by Doug Newcomb, SLA

The late U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen once famously said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” That statement says a lot about how public policy is made, but it’s also an appropriate metaphor for the way our profession (indeed, nearly every profession) responds to changes in the environment.

Big changes make headlines, but small ones are mostly overlooked—until they result in a big change. For example, many economists were warning in the late 1990s and early 2000s that prolonged low interest rates would create a “bubble” in the real estate market. The decisions to keep interest rates low were small, but their long-term impact can hardly be overstated.

Small changes may seem to have minimal impact when viewed as discrete actions, but when combined, they can lead to a new dynamic in our environment. This dynamic can be positive or harmful—cutting spending on information resources can force information professionals to be more creative about finding new resources and help them develop valuable skills in this area, whereas reducing spending on staff training and development can prevent info pros from acquiring new competencies and reduce their value to their organizations.

Being future ready means anticipating, responding to, and making small changes. We need to be aware of small changes in our environment so we can respond before they become big changes. Likewise, we need to take the initiative to make small changes on our own, recognizing that the real-time impact may be minimal but the aggregate effect will be both noticeable and worthwhile. The future comes one day at a time; use each day to prepare for it.

Douglas Newcomb is the Chief Operating Officer of SLA.

From – ‘A Study of Correlation, The Effect Of R&D Information Tools On Research Success,’ Elsevier Corporate Markets

submitted by Kristopher Patterson, Kansas/Western Missouri, New York, Southern California and San Francisco Bay Region Chapters, Biomedical & Life Sciences, Engineering, Petroleum & Energy Resources, Science-Technology, and Transportation Divisions

Researchers, engineers and scientists are under increasing pressure to outperform their competition and contribute to the growth of their companies. Responses from over 600 R&D professionals established a strong correlation between the contributions made by librarians and research success. In other words, a distinct correlation exists between providing researchers, engineers and scientists with librarians and their ultimate success in R&D activities. Listed below are key takeaways from how a librarian is viewed from the perspective of a research, engineer and a scientist. Among researchers who work with librarians, 90% believe librarians make significant contributions to their R&D efforts.

While Engineers and Scientists indicate that librarians affect the R&D process in a variety of meaningful ways:

• Locate specialized information researchers have difficulty finding 59%
• Organize a firm’s internal documents for use by researchers 53%
• Connect researchers with the correct/most applicable resources 45%
• Suggest print resources not available electronically 42%
• Save significant search time for researchers, making them more productive 42%
• Are knowledge managers, helping researchers take advantage of resources 40%
• Save time & aid in research, contributing to cost savings & revenue 38%
• Determine authoritativeness/relevancy of resources 38%
• Help researchers work faster, accelerating the research process 37%
• Direct researchers beyond the obvious resources 36%

For further information, please see the detailed report, or contact me (K.Patterson@elsevier.com).

Kristopher Patterson is Elsevier’s Marketing Manager for North & South America as well as an Adjunct Professor for Touro College. He is based in New York, New York and in his spare time, he still tries to figure out the Dewey Decimal System.

This week’s posts come from truly gifted professionals of the SLA North Carolina chapter. While each representative has made an effort to keep their topics inline with the central theme of SLA Future Ready 365 blog, you will notice that each post provides a unique perspective and is intended to help a variety of readers that visit the blog. For more information about our members and the North Carolina chapter, be sure to visit ncarolina.sla.org.

The future ready librarian must possess soft skills of marketing and salesmanship as well as the technical knowledge to perform day-to-day duties. In the new normal economy, those who do not provide value that the employers understand will find their employment in peril. Become the best marketer of your skills and value you can be! Here are a few suggestions to survive and be future ready!

• Know your product–You! Know your skills and how an organization can benefit from having you as an asset. Know the size, type, organization, and culture in which you wish to work and market to those employers.
• Demonstrate value–In order to stay employed, you have to understand what the employer values and how to present that information in an understandable way. This is trickier than it sounds. I happen to know of one organization where the information professionals were not allowed to talk to management!
• Hone your skills–Continue your education and tailor the learning to your strengths and the needs of your present and future employers. Take advantage of any educational support because it is a benefit to you, but you must choose to take advantage of it. Just remember, your present and future competition may be improving their skills and acquiring new ones.
• In business, “Location, Location, Location” is a common saying. In the new normal economy, ”Network, Network, Network” should be your personal mantra. Go to conferences, have business cards ready, get involved in your local library groups. Most importantly, take the time to consider which of your contacts you should meet. Being helpful to other networkers pays dividends! Good luck!

