Building Successful Relationships with IT Professionals - special librarians and information technology professionals

Information Outlook, April, 2001 by Martha K. Heyman

If you want to be heard, be sure you can speak the language. If you want to be listened to, be willing to build a visible track record of contributions supporting successful solutions. By building an appropriate level of information technology domain knowledge and bringing the information science competence librarians already have, credibility can be developed over time through active contribution to the creation of viable and sustainable business solutions. With each successful solution, a track record is created for the value of both our individual capabilities and the tools and techniques of information science. When information can be disseminated rapidly and built upon for competitive advantage, business leaders take notice. I would argue that the difference between a successful IT-based business solution and an unsuccessful one is the extent to which a librarian or information scientist was able to contribute. Speak their language but don't loose your identity as a librarian. Speak their language becaus e it pays off for the customer and it's the best way to be heard. But don't forget to speak their language in our accent--don't leave our tools and techniques at the door and don't let the value information science competencies bring to the information technology solution get lost in all the "glitz" of the technology itself. Speak the language of information technology with an information science accent. Educate the information technology professionals and the corporation about information science by demonstrating the value it brings to successful information technology solutions for critical business problems.

With each subsequent task team project, credibility is built and the information technology professionals begin to listen more and argue less. In 1995, I was assigned to a new location as an "information science resource". The client base was composed primarily of chemists and engineers working within a small research center in a subsidiary of DuPont. [1] There had been a recent change in the laboratory director position. Unlike the past director, the new director recognized that information technology was not "a toy", but a critical tool that would provide the research center with the competitive edge it needed to bring value to the businesses it supported. There were little or no existing information systems related to the research and development function. There was a traditional library established years prior by a professional librarian and maintained ever since by a well-trained clerk. One day a week, one of the laboratory technicians conducted literature searches using STN and Dialog. The only informat ion technology support came from the manufacturing facility located near-by.

The chemists and engineers of the research center had been actively teaching themselves about the potential of information technology. There was a tremendously high level of enthusiasm for adopting and implementing new ways of working. When I arrived, I found myself instantly swamped by well-formulated requests for document tracking systems, collaborative databases, proprietary literature databases, etc. In addition, they had developed an understanding of and appreciation for such things as subject categories, controlled term thesauruses and authority lists. On average, they understood that full-text searching was rarely the most efficient or effective way to find what they were looking for. The questions weren't "why do we need controlled term lists" but "how do we best create them."