more on library futures from NFAIS and Australia

UBC Google Scholar blog has an interview with Peter Morville about his book Ambient Findability.
(My general comment: interesting book, but the themes were a bit unfocussed.)

At the end I noticed a link to Libraries Embracing Change, which turns out to be blogging of an NFAIS 2006 session by Marydee (who has the amazing ability to construct entire coherent paragraphs while watching a presentation, whereas I can barely cobble together some point-form notes).

It has some very interesting points, the most striking being:

The view of special libraries was presented by Melanie O'Neill, VP R&D Information, GlaxoSmithKline. Her main theme was managing information for the discovery and development of new medicines. GSK has a very mobile workforce and has closed physical libraries to create a virtual library.

GSK negotiated enterprisewide contracts to put information on the desktop. It's no longer OK for a scientist to ask a librarian a question that can be answered at the desktop by resources purchased by the information department. On the GSK library portal, scientists are encouraged to use Google and Google Scholar. I'm rather shocked by that and, in answer to a question from the audience, O'Neill said it was very popular and heavily used.

This is much as I've been indicating previously: it's not just theory that the physical research library can be replaced with licenses to online content and search tools.  I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's reality.

I'm chopping up Marydee's post a bit, but here are two other important pieces:

Librarians have done a lousy job of communicating our value proposition, letting search engines grab mindshare, we need to learn how to do what we do better. End the priesthood of librarianship

...

[GSK] librarians are now analyzing information and are situated within project/strategy teams. There's a major push to capture and manage proprietary information (e-lab books, e-archiving, records retention). She wants to blur the distinction between publicly published data and proprietary information, and mine proprietary data in same fashion as searching public sources. Breaking down the silos between libraries and archives is the goal.

Marydee also has another posting from the same track, Information Companies Embracing Change

Kevin Bouley, CEO of NERAC, then gave his own case study of transforming a company that looked like it was doing just fine. That's harder. He hired a consultant to help them be innovative, but the staff was unable to grasp change. "Our minds had calcified. Ideas generated by staff weren't innovative."

He tried again a year later with more success. NERAC evolved from search and content to research solutions, It added opinion to research and took on a more analytical role. It began to focus on the customer not the product.

The NFAIS 2006 program looks like it had a lot of great material, slides are linked inline with each day's listing of presentations.  The Embracing Change ones are from February 28, 2006.  The specific GSK presentation is Managing information for discovery and development of new medicines (PowerPoint).

UPDATE 2006-03-13: I'm told that the bulk of the NFAIS presentations are now up on the sub-pages available under http://www.nfais.org/2006_Tier_Program.htm

Incidentally, NERAC has a blog.

Today I also happened to be scanning the Australian ALIA "blog", and came across a posting Libraries for the future (I can't link to it because there are no permalinks... or comments... so not really a blog).

Charles Leadbeater says that institutions that are 'stuck' are in a chronic condition and which are then very prone to crisis. He suggested that librarians are 'stuck' and could continue to stay in this category if action is not taken. Libraries and librarians need to articulate their role in creating a creative society.

The quote of the day came during question time of the first speaker, Joel Kotkin. When asked if libraries are going to be like the Mail Coach (now defunct) ...He replied that 'Libraries should be in the wisdom business'.

The event was Library of the 21st Century Symposium.

In an interesting twist, there are no PowerPointy presentations available, but there are MP3 audio files and text transcripts, or you can subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/about/site/feeds/podcast_slv21.xml

Previously:
January 10, 2005  the fall of the temple of books
December 14, 2005  it is easiest to discover what is everywhere: Ambient Findability