Article in USA Today
But none have jumped in as audaciously as the Welch Medical Library has under Roderer. Two years from now, the medical library at Johns Hopkins, a world leader in medical research, will have realized a “distributed” library model — one that nearly everyone else in higher education considers either a far-off goal or a theoretical guidepost. A library located everywhere, and nowhere.
“We don’t really need to have a central service point anymore,” Roderer says. “By 2012 we do expect to be out of the building.”
Full article here
Embedded librarians
I’ve been doing this for four years at my aerospace company and it’s working fairly well. We still have a small library, but everything else is offsite. I have cubicles in two different buildings, and I’m deployed half time to our advanced R&D group. There are advantages and disadvantages. I’d be hesitant to apply this model to some academic libraries, especially the ones who don’t have the funding for extensive electronic database subscriptions.
Also, you have to carefully weigh the charges involved with rental fees and ordering items from offsite storage (if you’re using a vendor for that).