The Corporate Librarian

This has already made the rounds, but the Ark Group is publishing a study Managing the evolution of library and information services (the email I got states you can preorder before May 28th for US $345 plus shipping). The press release suggests a heavy sampling of law firm libraries, but also mentions Adobe, BP America, Xerox (I have a hazy recollection of Carolyne saying something about this somewhere?) and other companies

Anyone have experience with Ark Group publications, or contacted as part of this study and want to comment?

Walt Crawford has done some interesting number-crunching of academic and public library blogs, and he’s looking at whether it’s desirable to do a larger-scale analysis of blogs by library people. In a sane world, people would be throwing lots of money at him for this.* But for now he’s just gauging interest. So hop over and put your two cents in.* And while I’m on the subject of non-pony-related wishes, I’d love to see Walt, Jason Griffey and Karen Coombs (authors of a forthcoming book on library blogging) and other people I’m not thinking of right now in a roundtable discussion on library blogging - when you should or shouldn’t do it, what works, and so on. And studies of non-English language liblogs. And discussion of the recent Best Practices LLC benchmarking study of corporate libraries. And…

So I ponied up the money for a PDF of Primary Research Group’s 2007 edition of its Corporate Library Benchmarks study ($189 for print or PDF, $289 for a site license). I really encourage people to check out the study - this page lists the tables included, and you can find a summary of findings here. These are my initial thoughts:

• I really wish there were a methodology section.
• 45 libraries, most of them in the U.S., seems a small sample if they’re aiming for representativeness. Especially when they go on to make cuts by industry. Also, should MBA libraries really count as corporate?
• “Organizations that have decreased the overall amount of space devoted to libraries in the past two years still average a higher number of library locations than those organizations that are not trying to decrease space.” This intrigues me - if companies are trying to reduce space, why not close down locations? I wonder if this relates to embedding librarians in business units rather than having them grouped together?
• With respect to outsourcing, it would have been interesting to see current and historical data on offshoring generally, not just limited to China, India, Russia and developing countries. I freely admit to bias here
• “Overall, more libraries lost FTE positions over the past two years than gained FTE positions. 
  More than 30% of the libraries in the sample lost full time equivalent positions over the past
  three years, while 11.63% gained positions; more than 58% experienced no change in the
  number of FTE positions allocated to the library.” While the phrasing of the first sentence is accurate, another way of looking at it is “Overall, most libraries experienced no change in the number of FTE positions allocated to the library. More than 30% of the libraries lost….”
• It looks like finance and higher education have a lot of ready reference questions.
• Finance and pharmaceutical/medical companies are most likely to have their librarians participate in knowledge management programs.
• Corporate librarians really aren’t taking advantage of blogs and RSS. More likely to publish blogs after space has been cut, don’t spend much time reading them (which is admittedly understandable) and most don’t take advantage of the possibilities of RSS to disseminate information to executives.
• Wow, other corporate librarians travel a lot more than I did.

Other people’s comments and reactions to the study?

Apologies for the delays, I’ve been wrestling with putting together IKEA furniture and applying for jobs and whatnot. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the initial comments on Meredith Farkas’ survey of bibliobloggers (specifically, those identified as corporate librarians), click here.

The gender split for corporate librarian respondents is even, 50-50, which is different than the biblioblogger sample as a whole, which skews female (66.3% vs. 33.5%, with a 0.2% other).

Corporate librarian respondents tend to have their blogs slightly longer than the sample as a whole - 2 to 3 years for the majority of corporate librarian respondents, versus 13 months-2 years for the majority of the biblioblogger sample as a whole. This may tie in with the majority of corporate librarian respondents having had their jobs for 1-6 years. Most respondents (6/22) started blogging in 2006, with a fairly even spread between 2001 and 2007 (2-3 each year). Most respondents contribute to more than one blog (15/22). Corporate librarian respondents, unlike the biblioblogger sample as a whole, do not use LiveJournal, Movable Type, MySpace or Ning at all, and only one blogger used Typepad. Some of this may be down to relative ease of use or lack of awareness, some of it may be a perception that LiveJournal or MySpace are not “professional.” This is rampant speculation on my part, however.

