http://search-engines-web.com/ writes Will the 21st Century will Redefine the field and skills of Public, Academic and Corporate Librarians
Librarians often manage a company’s information resources, including “best practices” that successful company veterans want to pass on to a firm’s new hires, Ray said. Another new avenue is corporate intelligence, or staying one step ahead of the competition.
It’s all part of a push by librarians to reinvent their profession.
“We don’t just live in the traditional four walls of the library anymore,” said Mandy Baldridge, an account executive with InfoCurrent, an information-management staffing company. “We’ve made ourselves necessary to the organization so we can be in many different areas of the organization.
http://search-engines-web.com/ writes Will the 21st Century will Redefine the field and skills of Public, Academic and Corporate Librarians
Librarians often manage a company’s information resources, including “best practices” that successful company veterans want to pass on to a firm’s new hires, Ray said. Another new avenue is corporate intelligence, or staying one step ahead of the competition.
It’s all part of a push by librarians to reinvent their profession.
“We don’t just live in the traditional four walls of the library anymore,” said Mandy Baldridge, an account executive with InfoCurrent, an information-management staffing company. “We’ve made ourselves necessary to the organization so we can be in many different areas of the organization.
How librarians fare professionally and economically depends on how they define themselves, said Bonnie Hohhof, editor of Competitive Intelligence Magazine, published by the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.
The future is in electronic information tailored to an individual’s or business’ needs, she said. Librarians need to work on a “higher level, providing information that supports the decisions of the company.”
That’s where special librarians come in. Most often they work for corporations, private businesses, government agencies, museums, colleges, hospitals, associations or information management consulting firms.
American Library Association data indicate that, as of December 2003, there were 8,350 special libraries in the United States, a figure that included corporate, medical, law and religious libraries but not public, academic, armed forces and government libraries.
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reinventing the profession.
Will someone please delcare the profession officially re-invented!
If I have to read one more article that says things like: “We don’t just live in the traditional four walls of the library anymore”, I am going to scream. Or cry.
Re:reinventing the profession. /or take a cold shower and calm down and get on with life.
My first impulse was to probably agree with Grumpy Librarian, even though realising it was perhaps a facetious take on the story, however on reflection I am prepared to cut a little slack , for the simple reason that the story is addressed to people who perhaps don’t frequently read library weblogs and hence are not aware of how the issue has been apparantly done to death. Anything that helps to promote the standing of librarianship, in the wider world , can’t really hurt and might even help, despite the “aaaarrrgghh..not again” factor that we might feel kicking in. (particularly when written with a sympathetic slant by journalists ) Perhaps we should all just count to ten and