Introduction

Corporate libraries are not critical to healthy service businesses, but they should be.

I have never seen a business headline that says something like ‘company X folded because they closed their library’. Why haven't I seen a headline like that? It may be linked to corporate librarians’ comfort as heads-down, taskbased workers. In general, librarians aren't self-promoting marketing geniuses. We are geniuses at doing the work that is asked of us. Problems that are brought to a corporate library for solutions or input are very well solved. Our subset clientele usually loves us. They are sad when our hours, space or budget is reduced. They mourn our retirements, but do not necessarily protest when we are not replaced.

How can we change this?

Corporate librarians must cultivate themselves and their departments as essential to the business of the organisation. I think of this position as the library being the organisation's mothership. Information is looked for from the central hub – the mothership – to ensure that the business is successful. Business strategy and business decisions are looked for at, in and from the library. When librarians are not consulted about specific business decisions, the library as place is still the hub of where business information decisions are sourced.

Consider a mothership corporate library. What does it look like? In practical terms, this means that the library and librarians are central to business strategy. Their names are all over the firm's strategic plan. Their department is an outward facing growth area that is lauded and touted in every single request for a proposal that the firm answers. When clients are cultivated, the librarian is introduced. Librarian as business genius is the role that I believe corporate libraries should be striving for. If information is the business commodity, and finding information is a librarian's forte, librarian as the mothership of useful business information is the position to strive for.