Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Dave at The Industrial Librarian argues that corporate librarians can get bogged down in two many unimportant clerical tasks, such as checking in journals and meticulous cataloguing*. Instead, they should focus on those activities which really add value to the organisation.

He was responding to Why many medical librarians deserve to lose their jobs, which is also worth reading. I can certainly recognise, in what Dave says, mistakes which I made myself when I was a corporate librarian. I'll try to bear his points in mind if I end up back in a corporate environment.

*Not that cataloguing is really a clerical task, but I take his point. If you have a small collection, does it really need to to be immaculately catalogued to AACR2R standards?

| posted by Simon at 9:27 pm