Welcome to today’s webinar. I’d like to start by putting the embedded model in the context of the disruption that our profession is experiencing, and the realignment of our work that we are engaged in as a result. Next I’ll review the basic characteristics of embedded librarianship and highlight how it is different from the traditional model of library services. After that, I’d like to open up a discussion of the problems and pitfalls that can arise, along with some ideas for dealing with them and managing successfully in the new model.

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Here’s a graph of data on reference transactions from the Association of Research Libraries. As you can see, the trend is down. In fact, it was down by 45% during the period shown. I showed this graph at a presentation not long ago to illustrate the disruption of traditional library services. Afterward someone from the audience came up to me and thanked me for using it. She said, “I thought the problem was me, and my library” – meaning that she was alone in experiencing a decline in traditional services. “But” she continued, “now I see that it’s a much broader trend.” Exactly. Our profession’s traditional operational model has been disrupted. The changes we’re experiencing aren’t unique to us, or our library. They’re not due to some failing on our part. But they are significant and they demand a response.

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We’ve actually been dealing with this disruption for some time now. I’d date it back exactly 20 years. Much of the change is due to the revolution in information technology started by, among others, these 2 individuals: Mark Andreessen, and Tim Berners-Lee. You’ll recall that Berners-Lee was the developer of the hypertext transport protocol and hypertext markup language. Then, in 1992, Andreessen, while still a student, wrote Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, which made Berners-Lee’s html documents widely accessible. As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman say in their book, Networked: The New Social Operating System, “1993 is the birth year when the early majority cohort of adopters began to use the internet.” (p. 61) I think that is a good point from which to date the beginning of the disruption we are still experiencing.

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So how did this disrupt librarians? In her Foreword to my book, The Embedded Librarian, SLA CEO Janice Lachance put it in a very vivid way. Here’s an excerpt from her description: “Imagine a librarian accompanying you throughout the course of your day. You drive to work and the librarian is in the car with you, telling you the latest news and helping you avoid traffic jams. You leave your office to get lunch and the librarian walks down the street with you, describing the specials at your favorite restaurants. You go home and sit down to eat, and the librarian is there at the table with you, telling you how the stock market performed that day. … today we carry pocket-sized and paper-sized librarians around with us wherever we go.” That’s a far cry from what we used to think of as a librarian’s role. Our traditional mode of operations has been disrupted. We used to have a monopoly, but now we don’t.

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Libraries used to be “the only game in town”, but now we have competition – lots and lots of it. As Michael Stephens wrote in Library Journal, “People do not think of the library first when they need information.” (“Stuck in the Past.” (LJ Apr 15, 2011, p. 54)

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Or, in the words of Meredith Farkas, “In an environment of information abundance, librarians are no longer gatekeepers of valuable bits of information … Yet our reference services are based on an environment of information scarcity.” (American Libraries, “The DIY Patron”, Nov-Dec 2012, p. 29) So, no wonder the ARL reference numbers have gone down! The traditional model of library services has been disrupted.

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Imagine if Starbuck’s or McDonald’s had a 45% decline in sales over a 10-year period. The repercussions would be pretty dramatic. They would be coming up with new approaches. are needed. We need to do something – but what? Blaming Andreessen and Berners-Lee for our troubles won’t help. We need to get on with life and take action. To do that, I’d like to turn to Clayton Christensen, the scholar and writer who developed the idea of disruption. You may be familiar with The Innovator’s Dilemma, or other books he has published on this theme. A disruption is defined as a technological or business model innovation that offers sustainable advantages even as the disrupting product or service improves. Certainly, that’s what libraries of all kinds have experienced as computer and network technologies have developed over the past 20 years. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Christensen, and co-author Maxwell Wessel, advocate that traditional operations that are experiencing disruption should stop and ask themselves, “what jobs are my customers hiring me to do?”

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Fortunately for us, SLA’s Alignment Project has done just that, so let’s review some of the results.

