Special Librarians are Special Too
July 30th, 2004The good folks over at LISNews pointed me to this well-written article on special librarianship from Career Pro News. Some good quotes:
“Savvy managers know better. Really savvy managers know to deploy special librarian skill sets in every area of the organization’s life where information plays a role: corporate memory, document management, customer relations management, etc….
…And really savvy special librarians know how to sell themselves in order to get the job and keep it. “It may seem pushy, but you have to sell yourself every day by providing service that is on time, on budget and meets or exceeds expectations,” says Mitchell Brown. Brown is a mathematics and physics librarian at Princeton University.”
I’ve mentioned this on many an occasion and feel the need to bring it up again now. I believe that I have to justify my existence at my firm every minute of every day. Which means that I go the extra step when performing research by doing more follow-up with the attorneys, anticipating their needs before they ask me reference questions by sending out new material (articles, cases, etc) as they are published, and by marketing myself as a necessary commodity to the overall development of the firm. The managing partner has a saying: “Grow the firm”. I believe that my job is to assist in this growth by any means possible. Librarians, this is not the time nor place to be humble. I make it a point to tell the marketing department of every accomplishment (no matter how small) in my career. and it has paid off. The “big wigs” know what I have done over the past 3 years and that makes us all happier. It’s a no lose situation.