Mason is a librarian/information professional from Raleigh, NC. He graduated from Florida State University’s online program with an M.S. in Library and Information Science in 2008. He worked at Strayer University and The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences. Currently he is the Career Chair for the North Carolina Chapter of the Special Libraries Association where he is part of the resume review service development team and acts as a mentor and resume reviewer for new information professionals.

San Diego, California is home of beautiful weather, spectacular beaches- and a group of highly motivated, driven and future-ready information professionals. The SLA-San Diego Chapter is proud to join in the conversation with our SLA peers about what it means to be Future Ready.  Our San Diego membership boasts a wide range of professional experience and expertise, and we hope that you find our contributions to the FutureReady365 blog to be both thought-provoking and useful!

by Dolly Goulart, San Diego Chapter, Competitive Intelligence, Engineering, Legal, Leadership & Management, and Science-Technology Divisions

At your next meeting, look around. Who do you see sitting at the table? What roles do they fill? Are you regularly sitting amongst librarians or information providers, or are you regularly sitting with a cross-functional group, representing various business units, roles, or functions? If your answer is the first, why isn’t it the latter?

The overused stereotype of the librarian as a back-office or behind-the-scenes support person makes it easy for those in our role to resign ourselves to a position of reactiveness. As highly knowledgeable professionals within the organization, it is in the best interest of everyone involved – you, the client, and the organization – for information professionals to recognize their value and forge themselves a seat at the table.

Recognizing one’s value doesn’t always come easily. It takes self-reflection, future awareness, and the ability to part with comfort. Understanding the importance of our role is not enough. If you understand, but don’t demonstrate your value, you are not any further ahead. Consistently demonstrating your value requires one to evaluate the role they want to fill. The way we present ourselves determines the success we’ll encounter. Do you want to be an advocate for comprehensive information that answers strategic needs, or do you want to be a fill-in secretary, providing transactional-based support without building an equally respecting relationship with your clients? I know which role I want to fill and work every day to make sure the team I manage is viewed in the most professional capacity possible. I don’t fight for a seat amongst other highly competent business professionals. I let the work of our team speak for itself, resulting in strong partnerships across the company and strategically aligned participation. Do we still have work to do on this front? Yes. Is there alignment that we still need to strengthen? Yes. Do we increase our value almost daily, thereby increasing the level of respect and ultimately inclusion? Absolutely.

Back to the stereotype. Why is that we spend so much time evaluating old stereotypes and using them as crutches to keep us from moving forward? It’s so easy to think that someone doesn’t need a librarian in the room, or that they’ll come to us when they need us. Isn’t it more important to look towards the future, forget about the past, and for each and every one of us, determine the best approach to making sure we’re included in the discussion, whatever that discussion is? Personally, I get excited about tomorrow. I get excited about the possibilities and the potentials. I don’t dwell too much on why or why not and I don’t look too far back. Am I a risk taker? Maybe, maybe not. More than anything, I’m passionate about my role and the role librarians can fill. I don’t apologize for that passion because that is what keeps me engaged. It is also what gets me invited to the table.

Dolly Goulart has over seventeen years of experience in the information industry, including more than ten years of corporate experience in wireless and telecommunications. She is currently the manager of Research & Analysis for Qualcomm Library & Information Services, leading a team that supports a global population of Qualcomm employees. In addition to providing industry research and competitive IP intelligence, the team partners heavily with strategic and cross departmental groups to provide business critical research deliverables.

San Diego, California is home of beautiful weather, spectacular beaches- and a group of highly motivated, driven and future-ready information professionals. The SLA-San Diego Chapter is proud to join in the conversation with our SLA peers about what it means to be Future Ready.  Our San Diego membership boasts a wide range of professional experience and expertise, and we hope that you find our contributions to the FutureReady365 blog to be both thought-provoking and useful!

by Britt Mueller, San Diego Chapter, Business & Finance, Engineering, and Leadership & Management Divisions

Years ago I was told a third hand story that had a huge impact on how I thought about my career and defined success in my work. In essence, it was one of the best pieces of advice that I have been given to make me “future ready.”

