Although you may feel you don’t have the personality for sales (although if you do, there’s some serious money to be made here), there are numerous other roles to play. These could include marketing, market research, account management, product development, external market communications (social/digital media), information/content development and/or management, indexing and abstracting, taxonomy work, customer product training, competitive intelligence research, and user testing, among other roles.

Working for a Vendor: What to Expect
Depending on the company and the position, your job may entail substantial travel, financial incentives, and the opportunity to help create new products and services for the profession. Your job may entail supporting internal or external customers.

You’ll also be expected to meet performance benchmarks, be accountable for supporting your team and/or department’s success, and possible (depending on your job) represent the company to potential and existing customers. Personal accountability and initiative will be important parts of your job.

Identifying the Universe of LIS Vendors
There are a number of ways to get a sense of all of the various vendors who might offer work opportunities of potential interest. For example:

The Librarian’s Yellow Pages. One great starting point is the now-online free resource, Librarian’s Yellow Pages. It provides listings of thousands of LIS-industry vendors by category (e.g., automation systems & services, book publishers, library services, etc.) and subcategory (collection development, abstracting and indexing services, knowledge management), plus you can search by company listing. Each entry provides the company’s address, contact information, and website. It’s a great starting point to get a broad overview of the vast range of companies serving libraries and information professionals.

Library Journal. The “Products and Vendors” section found on its website under the “Technology” tab provides recent articles and updates about LIS vendors that have appeared in the print issues. In addition, the print publication has annual overviews of database publishers, ILS vendors, and other categories of vendors.

Visiting conference exhibitor booths. Depending on your interests, the annual ALA and SLA conferences can be worth attending at least once simple to hang out in the exhibit hall to get a sense of who all the different vendors are, and talking with the booth staff to get insight into the companies, their products and targeted markets, and possible job openings. (Be sure to come equipped with business cards that you can leave with any interested parties.)

Finding Jobs with Vendors
You may come into regular contact with LIS vendor reps during the course of your daily job responsibilities; this is a great opportunity to chat them up and find out more about what they do, how they like working for their employer, and the types of jobs that people have within their companies. It’s also a great way to find out about potential job openings with that vendor.

But if you don’t regularly come into contact with vendors, there are still a number of ways to learn more about these opportunities. These include:

Registering with recruiters and temping agencies. If you’re job hunting or considering a job change, signing up with a placement agency can offer multiple benefits, including providing reliable information about LIS vendors. They can often provide insight into what companies are hiring for what roles, provide you with a sense of what vendors might be a match for your expertise and career goals, and potentially be able to match you with a good job (or an initial project) with a vendor.

Checking the library-related LinkedIn group members for corporate affiliations. One of the great reasons to join the LIS-related LinkedIn groups (especially the ALA group and its subgroup, LIS Career Options) is to have an opportunity to cruise the membership list, and see if anyone is working for a company that might be of interest to you. If so, you can reach out to them for more information about the work they do, their company, and possible job openings. Also, as a LinkedIn member, you have the option of “following” a particular company to keep apprised of potential information that might lead to a job opportunity.

Visiting company websites. Once you’ve identified some companies that may be of interest, start checking out their websites to see what job openings are listed. This is a great way to get a sense of whether there may be a match between your skills, work history, and market knowledge and their growth opportunities.

Searching the LIS job boards. We have several great resources for job postings, including Rachel Singer Gordon’s LISjobs, Library Journal’s Job Zone, and the ALA JobLIST, among others. Although most of the jobs listed at these sites are for libraries rather than vendors, they can still be the source of some vendor openings.

Although working for a vendor may not be the first choice for those just coming out of grad school, it can be an excellent choice for a librarians or information professionals who have worked in a library environment for awhile and are ready to transition into a new but related career opportunity that will still recognize the professional equity they have built over the years (read: offer a decent salary).

In a business environment, an embedded librarian might be working as part of the marketing team doing market research, or doing competitive intelligence hand-in-hand with the business development team, or doing patent research for the engineering department.

In a nonprofit organization, an embedded librarian might be working with the donor relations team, or aggregating topical resources as part of the website team, or researching community issues for the community outreach department.

These are basic examples of what can be very innovative roles; the bottom line, however, is that this type of “librarianship” is focused on adding value 1) at the point of need, 2) in a collaborative manner, and 3) with or without the existence of a centralized library. It’s also the role more and more special librarians are transitioning into as their libraries (perceived as overhead) are closed down.

One of the challenges in finding these types of jobs is that if you start out inside the organization, you’ll be familiar with the opportunities and be able to market yourself and your skills as the perfect solution.

The challenge comes when trying to figure out how to identify and move into these jobs when you’re not reaching out as part of an existing, centralized library. People may know they need information, but not realize that you’re the solution they’re looking for. For example, a new business development department may need someone who can find, interpret, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information to make it actionable. They’re looking for decision support.

