Librarian Backtalk: Let's Circulate Librarians

It's been a long time since we broke the chains that secured the books to the shelves and let them circulate. Now it's time to do the same for reference librarians. We need to break the bonds holding us at the reference desk and start circulating outside.

Around the globe, in organizations of different types, reference librarians are doing just this—getting out of the library. Sometimes, it's a physical thing—they're going to meetings of research teams and academic departments, they're coteaching classes. Other times, it's virtual—they're managing project web sites, editing news feeds for distributed teams, and teaching distance courses.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a librarian and a member of the faculty coteach a seminar in research methods for Ph.D. students. At Purdue and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, librarians act as information counselors to student project teams. At Affinion Loyalty Group, a company in Richmond, the librarian moved her office into the marketing department in order to create a closer working relationship with the marketers.

When reference librarians circulate like this—and do it well—they also change how they relate to their customers. The medical library community has been at this the longest, with the first clinical medical librarians joining care teams in the 1970s. N.B. Giuse wrote in Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (1997) that the role requires librarians to “project themselves not as information servers who trail the team in an auxiliary capacity, but as an integral part of the group with a specialized expertise that can contribute vitally to clinical situations.”

One name for this model of service is “embedded librarianship.” Recent research affirms that embedded librarians form strong relationships with their customers and provide highly sophisticated services to them. In a research project funded by the Special Libraries Association, my colleague Mary Talley and I found that embedded librarians engage in activities intended to build relationships and develop their knowledge of their customers' work. Over 50 percent of them said they contributed to their customer group's work, met with customers to discuss their information needs, provided training on resources away from library facilities, attended a meeting, class, or conference devoted to their customers' area of expertise, went to customer groups' meetings to learn about their work and information needs, and so on.

We also found that while the demand for traditional information services such as ready-reference and bibliographic verification didn't go away, complex, value-added services were emphasized. Over 50 percent said they provided services like in-depth topical research, evaluation of e-resources and negotiation with vendors, content management for web, intranet, and wiki sites, and participation with faculty in classroom instruction.

This way of working calls for new skills and new attitudes from both librarians and library managers. In an interview we conducted at a technological university, the assistant VP for library services attributed the embedded librarian's success to three key factors: the ability to connect (with faculty), an understanding of the curriculum and curricular goals and objectives, and service on faculty committees. In other words, the librarian had taken the initiative, shown an interest in university issues, gotten involved in faculty activities, and leveraged the resulting relationships to develop a new level of library service.

Effective management of embedded services requires that library managers become facilitators, coordinators, and advocates for their embedded staff. Based on our research, we have five recommendations for managers:

• hire library services staff who can build relationships
• enable staff to learn about the parent organization and the subject domain of their customers
• empower staff to identify and offer the services that their customers need most
• build manager-to-manager alliances and communicate effectively with customer managers
• support embedded librarians' work by enabling them to reach back into the central library staff for support.

Today, traditional library reference services stand at a crossroads. Change is not optional. As Stewart Saunders wrote, “The Internet and Google have changed the information landscape. Libraries now compete for a share of the information market” (RUSQ, 2007).

One thing we can do is become the professional information experts and advocates in our communities: building relationships, sharing responsibilities, and moving from service to partnership. It's time we start circulating.