Another big surprise is how few corporate librarian respondents blog anonymously - 2/22 (with 2 abstaining). Most corporate librarian respondents indicate that people at work know about their blog, with a sizeable portion (6/22) indicating that they are not sure. There is a fairly even split between first-time and repeat bloggers (11/22 versus 9/22).

Most respondents have personal single-author blogs (15/22), but sizeable numbers have single-author professional blogs (9/22), collaborative multiple-author professional or internal staff blogs (7/22), collaborative multiple-author personal blogs or official library blogs for patrons (5/22). The overwhelming reason corporate librarian respondents have blogs is to share ideas (13/22), with other top reasons being to record ideas for themselves/to keep current (9/22) or to network/to become part of a community (8/22). Surely I can’t be the only shameless self-promoter out there (OK, there are 2 others).

No corporate librarian respondents receive revenue from blogging. Many corporate librarian respondents have published in small-readership professional national or international publications (non-peer-reviewed) (7/22), and overall 15/22 respondents have published professionally.

They tend to read blog content via Web-based RSS aggregators (13/22). The distribution of how many blogs they follow is interesting:

• Less than 15 (4/22)
• 16-40 (2/22)
• 41-75 (1/22)
• 76-100 (5/22)
• 101-150 (0/22)
• 151-200 (2/22)
• 200+ (4/22)
• No response (2/22)

In terms of other social networking tools, corporate librarian respondents tend to use instant messaging (14/22), LinkedIn (13/22), Flickr (12/22) and wikis (10/22) - few use Twitter (3/22), Ning (5/22) or MySpace (4/22).

While most corporate librarian respondents have their MLS, very few have other advanced degrees (I suspect this is a key differentiator from academic librarians). Of the choices for types of work given, most corporate librarians deal with electronic resources (5/22) and are solo librarians (4/22). Beyond this, work activities range widely - the most common item was reference (2/22), but other choices include subject liaison (1/22), general tech services and cataloging (1/22 each) and web development (1/22). I’m very surprised to see no respondents citing circulation or acquisitions/collection development in their duties - thoughts on why this might be the case?

Most corporate librarian respondents (14/22) are not direct supervisors of others - I’d like to see how that changes over time and how it compares with other librarian populations. Is it that supervisors tend to be less comfortable with the technology or that they have less time, or both?

Corporate librarian respondents rate themselves highly in terms of openness to change (10/22 definitely, 9/22 pretty much), somewhat less in terms of tech-savvy (8/22 definitely, 8/22 pretty much, 3/22 somewhat), even lower in terms of leading innovation at work (7/22 definitely, 7/22 pretty much, 4/22 somewhat, 1/22 barely) and in terms of job satisfaction (7/22 somewhat, versus 6/22 for pretty much and definitely).

Obviously, it would be interesting to see how these results changed from 2005, or how law and medical librarians differ from corporate librarians. Other thoughts on analyses, or questions on these results?

I’m not inclined to look through results in an airport lounge, so real analysis will have to wait, but Meredith Farkas kindly sent on the results of her survey for just corporate librarians (excluding law and medical librarians, which were separate categories). Only 22 people identified themselves as corporate librarians, which compares pretty well with the 17 respondents to my survey. Respondents were evenly split between male and female, and an overwhelming number of respondents were between 31 and 40. I was surprised by the number of respondents from Western Europe and the UK, with most of the remainder being from various regions of the United States (none from the Northeastern United States, Southwestern United States, Northwestern United States or non-continental United States). Most respondents had their blog for 2-3 years. More reporting and some actual analysis later.

Meredith Farkas has started analyzing results from her survey of 839 librarians and their blogs. You should check out her post, but a few things were of interest to me.

• A bit more than half (55%) of her sample started blogging between 2005 and 2007
• Women are more likely to be anonymous bloggers than men (is this due to the jobs they find themselves in?)
• Over half (54%) of the bloggers have published professionally and almost three-quarters (73%) of bloggers who have had their blogs for two or more years have published professionally.
• Corporate and public librarian bloggers expressed the lowest levels of job satisfaction
• The percentage of women librarian bloggers is growing more rapidly than the percentage of male bloggers
• The average age of librarian bloggers is increasing (37% over 40, up from 28% of the 165 respondents in 2005)

I did a survey of corporate librarian bloggers back in July 2006, but it only had 17 respondents. Perhaps it’s worth asking Meredith if I can have a copy of the data for corporate librarian bloggers and seeing what sort of analyses I can do with it.
Reactions?

