[Publib] The Value of Librarians

[Fred Beisser]

The February 2002 issue of Information Outlook included an interview 
with the late management guru extraordinaire, Peter Drucker.

Why would he be concerned about librarians and libraries? Read on.

Drucker, as usual, comes right out and hits us right between the eyes 
with his on target observations:

    "[Public libraries] contain data. The customer decides what is 
information... [T]he general library is just a store, although 
librarians can -- and do -- make a difference."

Drucker points to where the knowledge in libraries lives - in the 
librarians:

   " In a special library, the librarians have the knowledge that 
enables them to convert the data in the library into information for the 
clients. I am always amazed how much topical knowledge special 
librarians have about the international trade that is the business of 
their customers.

    Librarians in a special library know what their customers need and 
often they know it much better than their customers in the organization 
do. They can -- and do -- anticipate the customer's information needs. 
They can -- and do -- reach out to the customer and point him or her in 
the right information direction. They can -- and do know what new data 
is in their customer's field or sphere of interest."

He was talking about competitive intelligence and was adamant on this point:

    "Companies may know a good deal about their customers. They know 
nothing, as a rule, about their non-customers -- the people who should 
be our customers but buy from someone else. Why do they do that? And yet 
it is the non-customer where important changes always start first."

It was not the library building he loved:

    "They are places. I love librarians, and have been doing so since I 
was a young trainee, not yet 18, on my first job."

He had a terribly boring job, and there was a library across the street, 
where a librarian opened his eyes to the world of reading. Reading ties 
in to Drucker's assertion that people be generally educated, and reading 
all the time. As for finding information on the web, Drucker had nothing 
good to say about it. He sticks to his guns, telling us that the web 
does not have a librarian who can say to us:

    "This is what you are looking for, and this is where you'll find it."

Drucker noted:

    "The code and the librarian convert the chaotic and unlimited 
universe of data into information and no web will ever be able to do 
this, if only because there is no way to classify the universe. You 
first have to codify it."

So there you have it. One of the world's most respected managment 
consultants on the value of librarians.


Fred Beisser
Trustee
www.elbertcountylibrary.org
(Colorado)






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