Future of Embedded Librarianship and Developing Your Role

This talk is entitled “The Embedded Model, the Future of Librarianship, and What to
Do at Work Tomorrow.” As the title suggests, the talk has three parts. In the first part,
I’ll propose a definition of embedded librarianship. Next, I’ll offer some ideas on why
it’s an important part of our future as librarians. To close, I’ll offer some suggestions
for things that you can do, starting tomorrow, to build and develop your embedded
future in your organization.
1

Let’s be clear about what embedded librarianship is, and is not.
Every once in awhile somebody tries to make a joke about librarians and getting into
bed. I’ve never heard one that I thought was any good. They are actually pretty lame.
More seriously, embedded librarianship has little if anything in common with
embedded journalism, although the terms are sometimes linked. The embedded
journalist gained prominence in the Operation Desert Storm, as a journalist who rode
into battle with a military unit, to gain a firsthand experience of the combat situation.
Embedded journalists were, and are, brave and important figures. But it’s important
that they’re essentially there as observers. They don’t take part in the combat itself.
The embedded librarian is different. The embedded librarian is like embedded
software, that allows all the computer-controlled functions of your car to operate.
Jezmynne Dene, formerly of the Claremont Colleges, said that the embedded
librarian is like the geological concept of an element in a mineral, an “integral part to
the whole”.
The embedded librarian is not an observer. The embedded librarian is fully engaged in
the action. The embedded librarian is essential to the functioning of the unit.
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So here’s my definition.
An embedded librarian is one who:
• develops strong working relationships with members of a team or community;
• achieves mutual understanding with the team, which means that the librarian
understands the team’s goals and operations, and the team understands the
librarian’s role and value
• shares responsibility for achieving the team’s goals
• and makes customized, highly-valued contributions to the team.
And, in short is a member of the team like any other, just with a unique set of skills –
the information and knowledge expert on the team.
3

I’d like to sharpen the point that embedded librarianship is really very different from
traditional librarianship. Here are five important differences.
1. First, the embedded model focuses on relationships, not transactions. Traditional
reference is a transactional operation. The reference desk is a place where
transactions happen. Somebody asks a question, the librarian gives them an answer.
The interaction has a beginning, a middle, an end. Similarly, traditional “one-shot”
library instruction is transactional. Students come to the library, they get a lecture
about doing library research, and it’s over. End of transaction. Embedded librarianship
is relational. One interaction leads to the next, and it just keeps going and going, with
increased mutual understanding and collaboration as the interactions accumulate.
This might mean a librarian embedded in a market research team, or it might mean a
librarian embedded with a first-year English class. The principle is the same.
2. Second, the embedded model requires librarians to specialize, not to try to be all
things to all people. We librarians like to think of ourselves as generalists. We’ve
evolved sophisticated reference interviewing techniques to get us from a state of zero
knowledge of what somebody is looking for to at least a basic grasp so we can
provide them with basic help. But isn’t it better if we start from a position of
understanding? It’s sure going to be a lot better for the people we are trying to help if
they don’t have to explain everything to us, and better for us as well. Just to cite an
academic library example: how many times across the decades have academic
librarians had students come up to the reference desk and ask for help with an
assignment – and the librarian had no background information about that assignment
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beforehand? It’s standard practice! How much better would it be if the librarian was
embedded in the class, so the librarian knew all about that assignment – maybe even
helped to design it?
3. Third, the traditional librarian stood apart from the organization, ruling over the
domain of the library. People came to the library – the librarians didn’t go to them. In
the embedded model, the embedded librarian is out of the library and fully engaged
with the other employees and groups of the enterprise. This engagement, by the way,
can be virtual as well as physical. Moving your office outside the library so you can
hang out with the information user group you’re working with is a great idea and it
can be very helpful. But if you’re embedded in a distance education course or a
virtual work group – as some librarians are – you can still be successful even if you
never get to meet the people you’re embedded with face to face.
4. Fourth, the traditional librarian focused on being a service provider. Service is in
our professional DNA. And that’s not all bad. But service providers aren’t fully
aligned. Their goals are to provide the service, and their responsibilities are just to do
that – and no more. Embedded librarians aren’t just service providers. They’re team
partners. That means they define their role more broadly. They do whatever their
skills and competencies enable them to do that helps the organization to succeed.
5. Last, traditional library services have become a commodity. They’re taken for
granted. Embedded librarianship finds new value in new roles. There are two
important points that we shouldn’t lose sight of, though. The first is that the
commodity services are still needed – they’re just not enough by themselves. The
second is that this means we need to continue to evolving and finding still newer
sources of value in new roles. I’m going to come back to this in the next part of the
talk.
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I do want to clarify one point before I go on, though. If it sounds like an embedded
librarian is something you either are, or you aren’t – that’s not what I mean. What
I’ve just described are two ends of a continuum, and there’s a lot of room in the
middle. When we talk about real life situations, it’s appropriate to talk about “how
embedded” and “more embedded or less embedded.”
5