Sorry to be duplicating content across blogs, but I think this is important. Meredith Farkas is conducting another survey of people considering themselves bibliobloggers, as a follow up to her August 2005 survey. She notes:

I’m looking for both people in the profession who have blogs and people who blog at their library as part of an official library blog. You don’t have to have an MLS to be a part of the survey and you don’t have to work in a traditional library setting. If you consider yourself a part of the profession and you blog, please do take part. I’ll probably keep the survey open for four weeks. Just like last time, I’ll be sure to publicly share all the details. I definitely can’t wait to see the results myself!

I’m very curious to see what has changed in 2 years - please check out her post and participate! The results of her first survey are here.

As promised, the results of the survey I did, after a month of collecting results.

• 17 respondents, the majority of which came in after I shamelessly promoted the survey on BUSLIB-L. I checked with Dan Lester first.
• 7 respondents categorized their blog as internally-focused, 4 as externally-focused, 2 as both and 4 didn’t have corporate library blogs.
• The majority of respondents, 12, said their company didn’t have an official blogging policy. 3 respondents said their company did have an official blogging policy, 1 said it was under development, and one respondent didn’t know.
• 11 responses to why people had corporate library blogs, which I’ll list at the end of this piece.
• Responses were evenly split between those who tracked readers/subscribers to their blogs, with 6 apiece. One person only tracked hits, one person wasn’t tracking yet, and 3 respondents skipped the question.
• Of those who responded to the question asking estimated number of readers/subscribers, results varied widely: 1-10 (1 respondent), 11-20 (3 respondents), 21-30 (1 respondent), 31-40 (2 respondents), don’t know (2 respondents).
• Most blogs were active for less than one year (8 respondents), with 4 respondents saying their blogs were active for 1-3 years and 1 respondent having his/her blog active for 3-5 years.
• Respondents overwhelmingly came from North America (4 respondents from Canada, 9 from the United States), with others coming from Japan (1 respondent), the Seychelles (1 respondent) and the United Kingdom (1 respondent). 1 person skipped the question. I suspect the North American bias is a product of posting to BUSLIB.

Reasons cited for having a corporate library blog:

1. Under construction at the moment
2. I’m trying to help improve the bottom line (no kidding)by combining competitor intelligence, marketing stats,industry information with knowledge not found in usual sources…knowledge from service techs, salespeople, engineers, chemists, marketing.
3. To help a friend promote his Library Services
4. to disseminate info fast, raise the visibility of the library and encourage knowledge sharing
5. To keep users informed about competitive issues or new things arriving in the library
6. I have a RSS reader to which I put our table of contents of our journals
7. As a forum for sharing my observations and experiences with the library community
8. Another channel to get information out
9. Currently do not have the capability/support.
10. I have it as a quick and easy way to get news out to my users. The blog software I use allows employees to sign up for e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, or else they can simply browse the web page. It gives them a choice in how they’d rather receive information.
11. Started out as a place to put things i found and did not want to lose.

I didn’t submit responses to the survey, but if I did I would be based in the United States, active for less than a year, I’d classify this blog as externally-focused, our company’s still developing a blogging policy last I heard. And I started this blog to share experiences and best practices with other corporate librarians out there, who seemed fairly under-represented compared to academic and public librarians last time I went looking through library blogs.

So, comments on the results? Suggestions for another version of this survey? Worse comes to worst, I might run this annually, see how results change over time. I realize 17 data points isn’t much, but at least it can kick off a conversation.

I’ve taken the liberty of creating a short poll using SurveyMonkey.com, to get a better understanding of the corporate library blogs out there. It’s only eight questions, and most of them are multiple choice. Feel free to pass the link to the poll on to other corporate librarians of your acquaintance.

As I note in the introduction, I’m no survey expert, so feel free to suggest re-wording of questions or additional questions. I’ll report back on results of the poll after one month, but I’ll leave it open.

You can take the survey here