I recently saw a great infographic based on Larry Cooperman’s book, Managing the One-Person Library. It’s a “test” that allows you to assess whether you have the right stuff to operate as a solo librarian (and it can also be used as a recruiting and hiring aid). Please read on for some secrets to effective one-person library management.

As highlighted in Lucidea’s lighthearted short video introducing The Stormy Librarian, there are many information and knowledge management challenges common to special librarians the world over, no matter what sector, organization size or geography. Strategies to solve these are important for the sustainability of the profession - and help is on the way.

This holiday season is an appropriate time to republish a post from our CEO, Ron Aspe, on the value of our partnerships with you, our much appreciated clients. Our thoughts turn gratefully to those who have made our progress possible. Thank you for being our trusted partners.

At Lucidea, we believe that commercial partnership includes a consultative, collaborative element; ideally, vendor and client make each other smarter and more effective. I can certainly think of many times when clients, longstanding or new, have helped me to be smarter and more effective.

Marketing anything is about building relationships. For libraries, making a personal connection is extremely important, because it leads both to advocacy and increased usage of services and products.

Organizations of all kinds spend a significant amount of money on electronic content and research tools – but often have no way of knowing if that’s money well spent. Proactive management of your portfolio with an ERM (electronic resource management) application is critical, whether you are a law firm, a nonprofit or a corporate multinational.

Special librarians achieve sustainability by understanding that end user requirements and forces at work (e.g. new technologies, globalization and a mobile workforce) all demand change.

As highlighted in Lucidea’s lighthearted short video introducing The Stormy Librarian, there are many information and knowledge management challenges common to special librarians the world over, no matter what sector, organization size or geography. Strategies to solve these are important for the sustainability of the profession - and help is on the way.

Solo librarians may not have the same options as their counterparts in larger organizations when it comes to following all three sticky marketing tenets but they are often uniquely positioned to optimize one of them: make a personal connection.

Ye Olde Reference Interview. It offers an excellent opportunity to practice “Sticky Marketing,” allowing you to meet your users where they are (in this case, in the context of a research project) and to make a personal connection that results in the library being more integrated with employees’ daily workflow.

Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH) is an engineering firm that designs, investigates, and rehabilitates constructed works in the United States, Canada, and in more than thirty additional countries, with ~500 employees in six offices. SGH has a multi-location library of more than 25,000 items, and making that content available enterprise-wide presented a huge accessibility challenge.

There’s quite a list of information and knowledge management challenges common to special librarians the world over, no matter what sector, organization size or geography. Strategies to solve these are important for the sustainability of the profession, and help is on the way. You might recognize many (and possibly all!) of the unique challenges faces by today’s special librarians as they strive to increase visibility, value and relevance to their organizations. These include:

Attaching the library to regular training sessions - particularly onboarding for new hires - opens up a great marketing channel for the library, while offering important benefits to new employees.

It’s critical for the library to have a great working relationship with the IT department, and that doesn’t necessarily happen overnight.  Even though it sounds counterintuitive, establishing your credibility with IT leadership is the key to achieving IT independence and managing your own systems.

It used to be considered inappropriate for library staff to monitor the usage patterns of their end users, but for today’s special libraries, tracking and acting upon the insights gained is essential for delivering the best in content, tools and services.

What do you do when you get an unsolicited email about a product, event or service that’s full of exclamation marks or threats of scarcity? I hit delete, and I’m betting you do too.

ETS is a nonprofit organization that advances worldwide quality and equity in education by creating assessments based on rigorous research. They develop, administer and score more than 50 million tests annually in more than 180 countries, at more than 9,000 locations worldwide.

Special librarians achieve sustainability by understanding that end user requirements and forces at work (e.g. new technologies, globalization and a mobile workforce) all demand change.

I recently noticed a statement about Web presence and visibility for public libraries being “potentially the most important development in the library industry since the transition from the card catalog to the Integrated Library System.” It might seem counterintuitive, but the imperative to make content discoverable via Web search engines isn’t limited to public libraries.