Now let’s talk about the future of librarianship. To start out, I want to make clear that
I do not think that embedded librarianship is the only path for us to take. I think there
are several opportunities for our profession to develop. Embedded librarianship is a
very important one, but not the only one.
So, what’s happening to our profession, and where are we headed?
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To answer that, first consider that we’re now in the midst of a great information
revolution. The last one was 500 years ago. We’re living in the greatest upheaval in
the ways society creates, distributes and consumes information since Gutenberg.
Think about it. For millennia, information had been laboriously recorded and copied
by hand, one copy at a time. Copies were few, the number of works was small, and
the percentage of the population that could consume recorded information was tiny.
Gutenberg changed all that. In a relatively short period, his invention disrupted the
monopoly of scribes and copyists. It created a whole new publishing industry. Copies
proliferated and works multiplied. Some of those new copies were sacred and
scholarly works of high authority, and some were junk. As literacy spread, the
demand for published material exploded. People began to complain about
information overload.
Of course, lots of things changed between Gutenberg’s time and 1993, but in the past
20 years, thanks to the invention of the Internet, we have seen the kind of
discontinuous change not seen since Gutenberg.
7

Here are my two candidates to go down in history as the Gutenbergs of the 20th
century. We can call them co-inventors of the World Wide Web. The one on the left is
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the hypertext transport protocol and hypertext
markup language, not to mention founder of the World Wide Web Consortium. The
other is Mark Andreessen, who while still a student wrote Mosaic, the first graphical
web browser, which made Berners-Lee’s html documents widely accessible. Together,
Berners-Lee and Andreessen are as responsible as any for the web-based information
ecosystem we have today. Their inventions have disrupted the information cycle that
depended on publishers, journalists, broadcasters, and bookstores – and libraries.
Their inventions have led to the creation of whole new industries in web service
hosting, information architecture and web design, social media, and more. More
fundamentally, they’ve challenged many information-related industries operated by
professionals by unleashing armies of amateurs -- anybody and everybody with a
computer – or a phone – and a network connection. Copying – legal and illegal; open
source and paid – has proliferated, and the range and diversity of works have
multiplied. Some of the new information being created is marvelous and exciting, and
some is boring, silly, or even malevolent.
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Media consumption has exploded, and by 2008 the average American spent almost
12 hours a day consuming information in some form – up from 7 and a half hours in
1980. And we are complaining ever more loudly about information overload.
Do you hear an echo of Gutenberg and the printing press?
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Librarianship has been one of the professions disrupted by the invention of Berners-
Lee and Andreessen. We haven’t had it as bad as some –the employment of
journalists in traditional media is down 40%.
We have been hit pretty hard, though. Here’s just one fact to illustrate the impact. In
the first decade of the 21st century, member libraries of the Association of Research
Libraries – the biggest, most impressive libraries in North America – reported a 45%
drop in total reference transactions. -- 45%! So we have been hit pretty hard.
Fundamentally, the Internet has destroyed our monopoly on information. Time was,
to find something out, to look something up, you had to go to the library. Now you
Google it. Actually, now there’s an app for it. I won’t say, you don’t need the library
any more – but let’s face it: there are a lot of times you used to need the library, but
you don’t any more. Our unique role used to be providing access to information. Our
value came from the access we could provide. Now we have lots of competitors who
can provide good-enough access, and do it quicker and cheaper than we can. That’s
what I was referring to earlier when I said the work of traditional librarians had
turned into a commodity.
10

