Full Report (MS Word)
Information Outlook article (April 2004)

The 2002 Steven I. Goldspiel Memorial Research Grant was awarded to Dr. Deborah Barreau for her project "The New Information Professional: Vision and Practice."

As more people turn to the Internet and other online sources for their information needs, the role of the library as an information center where people go to fulfill their needs is being challenged. Some corporations have closed their libraries, while others have opted to define new roles for librarians in the development and use of information resources. One vision for the librarian of the future suggests that information resources and information professionals will be more closely integrated with the work of an organization, with information professionals serving as members of collaborative teams. How receptive are workers within an organization to collaborating with information specialists whose roles and background may be different from the specialties of the team? How receptive are information professionals to moving from a centralized information center to the decentralized and specialized department or work group? What characteristics of organizations, work groups and information professionals are required for this vision to succeed?

The purpose of Dr. Barreau's project is to examine these questions within a specific corporate domain, the newspaper industry. Newspaper organizations were selected primarily because some of these organizations have redefined their library services by integrating information professionals within various editorial departments of the organization, while others have not. Typical of special libraries, newspaper libraries exist to serve the parent organization, and professionals must constantly struggle with how best to do this.