2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

Embedded Librarians: Pushing Boundaries
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BEST PRACTICES 2012
By David Shumaker, Clinical Associate Professor, Catholic University of America
The age of digital content has enabled librarians to cross the boundary from the
library to the places where people live and work. But it has not simply enabled
them to get out of the library – it positively demands that they should do so.
For centuries, information containers (i.e. books) were rare and precious. They had
to be copied by hand, laboriously. In fact, they were so precious that they were
kept chained to the library shelves. Fortunately, Johannes Gutenberg changed the
economics of publishing in Europe, and eventually libraries allowed their collections
to circulate. Library members still had to come to the library to borrow and return
their books, though, so the librarians remained within the four walls.
The current information revolution, dating from the invention of the World Wide
Web and the graphical browser in the early 1990s, changed things even more
radically than the printing press did. Now information is everywhere. We don’t have
to go to libraries to get it. Google is even working on a new appliance, Google
Glasses, to bring it right in front of our eyeballs.
As a result, traditional library services are being used far less than they once were.
To cite one example, reference transactions reported by members of the
Association of Research Libraries were down 45% from 2000 to 2009. (Shumaker
2012, 24-25) This doesn’t mean people aren’t visiting libraries any more – they are,
but they’re using libraries in quite different ways than they used to, and not to seek
traditional reference help.
So the chains that bound librarians to their libraries are off. It’s past time to get out
and move about the country. Librarians are trying various approaches for doing
this. There are the virtual librarians, the roving librarians, the personal librarians,
and the consulting librarians. Each approach has its special characteristics, and
they’ve all been described in the literature.
However, there’s one approach that is especially appealing, that I think really rises
above the others and is what we need in the profession. It has some unique
characteristics that separate it from traditional librarianship and from these other
models. It is Embedded Librarianship. Librarians in every sector can be embedded.
And while physically getting out of the library is often part of the deal, librarians are
also embedding in distance courses and virtual teams, where the members rarely if
ever meet face to face.
That brings us to the first key issue: what exactly is embedded librarianship?
Here’s a definition: Embedded librarianship is a model of librarianship in which the
librarian builds a relationship with members of a particular information user
community, focuses on understanding the activities of the community, contributes