3/23/2006
proving the value of library & information services
While I was skimming through the recent articles in this month’s issue of LLRX, I ran across the Business Information Searcher, a journal that both looks interesting and is well beyond my budget. There are, however, some articles available free of charge from their website, and one in particular caught my eye.
Why Library and Information Services Fail (direct link to pdf found here) is a brief four page article that attempts to condense what can often be a complicated issue into a small space, and I think the author, Anthony Wood, does a fairly good job of it. While the article was written about three years ago now, it remains extremely timely, in my opinion. He includes tips for calculating the financial value of the information service, essential when defending the department’s budget and/or continued existence to the powers that be who might not have a great understanding of our importance. The entire article points to the necessity of proving the library’s value within the corporate structure, and in some cases reconfiguring how the library and the librarians interact with the clientele; this, I think, represents a paradigm shift brought on by Google and the age of the search.
The shift in interaction is nearly perfectly represented in one of the early paragraph’s in Wood’s article:
Users accept that they will need to use information professionals from time to time, but in general prefer the empowering nature of self-service. They rarely take advantage of customised alerting services unless they are set up in partnership with an information professional. A well-designed customised alert, however, is a very powerful bond between the user and both the information professional and the information provider.
It’s been said many times before, but I think it bears repeating: the real future of the corporate librarian lies not in finding information for their clientele, but in aiding the finding of information. This can take the form of setting up the customized alerts that Anthony Wood mentioned in his 2003 articles, to teaching effective searching tools, to utilizing Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging and social bookmarking to share information.
Filed under: Librarianship, Knowledge Management
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