Michael Stephens (“Stuck in the Past.” LJ Apr 15, 2011, p. 54)
As Michael Stephens wrote in Library Journal, “People do not think of the library first
when they need information.”
11

So our traditional operating model has been disrupted. And when you are disrupted,
you better change your operating model, pretty quick.
And that is where the embedded model comes in. It enables us to create new value
in new ways. The characteristics that distinguish it from traditional librarianship are
the characteristics that create new value:
Relationships: so we understand the communities we are working in.
Specialization: so they don’t have to explain everything to us every time they ask us a
question; so we can organize and manage their information in the ways that are
responsive to their work; so we can teach them the things they need to know most.
Engagement: so we are present and available, pitching in as needed and not waiting
to be asked.
Partnership: so they know they can count on us, so they know we care as much about
the success of the community as they do.
Those things move us away from commodity and toward added value.
You know, sometimes I think I might add one more characteristic to embedded
librarianship, and that is “visibility.” I wish I had a dollar for every librarian who has
said to me, something along the lines of “they just don’t understand what we do”.
Embedded librarians don’t have that problem. Embedded librarians are very visible,
and if you’re adding value, everybody knows it.
12

The embedded librarian, now and in the future, is the information and knowledge
expert on the team.
13

So it’s clear what embedded librarianship is, and it’s clear why it is going to be
important in the future of many librarians. So what should you do at work tomorrow?
14

You could order a new sign that says “Embedded Librarian on Duty.” But don’t do
that! A new sign won’t make it so.
15

It’s going to take more work than that, and it’s going to take you awhile. You won’t
finish tomorrow. In fact, you may never finish. But you can start.
Here’s my three step program:
1. Figure out where you are, as far as embedded librarianship is concerned
2. Identify the facilitating factors and the barriers in your environment
3. Prioritize actions you can take to seize opportunities and overcome barriers.
So, it starts with some reflection. Let’s go through each step in turn.
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Relationships are key to embedded librarianship, as I’ve been saying. So, start by
thinking about your relationships with the people in your community. Maybe you
have some friends at work – not librarians – that you get together with for lunch.
Maybe you participate in a work-related club or social group, or volunteer activity. Do
you ever talk about work with these friends? Could you?
How about working relationships with groups, or teams, or departments who use
your library or information service? Do you participate in team meetings? Collaborate
on projects? Meet with their managers to discuss projects and priorities, and learn
what their pain points are, and talk about how you and your group could help?
Both social relationships and working relationships are strong factors in the
embedded model, so assessing your relationships is a good place to start when you
want to assess just how embedded you are. In our SLA “Models of Embedded
Librarianship” research, we found a number of relationship building activities that
embedded librarians commonly take part in. In my book, there’s a self-test you can
take to help you evaluate this. It includes both purely social activities, and work-
oriented activities.
You might come out of this with a conclusion that you have some strong relationships
but you want to develop and strengthen some others. Or you might conclude that
you need to start creating new relationships across the board. Whatever your current
situation is, you’ll need to think about readiness before you strike out on an action
plan.
That takes us to Step 2: assessing how ready you are to initiate embedded
librarianship.
17

