Page 60 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Unit 3: Reference Librarian

Notes
reference questions—asked during a meeting or by community leaders with whom
embedded librarians meet—librarians often also assist with the leadership of the
organization; report on the group’s activities, goals, and direction; and in general become
an integrated part of the group. Participating in these organizations allows us to
demonstrate our value, while also becoming deeply knowledgeable about the issues they
are facing. With this information, we can then discover the issues that our entire county is
facing.
Douglas County Libraries’ first experiment with embedded librarianship occurred in
2006 when LaRue was invited to attend the meetings of the Parker Downtown Development
Council (DDC). A group of property and business owners who wanted to improve the
downtown shopping district invited town staff, city council members, and other
stakeholders to work with them. The Parker Library manager and librarians began
attending their meetings and served as the DDC’s secretary and in-house researcher (doing
everything from minutes to volunteering at events, hosting information on the library
website, and researching local architecture and methods for economic development in
small towns). When the DDC was asked to describe the value of the library’s service over
several years, members mentioned the importance of the expert research the librarians
provided, the communication we facilitated, and the credibility a partner like the library
brought to a fledgling organization. The library built strong relationships with these
motivated community leaders, amazed them with our research skills, and helped the
group grow into a formal non-profit that leads the community’s drive for economic
growth.
Unique outreach benefits both partners
Community reference is a way to integrate ourselves into the community that highlights
the skills and services we have to offer. This unique outreach creates a valuable partnership
for the library, communities, and the library profession at a time when we need our
communities to support the existence and funding of their local library. It is outreach with
a hyper local emphasis, something the library can do better than any other community
organization. As libraries all over the country face steep budget cuts, the library needs to
reinvent itself to stay relevant and create a library culture. We rely on our community’s
support, and community reference in turn allows us to be strategically placed for our
community to rely on our skills and services.
The value of the library’s involvement with a community organization includes both the
tangible and the intangible. The embedded librarian generates reports, minutes, executive
summaries, bibliographies, and many other deliverables that represent hours of research
and analysis performed in response to an organization’s information needs. The cost of
having an independent information professional perform the same research would be
prohibitive for most community groups or non-profits.
But the value of the library’s partnership is not limited to concrete pieces of information.
The library stands with the local organization as a non-competitive partner who has a
deep and broad knowledge of the community, connections with other groups that might
assist or inform the organization’s mission, and a desire to see the organization succeed.
At times, the library’s connection can go beyond our greatest hopes—for example, when
the Parker DDC publicly acknowledged that the library lent credibility to their fledgling
organization. The idea that the library can validate a group’s worth was not something
that we ever considered. But it makes perfect sense: Everything that the library offers to
individuals to help them succeed—resources, guidance, and expertise—is also available
to organizations as a whole. This makes us just as essential to these groups as we are to our
patrons.
Contd....

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