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Probably you have seen this graph before. What I’d like to concentrate on are the biggest disconnects: where librarians said one thing and information users said something else. Here are some of the biggest gaps: • Librarians thought one of their biggest values came from managing print library

collections. Information users ranked it far down the list (20% gap) • Librarians thought their biggest value of all was doing research for information

users. The users ranked it in the middle of the pack (23% gap) • Users wanted librarians to manage internal content. Librarians saw that as a

relatively low priority (8% gap) • Information users wanted librarians to integrate information into work processes.

Librarians ranked it near the bottom of the pack. (9% gap) These results are indications that in responding to the disruption of our professional model, we are not always doing the jobs our employers value most. We haven’t consistently taken on the jobs they need us for. We’re not as aligned as we could be. (Alignment Project presentation, slide 18)

So how do we get aligned? Wessel and Christensen recommend that “the best way to identify the jobs a company does for its customers is through a combination of extensive surveys, interviews, focus groups, and in-person observations.” I’d like to go Wessel and Christensen one better and propose that for us librarians, embedded librarianship gives us a way of not just continuously monitoring the jobs our employers want us to do, but also doing them. Wessel, M. & C. Christensen (2012, Dec.) “Surviving Disruption.” Harvard Business Review, p. 56-64. (quote p. 62)

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Why’s that? Because to gain the insights we need, we have to form strong working relationships. In our situation, understanding the jobs we are being hired for involves ongoing interaction with the people doing the hiring – our users and customers. The understanding we need won't come from reading documents. It won’t come from mission statements or strategic plans alone. It won’t come from formal meetings or even SurveyMonkey surveys and focus groups alone. It will come by getting to know the people in our organizations, and becoming known to them. Alignment will come through dialogue.

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The starting point of embedded librarianship is the formation of these relationships. Here’s my definition of embedded librarianship: An embedded librarian is one who develops strong working relationships with members of a team or community; shares responsibility for achieving its goals; and makes customized, highly-valued contributions to the team. These characteristics contribute to a strong embedded model: The first is building those relationships with individuals and groups of information users. The conversations that happen as relationships are built create shared understanding of the organization’s work and the librarian’s role, so that it’s possible to create a set of shared goals. These show how the librarian’s work contributes to the organization’s success. This is where alignment happens. Of course, the librarian has to deliver on the value and meet the goals. Doing that requires customized, high-value professional work.

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So that’s how embedded librarianship connects with Alignment. From the librarian’s perspective, the process goes something like this: building strong relationships, understanding the work, committing to shared goals collaborating with highly valued work, and ultimately becoming an integral member of a team achieving its objectives and contributing to the organizational mission.

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I’d like to cap this argument that embedded librarianship offers a response to disruption, and a new approach to alignment, by highlighting five differences with traditional librarianship – the kind that’s been disrupted. 1. It focuses on relationships, not transactions. 2. It requires us to specialize, not to try to be all things to all people. 3. As the SLA Alignment study showed us, traditional library services have become a commodity. They’re taken

for granted. Embedded librarianship finds new value in new roles. 4. Where the traditional librarian stood apart from the organization, ruling over the domain of the library, 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.

5. Last, 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.

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So just to recap, so far I’ve set out a line of reasoning that says: We are a profession that has been disrupted In response to the disruption we need to ask what jobs our customers are really interested in hiring us for We need to realign our work with the jobs they value, and Embedded librarianship offers a way for us not only to do a one-time realignment, but keep realigning our contributions as needs change.

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Let’s turn to a discussion of the problems and pitfalls that can arise. Because embedded librarianship can be hard. There are definitely challenges. The good news is, there are also ways to address them.

