Learning to sell themselves

Image by thewikiman via Flickr

For the last two days at the Pharma-Bio-Med Conference in Seville, I have listened to a number of information professionals who have been sharing their ideas and best practices for their roles in major pharmaceutical companies. For most of them, they enjoy helping people to find information. They used to do the searching themselves using 'precision search' tools and techniques which require years of training to complete effectively.

But, the harsh reality is that their roles are changing from being providers to being enablers in their organisations. They spend less time searching and more time helping others to search effectively. Google has brought about this change. Google is not precision search but it is most people's first point of call when they want to find an answer to a question. It is easy to use but it is not as authoritative and comprehensive in its information sources as you might like to think.

So, as organisations value doing more research with less resources, this is  having an impact on the 'information professionals' and librarians in so much as there are fewer of them. But, the demand for information has not diminished. Organisations just don't want to pay for people to search for their staff.

This change means that the role of the information professional is changing. They are doing less search themselves and increasingly showing other non-information professionals how to search effectively. As a direct consequence, the entry barrier to precision searching, which was perhaps using a highly technical command-line based search interface, is no longer suitable. People are used to searching in a Google-esque interface which means people don't have to be trained to such a high level.

Further to this, the traditional information professionals are now having to pick up sales and marketing skills to help their staff in their companies to know how they can help them and to, dare I say it, justify their positions. The world of the information professional is changing quickly and, like many other people, they are having to learn to sell themselves.