The story was about a person in a large company who was working on a project with a lot of visibility. Quite a few very bright and highly competent people were on the project and worked tirelessly on it for several months. They had great communication skills and worked effectively as a team but in the end the project did not fulfill the objectives that were laid out and failed to impress senior executives. When discussing the project with an executive, the lead described the significant teamwork, the long nights, and how hard people had worked. The executive listened to the project leader and simply said, “You are confusing effort with results.”

Although I was hearing this story third or fourth hand, the clarity and simplicity of this statement rang true. The fact that it came from someone who was in a high level position was also critical in that it clearly delineated what was important to leaders. Getting results counts – both personally in terms of what I deliver as an individual and also for the Library as an entity within the larger organization. I can develop personal and professional skills, my team can work hard, we can be busy – but in the end gaining and developing skills or trying hard is meaningless if you cannot produce results that matter.

I think there is a lot that library and information professionals can learn from this statement. I have attended many conferences, communicated with peers, read our literature over more years than I would wish to admit and I am often disheartened by the emphasis with which we work to define ourselves. I am sure many people would agree that they cannot attend a library conference without some mention by attendees of how nice a group of people we are, that we need to position ourselves for the future and develop new skills, or the oft cited lament on how people outside our profession don’t understand us and we have to get better at communicating our value. These are all good and often true observations in and of themselves, but they should never be how we define our success or our ability to be meaningful. These are attributes, tools and approaches that should help us do the final necessary step – get results that matter to our organizations, our leaders, and our clients.

I personally use the idea of results over effort to define what I work on, what strategic initiatives the organization I manage focuses on, and to communicate value to my leaders. It also requires me to be my own worst critic – to look for continued opportunity to produce results that matter. The outcome of focusing on results creates the best use of resources, assures that the work I do is meaningful and important, and positions the Library as a critical and necessary service – not a nice to have. Never confusing effort with results actually creates outcomes (or results) that we can all consider successes including recognition, support, resources, and growth as we position ourselves, our libraries and information centers as critical to the success of any organization.

Currently serving as President of the SLA San Diego Chapter, Britt Mueller is the Sr. Director of Qualcomm’s Library & Information Services department. Serving a global employee population of over 20,000 people, the Qualcomm Library provides just-in-time information, research and analysis to enable employees to increase performance and productivity for competitive advantage.

by Sara Tompson

SLA needs to be growing and supporting continuously competent professionals. In a field that changes as rapidly as does ours – I know I am not the only one who originally learned to search online using BRS After Dark, a 300 baud acoustic coupler and thermal paper (!) – continuous learning is absolutely critical in order to survive and thrive and be of value to our organizations.

I have long seen competencies as a very useful framework for professional development, have written and spoken on this view, and have used SLA competencies in teaching LIS graduate students. Therefore I am pleased that SLA’s Professional Development Program is ranked fairly high in importance on the new Strategic Vision we all helped create. I would like to see competencies made even more explicit in the plan, though they are strongly implied therein.

The first order of business we’ve set for ourselves for 2012 includes defining and documenting a new strategic approach that integrates professional development opportunities throughout the year and in different modalities, not just annually face-to-face at Continuing Education conference workshops. Great! We are moving towards a continuous learning program.

This new approach to SLA professional development requires feedback from the Professional Development Advisory Council (PDAC). PDAC currently helps SLA staff review CE workshop proposals and has been charged with reviewing and proposing updates to the SLA Competencies document (which also should be a living, continuous document). Again, great! This should help integrate the competencies framework. In addition, SLA President Cindy Romaine has recently appointed a special task force to help fast track the competencies document review. I hope to see a re-energized PDAC partnering in that effort in 2012.

We also plan to reach out to iSchools to examine and propose opportunities for professional development programming. Once again, great! The iSchools (I would include LIS programs in a broad definition thereof) are training the next generation of librarians and information professionals, and it is exciting to have a hand in that effort (as those of us who teach know!). PDAC had a fruitful Skype discussion with some SLA leaders earlier this year about the importance of competencies for iSchools, including the need to promote relevant special libraries competencies into curricula where possible, noting that ALA competencies are more woven into these graduate schools than are SLA’s. I hope to see everyone who is or has taught information professionals contributing to professional development/graduate information school partnership ideas.

Moving forward, we want to pilot and evaluate some partnership and solo programs, and refine them as necessary. We also want to look at partnering with other professional schools, e.g. MBA programs in business schools, for further opportunities. I think we can do this right, so the sum of the whole of the partnerships is greater than our impact individually.