Very rarely will people associate “librarian” with “killer information skill set” – which is, in fact, what we’ve got. So it’s up to you to find the match not in the titles for jobs that may be posted (or needed), but in the skills required.

Perhaps you’re already in an organization in a library role and either 1) you want to move out of that position into an embedded information professional one or 2) your library is going away and its staff is being laid off but you’d like to stay with the organization. How to start? By devising a strategy for demonstrating your value to potential internal employers. David Shumaker suggests three ways to address this situation;

Start with your friends. You want to actively seek out and build relationships with key information users throughout the organization – look for ways to use your information skills to help them achieve key business goals, come up with important “wins.” Essentially, you want to help them (and their department) succeed, so that they understand how much better life would be if you were a part of the team.

Lead with management contacts. There are people who love you, and there are people who love you and can make decisions to hire you. Make sure that the latter see, acknowledge, and come to rely on your expertise. Can you pull together statistics for that last-minute presentation they’ve got to give? Find the market analyst report whose findings substantiate a key business decision? Provide some other killer information that saves the day? The key here is to always focus on need to have, rather than nice to have. Nice to have means they’ll miss you when you’re not around; need to have means they’ll find a way to get you into the budget.

Volunteer. Take a tip from Procter & Gamble: nothing beats a free sample when it comes to getting people to see how good you are. You may find yourself doing your regular job and taking on a bit of additional work on your own time to be able to start building a new relationship (and demonstrating that killer skill set), but consider it an investment in your future. You’re doing the work necessary to create a potential new opportunity. Is there a guaranteed payoff? Nope. But increased visibility for your skills is always a good thing; you never know what it may lead to. What if you’re trying to find a job as an embedded information professional, but aren’t currently working in an organization’s library?

Other ideas for finding these types of jobs:

• Look for jobs that say things like researcher, analyst, information specialist, or business development support. If you’re an SLA member, cruise through the membership list to get an idea of some job titles that sound as if they might be something you could do, and search the job postings for those titles.

• Retool your resume with a focus on transferable skills. Describe your LIS skills in a way that resonates with your potential employer – use business language rather than LIS terms.

• Tell everyone you know that you’re taking your information skills in a new direction and are looking for opportunities to deploy your expertise with any of the following departments: marketing, communications and public relations, community affairs, competitive intelligence, or new business development. Be prepared to describe the kinds of work you could do to contribute value to each one of these functional areas.

Also, don’t hesitate to pitch a position for a company you’d like to work with – in other words, suggest a position that doesn’t currently exist. Contact the head of marketing (or any other department of interest), and tell him or her how you could add value to their group and help it achieve its goals. (I tend to avoid doing things like this by phone since I’m simply appallingly bad at phone conversations, so usually will do a written overview that I might, for example, present to someone over lunch.)

The benefits of the create-your-own-job approach include 1) no one knows what to call you, so you can often make up a cool title, 2) no one knows what to pay you, because there’s no precedent, so you can sometimes negotiate a higher salary, and 3) you get to make the job up as you go along, because no one else has done it before.

Bottom line: whether you’re an embedded librarian or an embedded information professional, moving your skills into operational units and becoming key participants in group outcomes may offer an increasingly important career opportunity for librarians and other information professionals.

Embedded Librarian Resources
The Embedded Librarian
David Shumaker has been in the forefront of the embedded librarian development and is generally considered the profession’s thought leader and most knowledgeable individual on this topic. Although I’m recommending his blog, I’m really recommending that you read anything David writes or researches on embedded librarianship. His blog presents his own thinking and research results related to embedded librarianship and also aggregates key information from others.

“The Embedded Librarian Program,” by Victoria Matthew and Ann Schroeder, Educause, v 29, no 4, 2006.
Although this is an older (Q4 2006) article, it provides a good overview of how embedded academic librarianship was designed into a series of online courses for a community college.

“Embedded Librarians,” Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2010.
An overview of how a special library (Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University) dismantled and distributed its resources and informational professionals to function as embedded librarians.

“Embedded Librarianship Part 1: Aligning With Organizational Strategy to Transform Information Into Knowledge,” by Reece Dano and Gretchen McNeely, FUMSI, February 2, 2011.
Focuses on strategic alignment with key stakeholders (i.e., the people who need and can benefit from your skills) and your role in transforming information into knowledge for your organization. See especially the six-step workflow outline.

Models of Embedded Librarianship
Given by “David Shumaker and Mary Talley and Friends” at the 2009 SLA Conference, this presentation provides an excellent overview of all aspects of embedded librarianship.

In an effort to create a group of questions that could be replicated for each LIS role, I decided to take one job – reference librarian – and see how it could be taken apart as an LIS role and then parsed into non-LIS opportunities. A caveat here: I’ve never actually been a reference librarian, but have colleagues who’ve been willing to share their reference-librarian experiences with me, so this represents my best-guess interpretation of basic reference-librarian skills.

