Opportunity in the Air

In any career, there will always be things you can control, and things you can't. But for special librarians, it is getting a little hard to tell the difference. Work in a venerable corporate library, say at Time Inc. or perhaps the American Bankers Association, or more recently Chevron and Arthur Andersen, and one day you suddenly find yourself unemployed and packing boxes. Decide to get out of the library and bring your services directly into the organization, and you find out your boss thinks someone named Google is already doing your job. Just how is today's special librarian supposed to manage a career?

In a word, says Microsoft's Mary Lee Kennedy, broadly. "I've always thought of what I wanted to do," Kennedy says, "is to make sure people have the information they need to do their jobs. If you put it that way, there are just a million things you can do, from working in a physical location, to information architecture, designing tech platforms, or just making sure people communicate. Because I've thought of my career extremely broadly, I've been able to create wonderful opportunities."

Kennedy is a great example of how librarians are using their skills to shape vibrant careers in today's ever-changing organizations. In her role as director of the Knowledge Network Group at Microsoft, she is responsible for everything from the company's intranet strategy and knowledge services, including the company's enterprise and business information portals, to information architecture, content management, and shared intranet standards, practices, and services. It is hard to imagine a corner of the company where Kennedy is not involved.

"When I tell people what I do, [they] would not think that my background is in library science," says Kennedy. "A lot of that has to do with the culture that I'm in. There is huge respect for librarians [at Microsoft]. We're just not known as librarians."

Of course, that Kennedy is not known as a librarian may also be partly because, as is the case in an increasing number of today's businesses and organizations, there is no central "library" at Microsoft. The library at Microsoft is a "virtual and physical" experience, with the majority of information consumption occurring at the desktop. "I'm in a product group," Kennedy explains. "This company has basically said we love what you can do. We want you to contribute to our ability to do that around the world."

The past decade of technological advances and economic highs and lows has brought sweeping change to all librarians. But it's safe to say that no librarians have experienced more change than special librarians. In fact, it seems that the only constant for special librarians today is, well, change. So much so that members of the 94-year-old Special Libraries Association (SLA) voted on a measure that would change the organization's name to Information Professionals International at the SLA annual conference, June 9–12 in New York City. Proponents fell just 71 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve the new name.

Whatever you call them, says Jim Matarazzo, dean emeritus of the Library and Information Studies program at Simmons College in Boston, it is clear that for today's special librarians, the career path must be constantly blazed rather than simply followed.

"A big question is how today's companies look at their employees," he explains. "Is what you do a core competency? If not, then a Peter Drucker is going to say outsource it." The challenge for special librarians, says Matarazzo, is much the same as that facing other employees in the current economy: to connect themselves integrally to their firm's success. "Just pick up today's Wall Street Journal and look at how many people have lost their jobs," Matarazzo adds. "The real question is not what you are called, but how do you add value?"

A study sponsored by LexisNexis and released at the SLA conference confirms Matarazzo's assessment. The study cites the top challenge for the future of information professionals as delivering a "return on investment." In the survey overview, LexisNexis's Wendy Beecham sums it up: "To survive in the current business environment," she posits, librarians "must be able to provide not just data but additional strategic value as well."

Indeed, 69 percent of the 200 information professionals who responded to the survey cited the need to "add value back to the organization to meet its business goals" as one of their top priorities for the future. Sixty-seven percent point to "improving the quality, efficiency, and value of information as a business and competitive asset." Technology, of course, plays a key role. Eighty-five percent say they use intranets for managing and distributing information, and more than half see collaborative workspaces, wireless networks, and portals as increasingly vital.

Not surprisingly, the study also found that information professionals feel they are being underemployed in their organizations. Nearly 60 percent of those polled said that they are underused in helping internal clients prioritize research requests, and an additional 47 percent said they felt they were not fully exploited for their "analysis and interpretation" of information.

All of this data confirms that change is rapidly and constantly re-inventing the workplace for special librarians, sometimes in disquieting ways. Of course, this change is taking no one by surprise. In an article for LJ ("Tactics for Corporate Library Success," LJ 9/15/90), Matarazzo and Laurence Prusack predicted with Amazing Kreskin–like accuracy nearly every trend now fully realized. "To survive," they wrote, "the corporate library must learn to portray itself as a service that is tied to company goals." Librarians can either see this change as opportunity, as Matarazzo and Prusack presciently surmised nearly 13 years ago, or they are sunk. "Not to seize the opportunity information management presents will only further hasten the decline of what is fast becoming an insecure, undervalued, and underpaid position in the United States." Fortunately, today's information professionals have a lot to fall back on. After all, this is the Information Age and these are librarians.

"This is a great time to be a librarian," effuses Mary Ellen Bates, a well-known independent information professional. "People are just beginning to realize everything we can do." Since earning her LIS degree from UC–Berkeley, Bates has worked in a variety of settings, a law library, a federal court, and at the then nascent telecomm giant MCI. But since 1991, she has been on her own, offering her research services. She readily admits that not everyone is cut out to work independently. A lot of people, she notes, go to work for themselves only to find out they hate their boss. But working independently is one example of how opportunities for librarians can actually increase even as traditional special library jobs are on the decline.

Bates presses a compelling point: while many information professionals are necessarily concerned about their jobs, they might do better to consider their careers. "I know that I could leave tomorrow and I would have a job wherever I land," she says. "As long as my clients can find me by phone or email, I'm there." In the current environment, Bates agrees that librarians more than ever need to rethink their function in the "information atmosphere." Once they do, she asserts, the news, despite a flood of corporate library closings, is actually pretty good.