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The first one is getting traction for starting the new model. I’ve heard librarians say things like this, “managers in my organization don’t know what I’m talking about, or don’t see the value, when I propose that they need an embedded librarian.” This is a common problem in the startup phase. It indicates that there’s a need to pay more attention to marketing the embedded idea. I have three suggestions for addressing it. 1. Focus on the people in the organization who do get it. Actually, all you need is one partner to start. I’m a big fan of beginning with pilot programs, showing the value, and then scaling up. 2. Seek first to understand their needs, not to promote your idea. Explore how their team’s performance is being dragged down by problems with knowledge discovery, information analysis, or knowledge and information management, and how a team librarian could help with that. 3. Step back. Maybe you need to defer your plans; maybe the time and conditions aren’t ripe yet. Focus instead on building relationships, not taking action. Learn about the organization by getting to know the people in it. This might mean volunteering for activities that aren’t related to your library work. Use these activities as a way to get to know people and their work, and maybe to get them on your side.

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Number two has to do with the period after an initial success. Here are three ideas for dealing with the resource issues created when you scale up an embedded librarianship program. 1. Get more resources. It’s not out of the question. But where those resources come from depends very heavily on your own circumstances and your organization’s approach to budgeting. In my research, I encountered one library manager in a for-profit professional services firm who had a great relationship with the senior management of the firm, and was able to get resources when needed. But that’s not the only way. I also encountered a large multinational corporation where it was accepted practice for business units to pay for their embedded librarians, through an annual budget transfer. An assistant manager of the library in this corporation once had to inform a middle manager in R&D that the assessment needed to double, due to the heavy tasking imposed on the embedded librarians. The response was that the embedded librarians were the best bargain in the company. So, depending on your circumstances, consider where you can find more resources. 2. Think strategically about staff responsibilities, and shift positions away from legacy tasks toward emerging value-added tasks. A highly successful academic library director I interviewed followed this strategy. Knowing that more resources would not be forthcoming, and wanting to expand an extremely successful initial embedded engagement, the director reorganized. This is a challenging strategy, primarily because some staff are bound to have trouble adjusting to new duties. To her credit, the library director was able to provide both the professional and emotional support to see several staff through the transition successfully. Former reference librarians have become instruction librarians, and former technical services paralibrarians have become reference and information desk assistants. 3. Think strategically about just how pervasive the embedded model should be. I suggest that library leaders pick their spots. Which courses in the undergraduate program are really the best for inserting an embedded librarian? Which groups and functions of the corporation are the information intensive ones that really need a librarian on the team? So, prioritize your opportunities and go for the ones that offer the best chance of making a real impact on your organization’s mission. Let the rest go.

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The third pitfall is settling for something short of a strong embedded relationship. Operational models are being called “embedded” that don’t meet the criteria. For example, in higher education, especially among librarians involved in distance education, the notion is out there that you’re embedded if the course management system contains a link to the library homepage, or a librarian virtual reference app. There’s no mention of a collaborative relationship and shared instructional goals with the subject instructor. I read recently of a so-called embedded librarian – embedded in the sense that she had authoring privileges in the course management system – who posted an introductory video in the sites for several courses she was quote-unquote “embedded” in. Without telling the instructors, that is. She was surprised when some of them reacted negatively. But it’s not just the distance education librarians who lose track of the real essence of embedded librarianship. There are also examples of on-campus librarians who set up office hours in a departmental building – but are never able to foster any real collaboration with the faculty or students of the department. The antidote to this, of course, is to keep in mind the formulation we’ve discussed earlier in this hour, and insist on progress in building relationships, shared goals, and collaboration toward achieving organizational objectives.

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The final four pitfalls all have to do with the opposite problem from the last one. They have to do with going overboard. There is perhaps such a thing as becoming “too embedded.” Sometimes I also refer to this as “going native.” The fourth pitfall, then, is isolation. In my research and in the literature, there are examples of this. Working with other librarians, in the same space, sharing duties and projects, is pretty congenial. We all speak the same language, we generally help each other out. Take a librarian out of that environment, put her in a situation where nobody else around her speaks the same language or really understands what she does, and a sense of isolation sets in. What’s more, she loses the benefit of comparing notes and collaborating with other librarians to solve common problems. Do this for a group of reference librarians, for example, and what was once a strong community of practice has been broken up. The astute manager can address this by being proactive. Create social occasions, shared tasks, and shared communication tools like a social media group to keep the embedded librarians connected with one another and with central library operations.