Hoping to chat with many of you in SLA about professional development, via phone, email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. (See, we’ve all come quite a ways from that 300 baud dial up!)

Sara Tompson is one of SLA’s Directors, 2011-2013.

by Mary Ellen Bates

One area of focus for the Board of Directors as we implement our strategic plan is in building and enhancing the Annual Conference. It’s one of our chief member benefits, as well as a significant source of association income. We also recognize that the conference needs some adjustments to reflect the current concerns and issues of our members, as well as the market in which we operate.

Since it’s one of my passions, I’d like to share the vision that the board has developed regarding the Annual Conference. As anyone who has ever been involved in conference planning knows, it involves a significant time commitment, often spanning several years, on the part of many volunteers. In order to continue offering high value to members, we see the need for a more strategic approach to planning the conference, in which our volunteers’ valuable professional time is used in the best way possible. We have selected several avenues to pursue for the next three years:

• Develop a more streamlined way to develop conference content
• Offer more value to more senior members
• Develop our virtual conference activities

What will this look like? In terms of the conference programming, division leaders will offer higher-level input and will be looking at ways to extend the programming virtually throughout the year. We also envision an executive track for experienced members that will have a high profile and will generate press coverage of the conference as well as publishable white papers. Our goal by 2014 is to have a full-time staff member involved in coordinating CE programs, conference programs and year-round education, in order to better support SLA’s strategic goal to support information professionals.

The number of sessions conducted during the Annual Conference will drop, as we combine similar topics and focus on providing fewer sessions of high quality. We also see the divisions offering more virtual programming throughout the year; this can be an opportunity to offer division-specific virtual programs that more division members could attend.

As a conference attendee of more years than I care to count (except that I’ll note that I have tote bags from two Annual Conferences in San Antonio), I know how valuable they are for my professional development. I am really passionate about finding ways for us to continue to add value to the conference, and to enable even more virtual learning for our members throughout the year.

I welcome your questions and comments. You can reach me at mbates@batesinfo.com or +1 303 772 7095. And I look forward to seeing many of you in Chicago in 2012!

Mary Ellen Bates is SLA’s Division Cabinet Chair.

Military Libraries come in all shapes and sizes. We’re academic libraries, supporting Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees. We’re public libraries, complete with children’s story hours and retiree’s financial resources. We’re also other types of special libraries: medical; history; science, technology & engineering; intelligence; and headquarters support. The Military Libraries Division brings together members from all U.S. military services, Canadian Combined Armed Forces, international military services, contractors, vendors, academic institutions and anyone with an interest in military librarianship. Check us out at http://military.sla.org/. — Gloria Miller is a Librarian at the Headquarters, U.S. Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal (Huntsville), Alabama. She is currently the Chair-Elect of the Military Libraries Division

“[t]he Army must continually adapt to changing conditions and evolving threats to our security. An essential part of that adaptation is the development of new ideas to address future challenges.”

Army Operating Concept 2010

“The Army Learning Concept 2015 is an important component of our effort to drive change through a campaign of learning. It describes the learning environment we envision in 2015. It seeks to improve our learning model by leveraging technology without sacrificing standards so we can provide credible, rigorous, and relevant training and education for our force of combat seasoned Soldiers and leaders. It argues that we must establish a continuum of learning from the time Soldiers are accessed until the time they retire. It makes clear that the responsibility for developing Soldiers in this learning continuum is a shared responsibility among the institutional schoolhouse, tactical units, and the individuals themselves.”

TRADOC Pam 525-8-2, 20 Jan 2011, Army Learning Concept, forward, p. i.

Like most American institutions, the U.S. Army is in flux. Ten years of war, now in three theaters, has changed attitudes about what the institution needs to do to remain viable, relevant, and dominant. Librarians have a part of that discussion. We need to remain viable, relevant, and useful to decision-makers, or we will be replaced by Bing.

So, in the spirit of General (ret) Shinsheki*, I propose a set of development points that are going to be vital for military librarians to navigate through over the next few years. Some are broad issues in the library profession that are being played out in the military microcosm; others are specific to the milieu. Surmounting the challenges below will require all our technical and managerial skills. We can surmount all of them, but not by huddling in our bunkers. Librarians have changed with the profession, and we can continue to deal with rapid and disorienting change.

