Tuesday, October 18, 2016

This double session looks at the new and exciting roles that librarians in four different organizations are carving out and impacting. In order to stay relevant, to impact employee performance, and, most importantly, to be seen as a positive contributor to the bottom line, enterprise libraries continue to evolve, building upon past successes and learning from current challenges. Transformation is driven by the business need and how successfully libraries anticipate or respond to those needs. Everything from the services offered to the skills for which the library hires directly tie back to helping employees make better business decisions. Powell discusses the expanding role of the embedded information professional in knowledge management. She talks about the archive, which is tasked with making internal information easier to store, discover, and retrieve. Strategies for integrating disparate content, including traditional library materials (e.g., books, technical reports), intellectual property assets (designs, process documentation), controlled documents (specifications, drawings), and manufacturing and product data into the library catalog are addressed along with the challenges of managing physical and digital assets with differing security/access requirements, innovative uses for the thesaurus functionality of integrated library systems, and more about how the library or archive can expand to add value to their organization’s knowledge management strategies. The third presentation focuses on specialized science and technology institutions, specifically their information needs for research and development in the form of both internal and external knowledge. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) spaceflight projects consistently build on work that has already been done, using unique heritage and legacy records as a backbone for new projects and development. Through leveraging the roles of the combined NASA JPL Library, Archive, and Records Management section (LARS), it is able to provide comprehensive research deliverables that capture both internally-generated reports and externally published articles to better inform spacecraft and mission development. This unique approach to embedded librarianship allows for on-demand reference services that utilize the full capacity of the knowledge resources that LARS offers. By using a combination of in-person interfacing with customers and digital collaboration among librarians in various roles, they are able to answer reference questions rapidly and provide an in-depth deliverable that spans both externally published work as well as internally generated data and reports.