A Guide to Excellent Creative Business Libraries and Business Centers

I had the opportunity to view the work produced by the American Library Association’s (ALA) Emerging Leaders at the 2008 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. While I was impressed overall with the quality of work produced by these rising stars, I was drawn to the research that one group presented as a poster session. This project related to identifying best practices of innovative business libraries and business centers. Since I believed that these findings would be of interest to a broader audience, I invited the group to submit an article on their project for this occasional column.–Editor Leslie Burger, 2006-07 American Library Association (ALA) president, initiated the Emerging Leaders program. This program provides an opportunity for new librarians to serve the profession in a leadership capacity. Emerging Leaders participate in problem-solving workgroups, network with peers, and gain an inside look at the organizational structure of ALA. Beginning in December 2007, our workgroup from the 2008 Emerging Leaders program took on a project sponsored by the Business Reference and Services Section (BRASS) of RUSA. The goal of the project was to create a guide to excellent creative business libraries and business centers to provide examples of innovative and best practices. To better understand the current practices of business libraries and business centers, we conducted a Web-based survey to identify innovation and best practice. The findings from the survey are discussed in this article. Note that we have used the term library to designate both business libraries and business centers. LITERATURE REVIEW Given that none of the authors are business librarians and lacked in-depth knowledge about business librarianship, we began with a broad literature review. Our review of the literature on business librarianship expanded to include current practices, innovative practices, marketing, and collaboration. We found a paucity of literature on current practices and nothing concrete on best practices. Abels and Magi reported on current practices and trends in twenty top business school libraries. (1) While their research focused on academic libraries, their findings apply to other types of business libraries as well. They found that, despite the organizational structure of these academic business libraries, the needs of patrons drive the delivery of services and resources. Listening to patrons’ needs and implementing changes to meet those needs are important for continued success. However, budgetary restrictions or constraints may play an important role in the delivery of services and resources. Abels and Magi identified the following trends: * Library websites offer access to a variety of services and resources * Library websites provide access to a variety of commercial online databases * E-mail reference service is increasing in popularity and use * User education sessions focus on topics instead of specific resources * Interactive online tutorials may become more prevalent but will remain as supplements (rather than replacements) to classroom instruction * Reference desk hours will most likely remain stable in the short term, but will likely decrease over the next five years * Materials budgets will reflect more spending on serials than on monographs Abels and Magi also found that a demand exists for in-person reference service. But they acknowledged that the “emergence of new technology will require business school libraries to adjust their practices.” (2) A follow-up or duplication of this study would be interesting, since Abels and Magi published their findings in 2001. The goal for this project was to create a best practices guide applicable to various types of business libraries and centers (academic, public, and corporate). More specifically, the task was to identify innovative practices. The question therein lies, what is innovation and how is it defined?