Who Let the Librarians Out: Embedded Librarianship and the Library Manager

Judith M. Nixon, Editor
David Shumaker, Guest Columnist

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One of the newer ideas being discussed and tried in libraries is “embedded librarians.” The phrase comes from “embed ded journalists,” and places a reference librarian right in the midst of where the user is to teach research skills whenever and wherever instruction is needed. In colleges and universities, our users are in the classroom, especially the electronic classroom. In business they are in the research lab or office. In hospitals they are with doctors and nurses. Embedded librarians are like bibliographic instruction librarians that have been totally immersed—this is more than collaborating with classroom faculty members. The embedded librarian is David Shumaker’s area of research, and here he gives a good introduction to the topic and some specific guidelines on how to start an embedded librarian program in your library. What next for the column? I am on the lookout for ideas and writers on the broad range of topics that relate to running a reference or public service department. I encourage you to suggest column topics and to become an author and write on any successful reference programs or services.—Editor

Interesting things are going on in the world of library user services. At a campus of Penn State University, Librarian Russell Hall—instead of limiting his role to providing two in-library bibliographic instruction lectures—arranged to attend every class meeting of the first-year “Effective Speech” course. As a result, student research skills and the quality of their speeches showed a marked improvement, and Hall planned with the instructor to further increase his role the next time the class is taught.¹ At Wake Forest University, Susan Smith and Lynn Sutton accompanied students and faculty of the course “Social Stratification in the Deep South” on a two-week bus trip. The experience was so successful for all concerned that at the end of the course they immediately began planning to continue the practice.²

At the headquarters of Fairfax Media, the largest news media organization in Australia, a library space downsizing dispersed librarians into the office areas of the various news bureaus they serve. When a subsequent office move offered them the opportunity to recentralize in new library space, there was no sentiment in favor—the new arrangement had proven too successful. Customers valued the new services and the new relationships that they had established with their librarians.³ At the Mitre Corporation, a librarian’s office was moved from the library to the space occupied by his prime customer, and the change resulted in heightened visibility and new opportunities to provide valued services.⁴ And at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, the Nursing Department and Library collaborated on plans to involve the clinical librarian in the important knowledge-sharing conversations that take place as the nursing shifts change—so that she could provide essential clinical literature to advance the delivery of excellent nursing care.⁵

These librarians broke out of their libraries, built new relationships, and found new ways to deliver new kinds of services to the people in their communities who need them most. While others may wring their hands with worry over the competition that digital libraries and the Internet pose for traditional reference and public services, these folks have found ways to create new services and new value for their libraries by getting out into the communities they serve!

This change is both driven and enabled by the increasingly digital, networked, and mobile society we live in. We’ve known for a while that libraries’ monopoly on factual information is gone. People don’t need us to find out who won the National League pennant in 1946, or who was the only president born in Pennsylvania. Anyone with a computer and a network connection can now do their own research anytime, from anywhere. As E. Stewart Saunders said in this space a year ago, “The Internet and Google have changed the information landscape. Libraries now compete for a share of the information market.”⁶ That’s true, but the same technologies that are competing with traditional reference service have freed us reference librarians from the chains that have kept us in the library. We’re free to roam and share our expertise wherever our customers are because we can, in a sense, take many of our most valuable tools with us.

What’s really critical here is not just getting out of the library. It’s that the very nature of our service, and the relationship we have with our customers, changes—or can change, and must change—when we start roaming. The librarian at Penn State didn’t just hang around before and after class, waiting for students to ask reference questions—he actively participated in class discussions, sharing his knowledge of information sources and insights on research methods. The librarian at Mitre didn’t sit behind his desk and wait for reference questions—he went to meetings, participated in conversations, and found himself pulled in and consulted about upcoming technical projects as well as the organization and management of the group’s library. The librarian at the University of Sheffield isn’t just supposed to sit at a desk and wait for questions either—now she’s supposed to be a participant in the nurses’ conversations.

The fact is reference librarians have deep knowledge and special skills that have the potential to be immensely beneficial to many of those in our communities. But we can only unlock that value when we establish the relationships that allow us to join their conversations—to identify their unexpressed information needs. Because, as we all learned in Reference 101, people often have a tough time articulating what they need to know—and many times they don’t articulate it at all. We need to build relationships so we can gain deeper insights into what our customers are doing and how they will use the information we provide. We need the background knowledge about them and their work that will enable us to perform successfully and establish our credibility.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t a call to abolish the reference desk or traditional reference services. It’s not a call to close the library or forget about the library as place. It’s not even a suggestion that we abandon our efforts to establish virtual reference services. All those things have their place. Rather, this is a call to do something else new as well, to explore new territories outside the library and take new opportunities to build working relationships—true collaboration and partnerships with our customers—as we’ve never been able to do in the past.

Some may say, “But we’ve had ‘liaison librarians’ for years. What’s really new here?” The question is, Have liaison librarians been outwardly focused and engaged in developing collaborative relationships with customer-partners, or have they been library-focused, seeing collection development, not teaching or reference and research, as their primary role? There’s substantial evidence in the literature to suggest the latter. See, for example, RUSA’s Guidelines for Liaison Work in Managing Collections and Services, which defines liaison work as “the process by which librarians involve the library’s clientele in the assessment and satisfaction of collection needs.”⁷ See also the extended discussion of research findings by Rodwell and Fairbairn.⁸ The difference is between saying “we’d like you to help us build the library collection” and “let’s work together to achieve our mutual goals.”

The name often given to this new kind of user services librarianship in recent years is “embedded librarianship”— “embedded” because the librarian becomes a member of the customer community rather than a service provider standing apart. The embedding may often involve physical collocation, such as the office moves at Fairfax Media and Mitre, or the class attendance by Hall, Smith, and Sutton. Or it may involve a virtual collaboration, such as interacting with dispersed students in a computer-based distance learning environment. It fits well within the academic, specialized, and corporate sectors because there are parent organizations (universities and corporations) with well-defined groups of library customers. But public librarians and librarians in primary and secondary education may be thinking that this model doesn’t apply to them. Their customer groups may not be so well defined. And, after all, the examples used so far have all been taken from higher education and specialized corporate libraries. Still, some of these ideas and principles may well apply. For example, the magazine Teacher Librarian is dedicated to the principle that instruction and student achievement are enhanced when librarians are able to form multidimensional partnerships with classroom teachers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if school libraries were so well staffed that librarians could afford to specialize and develop deeper relationships with the classroom teachers in a particular grade or a particular academic department of a secondary school? The Guidelines for Liaison Work mentioned above incorporate a section on liaison in public libraries. So why not extend the concept in the public library sector as in the others? As T. Berry Brazelton said, addressing the 2008 ALA Annual Conference, librarians have an “opportunity to be part of the family system,” should become partners with parents in the learning and development of young children, and should move from “objective involvement to empathic involvement” in the family system.⁹ A way to do this is to enable librarians to spend more time out in the community, participating in community groups.

It’s a telling fact that in the literature, many embedded library service relationships are established because of customer initiatives or external events. The Wake Forest, Penn State, and Fairfax Media stories are all cases in point. We library managers shouldn’t sit back and wait for these opportunities to come to us any longer. It’s time for us to start the process and lead the way!

But how do you begin to create the kinds of relationships that are forming at places like Wake Forest, Penn State, Fairfax Media, Mitre, and the University of Sheffield? And what are the pitfalls to watch out for along the way?

Here are some ideas for initiating and sustaining an embedded library service:

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