traditional concept of the librarian’s role), but a guide, advisor, and facilitator who works with the information seeker to help focus attention on the best, most important information.

This is a useful way to think about the role of the embedded librarian, for whom the traditional intermediary role has become outmoded and inaccurate. When we talk about the embedded librarian as collaborator or partner, we can’t be talking about the old gatekeeper / intermediary model. “Apomediation” is a great word to describe the new model that has to replace the intermediary.

I was introduced to the term by an excerpt from the book, “Library 3.0: Intelligent Libraries and Apomediation”, by Tom Kwanya, Christine Stilwell and Peter G. Underwood, who write extensively about the role of the apomediary librarian. Though they don’t use the term “embedded”, the relationship they describe between librarians and community members dovetails extremely well with embedded librarianship. Elsevier has made the excerpt available in a collection entitled “Facing Contemporary Challenges in Librarianship” which you can find at . It’s also on ScienceDirect.

*Here’s the citation to Eysenbach’s original article: Eysenbach, G. (2007). From intermediation to disintermediation and apomediation: new models for consumers to access and assess the credibility of health information in the age of Web 2. 0. In Studies in health technology and informatics: Vol. 129 (162–166). IOS Press.

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