Libraries have changed more during my 40-year career than in the previous thousand years. Is that great, or what? It‘s a good day to be a librarian.

Ten points of conflict for the military librarian of the next decade:

1. Libraries must welcome mobile devices. This should surprise no one. It‘s a reasonable assumption that every soldier has, or soon will have, a smart phone in his or her pocket. Will libraries be on speed-dial? Can libraries provide timely, relevant information quickly and easily, often without human intervention? Can libraries do that for a dispersed, harried, overworked, very determined clientele? Mobile accessibility is more critical to our survival with each passing year.
2. Libraries, particularly the school libraries, must encourage alumni queries, not limit their work to current students. As learning trends more toward the lifelong model, we will see a wider spectrum of soldiers accessing our resources. Can a deployed Staff Sergeant find the current doctrine on developing training strategies in Central Africa? Can faculty find usable, relevant vignettes on command relationships? Our ability to deal with diverse customers and subjects must improve.
3. Guard and Reserve students need access from their homes/armories. At my institution, we have about two thousand resident students, and at least triple that in distance education programs. Are those citizen soldiers served? Do they even know you exist?
4. More and more, as managers we find ourselves embroiled in licenses and contracting minutiae. This will not get easier! Information aggregators and vendors will demand payment for their services, will require you to define your audience, and will increasingly place restrictions on the use, re-use, and transfer of their products. We‘ll have to mediate these licenses in an increasingly chaotic contracting and copyright environment.
5. Management must be aware of library service requirements to residents and non-residents alike. This is something we should be doing all the time—making the bosses understand we provide a useful service. If they don‘t understand that, libraries will vanish. This isn‘t new, just continuing librarian responsibility. Educating your management is vital. Google may not kill the library, but senior managers who think Google can replace you, will.
6. ILS are swiftly becoming obsolete. Web discovery systems are evolving quickly. Competing systems are cropping up in all directions. The idea of a specialized, expensive, labor-intensive tool that only displays the tiny percentage of your library’s assets is a nineteenth-century artifact. That’s not to say we can give up on cataloging books and maintaining inventory control. But we have to make it easier for folks to use our stuff.
7. As with all levels of American society, military librarians must beware the Google-Wikipedia quick simple answer trap. Educating your clients about sources and provenance will serve them well all their lives.
8. Conflicts between public release, unclassified but sensitive, and classified research are making life harder. Rules on operational security and Personally Identifiable Information are changing daily, often in bizarre ways. They are a fact of life, and a source of much pain.
9. Education vs. training will be a constant friction point in military school systems, curricula, and civilian degree-granting institutions. Does the curriculum provide direct proficiency in a series of tasks, or does it broadly prepare soldiers and family members to respond in intelligent, knowledgeable ways to unexpected events?
10. Copyright is becoming increasingly Byzantine and time-consuming; librarians by default become copyright cops. Lawyers involve themselves in the minutiae of posting anything on the Web.

* “If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.”

Ed Burgess is the director of the Combined Arms Research Library in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is practicing to become a windy curmudgeon in his old age.

By Sara Tompson (Southern California Chapter) with input from Lorri Zipperer (Rio Grande Chapter)

Librarians and Information Professionals are missing a unique opportunity to improve their libraries—to become future ready—and the organizations in which they work! A systems thinking perspective and some systems thinking tools can enable us to lend the value of our information expertise to problem-solving and process-improvement efforts.

“Systems thinking” is a way to view the world, including organizations, from a broad perspective that includes structures, patterns, and events, rather than simply the events. Systems thinking includes:

• Seeing the behavior and the interaction of the parts within the context of the whole
• Building collective thinking for sustained change (AKA being Future Ready!)
• Learning from failure
• Working to dismantle the effects of silo-based activity
• Understanding and respecting how humans can affect the system
• Solving problems in non-linear fashion.

Systems thinking, developed by Peter Senge at MIT and others, draws from engineering process analyses to apply a set of principles for understanding complex-interacting wholes. It is best used to address complex problems where solutions seem elusive as well as problems that reoccur in an organization, especially problems for which past fixes have failed.

Systems thinking can seem, and sometimes be, rather complex, particularly with the use of the discipline’s hallmark loop diagrams – see a library example below from one of Lorri’s and my SLA CE workshops.

On the other hand, basic concepts of systems and the cyclical nature of cycles, and the loop diagrams to represent them, have been grasped by first graders! Check out this video from Systems Thinking in Schools.

