Thing 16 of cpd23 is about advocacy and speaking up for the library profession. When people think of advocacy and libraries I'm in no doubt that public libraries spring to mind first, closely followed by academic libraries. After all cuts to public library services and universities seeking costing cutting measures make it into the news and rightly so. There are however many of us information professionals in other workplaces, such as the commercial property firm I work for, that are fighting nail and tooth to show our worth. This however often goes unnoticed. I'm sure this is because we aren't for the greater good; we only serve the employees of our company and we're there to help the company make money. We also aren't part of a bigger picture - any idea how many companies employ librarians? As a result there's no "X number of corporate librarians face redundancy" headline. Most large firms need the skills of a librarian and if we don't shout loud enough about what we can offer other professionals will fill the void.
In 2008 the property industry was one of the first to be hit by redundancies. We lost half of our team and had to make significant cuts in subscription expenditure. We just felt like things were picking up when we merged with another company, which threatened our service for a second time. This goes to show you can never be complacent. Advocacy is not an option, it's something you have to do or at least be mindful of on a daily basis.
So what does advocacy look like in a corporate library and why is it not enough to prove the value of your service?
Every day we do the best we can to meet the needs of our users and until recently we actively promoted the services of our library; we engaged with new starters and promoted and explained the benefits of our services during office visits. As a result we have a core group of people who we would like to think if push came to shove would fight our corner. We keep enquiry statistics and emails from colleagues that show how useful our services are and how widely they are used and also have figures to show savings made through negotiating subscription renewals. All this helps to show the powers that be the importance and value of our service. Essentially it's our business case as to why we should be here at all, or so we thought...
A few months ago we merged with another company which hasn't had an information service since 2008. During the integration talks it became clear that there was a belief that surveyors are self-sufficient and don't need an enquiry service, subscriptions aren't handled centrally and no amount of statistics or endorsements seemed to alter the view that we just weren't needed. Things were looking very bleak. Whilst we'd like to think that we had some senior supporters that would have waded in and saved the day, things thankfully haven't come to that. From the outset my manger made it clear that we were flexible and willing to change the service we provide to fit with the new company and this along with a very senior person seeing our potential has been our saviour. We are in the process of making some of our services self-service which will free up time for our new remit; a mixture of enquiry work (for double the amount of people) and some knowledge management type work. Once this has been done we'll be in a position to actively promote our new service.
So the moral of the story is that advocacy, in the sense of explaining the value of your service to users and your organisation is not enough. You must regularly review your service and align it with the needs of your organisation (not just your users). You need to be flexible, only hold onto the things that really matter to your users and your organisation and be prepared to change. It's also important to concentrate on doing the things that require your professional skills and input. We know some things aren't going to be managed so closely in the future, such as subscriptions, but we will be putting our information skills to much better use. This will not only benefit our company, but also ensure there will be roles in our firm for information professionals in the future.
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