If you're flexible, adaptable, and willing to take risks: it's a great time to be an information professional

Information Outlook, May, 2005

If you think the information profession has changed over the last few years, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Change will continue--and you'll have to adapt and lead or you'll be left behind, says T. Scott Plutchak, associate professor and director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Plutchak, who has written and presented extensively on library and information science, will speak at a luncheon presented by the Leadership and Management Division and sponsored by LexisNexis and Basch Subscriptions Inc., during the SLA annual conference in Toronto.

He spoke with Information Outlook last month in a telephone interview.

IO: The description of your conference presentation says information professionals are at a transition point as "profound" and "momentous" as Gutenberg's invention of movable type. How is the transition going?

Plutchak: On any given day I think a lot of people are very frustrated and frightened. That is certainly the case in the health sciences sector. What I tend to tell people is this is really a fabulous time to be in this business. But it does require perhaps a greater degree of experimentation and risk-taking than has been the case in the past. And I'm not sure that people who got into the library profession, say, 10 to 15 years ago are always the most temperamentally suited to that kind of environment. So it's been very hard for a lot of people.

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IO: So, what are some of the opportunities?

Plutchak: The opportunities are vast because I think the skills and abilities that we actually have--and sometimes we're not good at really recognizing them--are really needed more than ever before. The information space has become so much more complicated. The need for good information resources has become so important that every organization, entity, business, whatever, has a much, much greater need to manage its information effectively.

And I think those individuals who are good at identifying the needs of the organization they work for and then being creative in identifying solutions are going to find that they can become very indispensable to those organizations very quickly. But it requires rethinking your role and rethinking your relationship to the organization.

Again, as an example from the area that I'm most familiar with, I often hear hospital librarians being frustrated in trying to figure out ways to get people into the library. And I think that's absolutely the wrong approach. We have technology tools that make it possible for them to not come into the library to get the information, so they shouldn't have to come into the library to get our expertise either. But we tend to still be very focused on our relationship to the space out of which we have traditionally worked.

And I think that's really where the change has to be the most profound. I had a meeting with my reference librarians here [recently], talking about where I see things going over the next few years. I want my people to spend less and less time in the building. Too much of our professional identity is still tied up in the nature of the place out of which we work, whether you call it the library or the information center. Conceptually, we still think of that as the place; we identify ourselves too much with that place, and we need to disconnect ourselves from it.

IO: Getting to Gutenberg, the definition of "library" has always included books. How do you change people's perception on both sides?

Plutchak: Well, I know that within the (SLA) community, there has been a shift away from using the word "library" and "librarian" and trying to talk more generically about "information specialist." And I think that that has been done as an attempt to address exactly that issue.

I tend to actually be pretty old fashioned in terms of the terminology. We can get people to think about librarians in new ways by acting in new ways. But again, the focus for me is on the individual and not the place.

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What I want the people in my institution to be thinking about is: Oh yes, there is that library over there and there are occasions in which I need to go there, but what is really essential to me is the librarian who comes to my space and comes to my lab or my office or my classroom and does their work in whatever space I'm in, and that's what's really important--not that building that happens to be down the street.

IO: And what will that work be when your reference librarians and others get out into the rest of the workplace?

Plutchak: The sorts of things that we're doing right now. I'll give a concrete example: My medical school is going through their accreditation process, and one of the things which has come out of the committee that accredits medical schools over the last 10 years is there is an increasing emphasis on making sure that people who graduate from medical schools have good information management skills, that they know how to get information ... they know how to evaluate it ... they know how to incorporate it into their decision making.