Systems thinking enables looking beyond the library – a view that is necessary for survival and success.  As SLA CEO Janice Lachance said in her column in the December 2009 issue of Information Outlook: “…people are not viewed as indispensable based on the function they perform but on the value [my emphasis] they deliver–specifically the clearly understood and essential contributions they make to the success of their organization.”

Employing systems thinking tools, librarians can utilize their time and strategic skills effectively while raising awareness of the importance of their work. Take a look at this “Habits of a Systems Thinker” handout from the Waters Foundation and take just a minute to contemplate how you could incorporate one or more of these habits at work. This could start you on the path of being one of we info pros who employs systems thinking to strategize innovative, sustainable solutions to long term, persistent problems in the workplaces, and thus moves more easily toward the future!

• Tompson and Zipperer recently published a chapter on systems thinking in ABC-Clio’s Best Practices in Corporate Libraries. Portions of the book can be read on Google Books.
• They will be teaching a day-long workshop on systems thinking as part of UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies Friday Forum series on November 4, 2011.
• Systems Thinking Perspective – SLA Biomedical & Life Sciences Division Project
• Zipperer L, Tompson S. “Systems thinking: a new avenue for involvement and growth.” Information Outlook. (December 2006):16-20.
  • Find Articles has posted the article as well.

Sara Tompson is a member of the SLA Board (2011-2013) and of the Southern California Chapter, and has held a number of offices in chapters and divisions.  She is the Head of Library Instruction & Orientation Services at the University of Southern California.  She has worked for years with SLA member Lorri Zipperer on systems thinking in libraries.  For more information on some of their work, please see the links at the bottom of this post.

Hello from the nation’s capital!  DC/SLA is excited to be contributing all of this week’s FutureReady365 posts (thanks to our future-thinking Communications Secretary, Chris Vestal).  We are a diverse community of 800+ information professionals, with members from D.C., Maryland, Virginia, as well as 30 other U.S. states and 12 countries.  You’ll see this diversity reflected in the range of future ready ideas presented in posts throughout the week.  We hope our posts will spark some thought and conversation and, of course, your comments. Most of all, we want to help keep the spark of the FutureReady blog alive  – a spark that’s become a fire, gathering us around it to brainstorm our way into the future. — Mary Talley, DC/SLA President (2011)

by Mary Talley, Washington, DC and Maryland Chapters, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Knowledge Management, Legal, and Leadership & Management Divisions

It was a wonderful life. When I started out, libraries and librarians were the only information game in town. Books held the answers and we held the books. There was no question that our work supported our organizations in crucial and irreplaceable (if not always measurable) ways. We were sure of our value: they (formerly known as “patrons”) needed us to identify, organize and maintain the sources and get at the data. These were powerful, valuable positions. It was a wonderful life.

Then… Well, you know the rest. The competition arrived and with it the temptation of the low-hanging fruit of good-enough information that forced us to rethink our place and value in this ever-evolving, 2.0 information world. To complicate life further, technological change and the competition it brings with it isn’t coming in fits and spurts – it’s rapid and continuous.

But wait a minute – was our old place in the information world really all that wonderful? Did we drive our organizations back then, tending the gates of knowledge; or, were we really in adjunct, transactional roles? If our positions did not allow us to be active participants in driving our organizations’ goals and objectives, we were – and are – adjuncts in our organizations. In a self-serve, peer-to-peer, 2.0 information world, as long as we hold adjunct roles, we will remain at the periphery of the organization and continually challenged to prove our value.

What can we do to be truly future ready? Move the conversation away from “proving value” to being valuable and trade in our transactional roles for those that are directly involved in the high-value work of our organizations. Moving information professionals out of libraries and embedding them in user communities provides a path to that direct involvement. Embedding trades in the service-provider role for one as a team member accountable for the outcomes.

The rise of a highly-interactive, information environment is opening the way for embedded information professionals, as much as it is making these new roles imperative. Collaboration, immediacy, accessibility, the disintegration of boundaries, and a new emphasis on relationships – this is the 2.0 information world our user communities inhabit. This is what they expect when they seek information from technology or us. Luckily, these are also qualities associated with the provision of embedded information services.

Mary Talley heads TalleyPartners, an information management consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, repositioning and embedded information structures for information centers.  She currently serves as President of DC/SLA.