"We need to focus on what we can still do better," she explains. "Google can provide links to a lot of stuff, but it won't give you an executive summary with key points highlighted, or a PowerPoint presentation with most provocative things listed up front. All these are things we can do that can draw people in. That's the value we bring. We need to impress on our patrons that we have critical abilities to evaluate resources in ways they can't."

For Bates, as an independent, she has no choice but to look at her career in an entrepreneurial light. She encourages the same of all her peers. "If we're not thinking competitively," she says, "looking at the marketplace, seeing who is using us and who's not, who could be and why they aren't, then we're doing a disservice to our organizations and to our potential patrons."

Microsoft's Kennedy agrees that the challenge for information professionals has far surpassed the static role of information provider. For librarians to remain vital to their organizations they must provide solutions. "My experience is that you have to be a critical thinker," says Kennedy. "You always have to add value. There's no way we could just stick stuff on the web and get away with it."

For Kennedy, this has translated into opportunity and a career not confined to managing information products but actually designing and implementing them. "My job is to connect information," she says. "I happen to love technology, so I like to know how people can use that, and I've pretty much been on the creative side of that rather than on the day-to-day—designing those environments rather than running them."

To come up with a solution, however, you have to know the problem, and that requires being proactive. Instead of waiting for someone to come to you, you go to them. "We do that all the time," Kennedy says. "You just have to go out and do it. One way is to identify the key initiatives the company is working on and then go to the people leading those initiatives, taking work with us that would offer up what we could deliver." Such an approach, she adds, is instrumental in seizing very real opportunities now open to librarians.

"I don't work in a library any-more," Kennedy explains. "I'm focused on creating productivity suites that help workers get their jobs done. Not just as a service to the company but as a service to our customers."

Although much focus has been placed on evaluating the librarian's role among the shifting information needs of an organization, one key point seems to have been ignored. Librarians have needs, too.

"Job satisfaction is my responsibility," says Kennedy. "I feel like I own my life, and job satisfaction is part of that. I have never felt in my entire career that I have been pigeonholed in anything. I don't know if that's an attitude or reality, or a lack of perspective on reality; I've just never felt that." It sounds almost too simple to forget, but job satisfaction is vital to professional development. In today's world, information is everywhere. Just as librarians are no longer confined by library walls, neither should their career expectations be.

"You really have to open up your eyes and your thoughts to what you do," says Ann Abate. "Some librarians are complacent," she notes. "A lot of librarians are scared because they think they know one thing. They themselves don't think as highly of their library degree as they should, so many librarians are blind to the opportunities that are available to them."

Abate is now director of communications at GovConnect, a company that provides technology solutions to local and state governments. After a long and varied career that included 11 years as a law librarian in Cincinnati's largest firm, Abate no longer works in a library. Her day-to-day duties now include marketing, internal and external communications, public relations, client communications, direct mailing with potential clients—as well as research—all skills, she says, that she honed as a librarian.

"I still have my library degree on the wall," says Abate. "I use my library skills every day. A lot of it crosses over. I never realized when I was doing all that marketing in libraries that I was preparing myself for a career in marketing, but I was."

"My assumption," adds Kennedy, "is that in academic or public libraries there still are traditional career paths for people. But in a corporation you either top out very quickly or you find broader and broader responsibilities with respect to information within your corporation. Or, you go find something else that you can do that uses some of your skill sets."

Of course, this is not a simple proposition. A new survey from Outsell Inc., released in June 2003, provides a rather disheartening snapshot of the difficult transition now facing many information professionals. Among the survey's findings: "inadequate funding and staffing" for corporate information centers, "excess demand," and "limited time for emerging roles." Indeed, where some organizations have offered special librarians the chance to advance and use their skills in varied ways, the Outsell survey found that "fewer information centers report directly to executive management, while more are positioned in administrative divisions."

The survey's results would not surprise Dee Magnoni. In fact, Magnoni's career as a special librarian is one that probably seems quite familiar. "After just two years I hit my ceiling," she recalls of her first full-time corporate library job, in a Massachusetts-based engineering library. Eager to do more, Magnoni says she worked hard to market her services to the organization. "Building relationships in the company gave me a much fuller understanding of what the engineers were doing and that allowed me to push research out to them before they even asked for it," she says. "I even wanted to branch out and do business research."

Despite her efforts, the powers that be didn't see things her way. "My supervisor oversaw the draftspeople, the secretaries, and me," she says. "He didn't exactly see the librarian as a professional person." At her next job, this time across the country in Oregon, Magnoni started an advertising library from scratch for a national firm, a creative, engaging job. After two years, just when things were getting good, the dot-com bomb dropped. Magnoni was downsized.

Today, Magnoni is back in an academic library setting, as director of the Olin College library, a new Needham, MA, institution that opened its doors in 2002. She is literally assembling the library from scratch and is energized by the opportunity, which came her way after a national search and takes advantage of all of her skills and experience.

Magnoni's career trajectory accents a key point. Not every organization is as progressive as Microsoft, meaning that no matter how creative you may be, proving your value is not only a personal challenge but a significant organizational challenge. As a profession, special librarians have a major marketing task on their hands. For individuals, clearly it is more important than ever to view your career broadly, to continue to pursue professional development, and to keep your mind—and your options—open.