Special Libraries: : A Guide for Management

Citation

Norton, B. (1998), "Special Libraries: : A Guide for Management", Library Management, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 345-346. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm.1998.19.5.345.6

This guide for management has a punchy beginning with an attractively short section on Why Read This Book? A good place to start and I was encouraged, that on the vexed question of information overload vs information relevance, “special librarians know that the need is not to create a new information function, but to adapt the existing one to the changing information environment”.

I was looking forward to following a track of breaking down boundaries between departments, integrating across functions to eradicate duplication, waste, ignorance or oversight, and the librarian becoming a new knowledge leader of the future. But I did not get it. Instead what I got was a primer in how special libraries worked. As this was the fourth edition, I realised that I should have been familiar with any of the first three. But I was not, so I ploughed on.

With the chapter on how the information is organised, I was mildly disappointed with the déja‐vu of sub‐headings of Housing and Arrangement of the Collection, Records to Identify Library Materials, Subject Analysis and Classification. Nothing new here. So I moved on to the Chapter on How Does the Information get to the User. Would this talk of the librarian’s role in co‐ordinating the corporate Intranet, of creating some consistency across the piece to remove waste and duplication, of integrating commonsense ground rules that everyone can buy into? No. Sub‐headings here are Reference Services, Current Awareness Services, Routing Services, Use of Outside Sources of Information etc. All this made me think back to those sleepy library texts I half absorbed twenty‐something years ago.

Without wishing to go overboard on the latest craze, I was nonetheless disappointed to see that the index only made passing reference to the Internet, to Intranets and to Webmasters, but devoted a section to the location of the library.

A further glance through the rest of the chapters told me that this would not show the librarian how to adapt to the changing information environment, if anything it was rather the other way round … almost as if the whole raison d’être of special librarians were so obvious that the case did not have to be made. If only that were the case.

The problem is that Special Libraries still sees the library physically at the centre of information management and it is not until page 106 ‐ at the end of the book ‐ that we get to the advice: “Think information management rather than library”. I would rather this to have been the starting‐point than the finishing‐point.

The chapters are brief, basic, and amply appended with citations. The book is 152 pages long (Ashworth, take note!) of which 43 are appendices, including a glossary which describes terms such as cataloguing, acquisitions, data and format; further reading which cumulates all of the further reading of the individual chapters; a list of ALA Accredited Library and Information Science Master’s Programmes in North America; and a list of professional associations. There is an interesting appendix on Competencies of Special Libraries for the 21st Century; the book may have had more impact if it focused on these, rather than attach them at the end.

In an age which is beginning to reverberate with noises of blowing up the corporate library (the article by Davenport and Prusak is cited) and the beginnings of viable alternatives to it, the Special Libraries Association has produced a description of the activities, functions and potential of how the “library in the organisation” was and is, rather than how it might be. It turns out to be more of a primer for aspiring librarians than a guide for managers, a step back into the past, rather than an attempt to grapple with an uncertain future.

If I were a manager faced with deciding the fate of an existing corporate library or the start‐up of a new one, this book would not inspire me to invest. I cannot help wondering how Special Libraries got to a fourth edition.