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The fifth pitfall is closely related to the fourth. It’s the problem of workload balancing and burnout. I’ll illustrate with a story from my own experience. I once had a conversation with a very successful embedded librarian who told me that when passing the offices of the team she was working with, she tried to keep her head down and avoid eye contact, because she was already overwhelmed and wanted to avoid getting any more projects. Here was an outstanding librarian facing burnout, largely because we hadn’t put in place any kind of backup mechanism for her. In the years since that episode, I’ve encountered a few successful efforts to address this problem. One I like is to form interest groups, which can include both embedded and non-embedded librarians. Group members share their knowledge about resources and projects, and back one another up as the need arises. This actually helps with the isolation problem, as well as leveling out the workload and giving central library staff a stake in the embedded librarianship model. If you’re interested in more information on this idea, check out the 2009 Annual Conference contributed paper by Jeanne Trimble of the MITRE Corporation.

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Number six relates to the lack of succession planning. I wrote a blog post last year in which I called this the “librarian who walks on water” syndrome. The members of the team that the librarian is embedded with – who don’t understand what the librarian does (and after all they don’t need to) – come to see the librarian as a magician, or miracle worker, who is able to create essential information and analysis out of thin air. They begin to attribute this outstanding performance to the unique mastery of that individual, rather than the characteristics of the profession. This is all well and good for the time being. But what happens when that outstanding librarian gets promoted, or leaves the organization, or retires? If there’s no succession planning, if there’s no understudy waiting to take over, the disappointment can be serious. No new librarian can step in and perform at the same level – precisely because the nature of embedded librarianship demands a sustained relationship, and thorough understanding of the work. At this point the entire embedded engagement is in danger of falling apart. The antidote, of course, is preparing others to step in. This follows nicely from the interest group idea already mentioned. Include junior staff in the groups. Introduce them to the role of the embedded librarian. Introduce them as backups to the members of the information user group. Have them sub at team meetings and work on projects when the embedded librarian is unavailable. In doing all these things, they’ll be prepared with the skills they’ll need if they are called on to step in as embedded librarians. What’s more, they’ll be familiar faces to the team members, who will already appreciate their capabilities, and quickly recognize that they can walk on water, too.

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Pitfall #7 involves loss of enterprise perspective and what’s best for the organization. I’ve labeled it “parochialism”. The idea here is that ultimately embedded librarianship needs to serve the mission and goals of the parent organization, not just the mission and goals of any one unit or department. Sometimes, when embedded librarians are spun off from a knowledge and information services organization, the enterprise-level gets lost, and the librarian gets caught in sub-optimal arrangements. Furthermore, the opportunity for the librarians to act as boundary spanners within the enterprise gets lost too. That may sound a bit obscure, so here’s an example. In this organization, librarians were spun off, and embedded with different groups. Over time, the work in some groups expanded; while in others it was flat or even declined. However, because the librarians had been spun off, the library manager had no control and little influence over their allocation and tasking. Negotiating a redeployment of librarians to the groups that needed them most was hampered by opposition on the part of both information user group managers and the embedded librarians. The managers viewed the loss of librarians assigned to their groups as a turf issue: a threat to their status. The librarians, in turn, had come to value their group relationships exclusively, and had lost all perspective on the information and knowledge needs of the enterprise. Two actions can address this pitfall. One goes back to the idea of interest groups or other mechanisms to keep the embedded librarians connected to each other and to central library operations keeps them aware of needs and activities outside the groups they are embedded with. Second, central library management needs to be engaged with the information user group managers, and not simply delegate the relationship entirely to the embedded librarian. In two successful operations I’ve studied, library relationship managers make regular visits to information user group managers. They use these meetings to review the nature and level of embedded librarians’ tasking and to gather feedback about how things have been going and what the outlook is.

