The health sciences librarian as knowledge worker

ABSTRACT

Technological development, economic constraints, and changing expectations about ownership of, and compensation for, intellectual property, challenge librarians to demonstrate more forcefully the value of their contributions to their institutions. Knowledge work in the library setting is defined as the development of products and services designed to meet client information needs. In an academic setting, client information needs revolve around the activities

of scientific communication. Health sciences libraries have begun to change in fundamental ways to meet this challenge, redefining their missions, re-educating their staff, and re-engineering their programs. Examples are drawn from the Welch Medical Library and other academic health sciences libraries to demonstrate different strategies for achieving a competitive edge in the campus information environment.

INTRODUCTION

This article presents the changing role of health sciences librarians in academic medical centers and their part in the institution's scientific communication activities. Although discussion and examples highlight experiences of academic health sciences libraries, the concepts also apply to other kinds of libraries. Knowledge work in the library setting is the design of products and services to meet information needs. In the environment of scientific communication, those needs revolve around the retrieval, creation, manipulation, management, and dissemination of new knowledge. The current environment for knowledge generation in the academic medical center is characterized by rapid technological change, turbulent economic conditions, and changing expectations about the value and ownership of inventions and intellectual property. In this highly competitive setting, all partners must add measurable recognizable value to the enterprise if they are to receive continued institutional support. Products that no longer meet critical information needs of the institution's populations are discarded or lef t under- or unfunded; new products and services arise which support themselves through a mixed funding base dependent upon continued measurable usage.

Fundamental Assumptions About Libraries

The library is not simply a service organization but an institution that creates products and services to meet the information needs of its clients. This is as true for the small hospital information center as it is for the large academic medical library. Management and process models borrowed directly from manufacturing industries of ten divide the world into "production" and "service." This approach inappropriately limits the library's vision of how it can and should operate. Historically, the term "manufacturing" has been used to describe the development of a material product that is no longer the responsibility of those who designed and built it once it leaves the factory or foundry. An important difference between a library and a manufacturing company is the fact that the library also designs and provides services to support its products. Knowledge work involves the development of integrated information products and services. Services are tightly coupled to products; products are not developed without a complement of services, and services are not offered independent of products for which they were designed. Many libraries must change in fundamental ways to fit this model, redefining their mission, re-educating their staff, and re-engineering their programs.

Another basic assumption is that, as the scholarly communication system shifts from a paper-based system to a network-based electronic information transfer medium, the traditional roles of libraries will change in the process. Libraries, authors, publishers, and information seekers have shared responsibility for various parts of the existing scientific communication system. In the electronic networked environment, librarians will be required to demonstrate their value to the communication system through their knowledge work activities if they are to continue to be seen as viable participants in scientific communication. As the rewards for intellectual invention are redistributed to recognize the value added by each contributor in the process, the value of the library's contribution must be clear. If the library is viewed as only a storage or service center rather than as an active participant in the information life cycle, then its value to the institution will diminish as new less costly storage media and service options appear on the horizon.

A final assumption is that libraries themselves must seek new roles in their respective information environments. It would be rare to find today an academic librarian who has not heard the terms "transformation," "restructuring," or "re-engineering" used by deans and other strategic planners on their campuses. The traditional roles and values of the past, where libraries operated as uncompetitive cost centers on their campuses, protected by noble values of "intellectual freedom" and "equal rights to information," are fast crumbling under the pressures of the new economic order. Health sciences libraries whose institutional support derives partly from fee-based health services and research grants - two intensely competitive domains - are increasingly called upon to prove their value to the institution through evaluative data and cost/benefit analyses. Such self-assessment cannot effectively be done within the traditional service center model of libraries.