Readiness comes in two flavors: librarian readiness and organizational readiness. Let’s take librarian readiness first. Do you, or the staff who’ll be
taking this on, have what it takes to be successful? Based on my research, I believe there are four key characteristics.
The first is skill at building relationships. This comes as no surprise, since I keep emphasizing this point. But it may be scary for some librarians,
who don’t think of themselves as extroverted glad-handers. But if you think this means turning your library staff, or yourself, from an introvert
into an extrovert, I have good news for you: introverts can do this. I have to tell you a story here.
The second is subject domain knowledge. As I mentioned earlier, embedded librarians specialize. They need to know at least enough about the
subjects their community members care about, that they don’t have to get basic background. What we found in our research was rather
interesting, though. It turned out that about half of the successful embedded librarians in our survey had prior education or experience in their
subject domain, and the other half, or thereabouts, didn’t. What subsequent interviews showed, though, is that those who didn’t start out with
the knowledge, acquired it one way or another. In many of the successful programs, there’s active management support – and even expectation –
that the embedded librarian will engage in some form of education to learn about their domain. That might be in-house training, or attending
professional or scientific conferences, or signing up for formal courses. Whatever it takes, that subject domain knowledge has to be part of the
mix.
The third is Organizational knowledge. Call this “knowing the ropes.” Call it politics. In the interviews I’ve conducted, embedded librarians have
repeatedly called my attention to this, and distinguished it from the subject domain knowledge I spoke of a moment ago. The embedded librarian
has to know – or, again, has to learn – how the organization functions. New embedded librarians, we’ve found, often rely on peer mentors or
management champions from their community to help them get started in learning their way around.
And the last element is your Librarianship skills. Are your staff top-flight information professionals? As I mentioned earlier, the embedded
librarian is very visible. This is a good thing, if the librarian is doing a good job, because the value will be clear. But for someone whose skills aren’t
as sharp, the demands of the embedded role may be too much. This is also a tricky area because different teams need different things. It might be
competitive research and analysis in a commercial marketing group, or managing a collaborative virtual workspace in an R & D group, or teaching
information literacy skills in a university biology course. No librarian is tops at all of these, so matching the skill set to the needs of your
community is not always easy.
How do your staff measure up? Do they have these? If they don’t, do they have the motivation and capacity to develop them?
Now let’s look at organizational readiness. Key factors include:
1. An executive champion
2. Strong working relationships with middle managers
3. Heavy users of library services who are respected by their peers
4. The autonomy for the library manager to start something new, and an organizational culture that is open and encouraging (or at least tolerant
of) initiatives.
You’re pretty lucky if you have all four of these. I’d say that if you have the fourth one, which is autonomy and an open, forward-leaning culture,
plus any of the other three, you probably have enough to get started. Here are a couple examples.
At Affinion Group, Jill Stover Heinze, who is a member of the Virginia Chapter, got her big break from an executive champion. The president of her
company directed her to move her office to the area of the Marketing Communications group. The move enabled her to build relationships and
collaboration that fundamentally changed her role in the company.
At a multi-national corporation I visited, the embedded librarian “relationship managers” meet regularly with middle managers to discuss the
business needs, library services, and funding of embedded librarians. Each group pays an annual fee to fund their embedded librarian. At one such
meeting, the librarian informed a group manager that the group’s assessment would have to go up substantially, because of the increased
demands being placed on the embedded library services. The manager’s response was to the effect that this was no problem, because the
embedded librarians were the best bargain in the company.
In higher education, what we’ve seen in multiple stories from the literature is that a faculty member and a librarian will hatch the idea of
embedded information literacy instruction, which then gets sold to the library director and department head.
Whichever version fits your circumstances, what you are essentially looking for here is a partner, somebody you can do business with, and the
conditions that will allow you and your partner to start something new.
And when you take the pulse of the organization, you may find some parts more receptive than others. You may find that you want to prioritize
working with those, so you can achieve something quickly. Or, for other reasons, you may choose to prioritize other units, even if it means you
have to lay some groundwork first.
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Either way, now you’re ready for step 3.
3.3 Prioritize actions
Step 3 is to decide on your action priorities and begin working on the first ones.
Those may involve training and mentoring staff. They may involve joining the softball
team, or the bond drive committee, just to start building relationships. They may
involve setting up meetings with key management contacts, to explore potential
embedded relationships.
Whatever you choose, you won’t finish tomorrow.
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As Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
I hope this presentation has triggered some ideas and energized you to take action
and invent your embedded future.
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As you invent your future, please stay in touch. Email me. Check out the Embedded
librarian blog for an occasional update on embedded librarianship. Get the full picture
and a detailed map for inventing your future from the book. I wish you the very best
success, and hope to hear from you!
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Future of Embedded Librarianship and Developing Your Role

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