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The 8th and final pitfall has to do with evaluating the embedded librarian’s work. The library manager isn’t in a good position to do this – even less so than with staff working in a central library. The manager may not see or even communicate with the librarian most days. The manager has little or no idea what the librarian is working on or what results the librarian achieves. Meanwhile, the information user group manager sees the librarian’s results, but doesn’t have the knowledge to assess the librarian’s skills. As a result, the librarian’s value can either be over-inflated or under-appreciated. For that reason, the best evaluation may be achieved when the library manager and the information user group manager communicate. The library manager is best able to assess the professional skills and performance relative to professional expectations and the achievements of other staff. The information user group manager is best able to assess the outcomes of the librarian’s work, and the librarian’s impact on achievement of the group’s goals. Both of these elements are essential for effective evaluation. However, I do want to append a caveat to these comments about evaluation. Above all, the nature of evaluation needs to reflect the norms of your organization. In my research, I’ve visited one very successful embedded librarianship operation that doesn’t do any formal evaluation at all. There are strong working relationships among managers, and excellent communications and informal assessment – but the culture and practices of the organization don’t include formal evaluation. On the other hand, I’ve also visited organizations where anecdotes are highly valued, so stories that demonstrate the librarian’s impact are prominently featured in formal evaluations. Still others, particularly in the academic sector, are working on correlating the work of embedded librarians with outcomes like student academic success. So, I’ve concluded that above all the approach to evaluating embedded librarians needs to conform to the practices and expectations of the parent organization.

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So, these are the eight pitfalls that can interfere with getting the most success with embedded librarianship. Adopting and sustaining this new model isn’t always easy, but it can be done, and the rewards of doing the jobs our organizations are hiring us to do, and making our work visible and valued, are great.

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To close then, I’d like to offer some ideas specifically for those with management responsibilities on elements of achieving success with the embedded model. This version is modified slightly from the version that Mary Talley and I published in the final report of our “Models of Embedded Librarianship” report, which is on the SLA website.

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1. Develop and hire librarians who can build relationships. I can’t emphasize this enough. The whole idea is to move from transactional service to relational partnership. And don’t despair -- you have them, you can find them, and you can develop them. And don’t give up on introverts. At the end of a long day of interviews during one of my research site visits, an exceptionally successful embedded librarian turned to me and said, “Introverts can do this, you know…. I’m an introvert!”

2. Enable your embedded librarians to learn the organization and the subject domain. Both political knowledge and subject knowledge are necessary for the embedded librarian. A great way to gain political knowledge is to volunteer – for any social or faculty committee that comes along. With subject knowledge, we’ve found that, somewhat surprisingly, not all embedded librarians start with relevant subject degrees or advanced knowledge – but they all develop it. Leading organizations, moreover, invest in helping them learn, and stay current. This should be easy for you – you probably have tuition remission for employees to take courses – or just audit them.

3. Provide the right high-value work. Figuring out what that is, is a constant task. The bar keeps going up. Today’s answer will not be tomorrow’s answer. In fact, you the manager and your embedded librarians should continually attempt to put yourselves out of business. Otherwise valuable efforts fall down when they assume there’s a fixed target and an end state. The target will always be moving.

4. Build alliances. This is about peer to peer relationships at the management level. What are you manager doing to connect with deans and department heads across campus? This can’t be left to the individual embedded librarian. It takes management to grow the program and scale it up – which leads to the next point:

5. Get management support. What I really mean here is senior executive support. Evaluate, and communicate all the way up the management chain to demonstrate the role that embedded librarians are playing in your enterprise. Make sure that the role of information and knowledge managers is embedded into the way your organization does business.

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