Here’s the process I would go through to map this role:

Job title: Reference librarian

Core job skill: Research

Job skill components: 1) mastery of research process; 2) ability to conduct successful reference interview; 3) ability to identify, evaluate, and choose best, most authoritative information resources to answer question; 4) ability to successfully use those tools to answer patron questions.

Additional “soft skill” business strengths: 1) customer relations; 2) interviewing; 3) interpersonal communication.

Business value-add: 1) analysis and synthesis; 2) research results presentation and packaging for client; 3) specialized topic knowledge (for example, biotechnology); 4) specialized resource knowledge (for example, public records or patents). [Note: these are skills that would make your basic reference skills more valuable to a non-LIS employer.]

Shift in approach: in a business or organization setting, your research will generally be used for decision support, so you will be expected to provide very targeted information and data as concisely as possible – think bullet points; also, research will often be only one component of your mandate – you may also be relied on to analyze, synthesize, and “package” the information so key points are readily identifiable.

Potentially translates to these roles: business or data analyst, business or information researcher, market research, business or product development support/research, competitive intelligence specialist, donor or prospect researcher (in general, all of these titles would include descriptors such as “analyst,” “researcher,” “specialist,” or “coordinator”).

Additional potential roles: focus group facilitator/leader; environmental scanning specialist; business trends analyst; customer service, content curation, writer, online content developer.

Who would use these skills: almost all businesses (most likely in these departments: marketing, sales, business development, product development, corporate communication and/or community affairs), large nonprofits (especially for donor research), marketing and public relations agencies (research for their client projects), organizations that use content for marketing/branding purposes.

Considerations: 1) think about which aspects of reference work you most enjoy to determine which of these career paths might be most appropriate for you – for example, if you especially enjoy the people interaction part of reference work, then you might be most interested in jobs like market research, focus group facilitation, or customer service; 2) think about whether or not there’s a subject area you’d like to specialize in if you choose to pursue the research field; 3) if your writing skills aren’t solid, you’ll want to practice them until they are.

I would love to hear from others whether this type of information is helpful in thinking about how to repurpose traditional library roles into new opportunities. Too much information? Too little? What’s missing? Would greatly appreciate any and all recommendations!

In an effort to nail down some (any!) answers to this tough question, I tend to read as much as I can about the future of work in organizations, and recently came across an interesting publication published March 10, 2011, by the Aspen Institute, “The Future of Work: What It Means for Individuals, Businesses, Markets and Governments,” by David Bollier.

It’s a fascinating read, interpreting how emerging trends may materialize in the workplace. But from my perspective, the title’s real value is the opportunity it offers LIS pros to practice identifying and articulating their value proposition in this “new normal” organization.

I read the report, and have perused others, with these questions in mind:

• Where could LIS skills support this type of rapidly moving organization?
• How would I disseminate information so that it was “just in time” rather than “just in case?”
• What would I need to do to be included in project teams, which may become the operational unit preferred over standing departments?
• What technology skills would I need to know as the cost of entry to participate and contribute?
• What soft skills would I need to master in order to be able to deploy my information skills effectively?
• What professional branding would I need to do to be perceived as an in-demand “impact player?”

When it comes to LIS careers and the chaotic nature of every LIS career path, it really is true that the best defense is a good offense. And one of the best ways to go on the offensive is to continually be thinking about where new opportunities will open up, even as others are closing down.

Reading “The Future of Work” and similar reports, articles, and books provides a good exercise in brainstorming where those opportunities may lie. Or equally important, where you may be able to create them.

Rosenbaum’s premise is based on two ideas: “First, curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized. And second, there is both amateur and professional curation, and the emergence of amateur or pro-sumer curators isn’t in any way a threat to professionals.”

Further, “curation is about selection, organization, presentation, and evolution. While computers can aggregate content, information, or any shape or size of data, aggregation without curation is just a big pile of stuff that seems related but lacks a qualitative organization….Curation is an exhilarating, fast-moving, evolving idea that addresses two parallel trends: the explosive growth in data, and our need to be able to find information in coherent, reasonably contextual groupings.”

Is it just me, or does this scream LIS career opportunity?

Information Professionals as Data Curators?
In an excellent overview by Rohit Bhargava in his “Manifesto/Job Description: Content Curator,” he writes:

In the near future, experts predict that content on the web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. To satisfy the people’s hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators.

The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.

Redeploying Skills for New Career Opportunity
Essentially, all of the skills that LIS professionals have been deploying within libraries, organizations, special collections, etc., will be in increasing demand in a new online environment, not necessarily connected to a library infrastructure of any sort.

Some of this work is likely to be done for content organizations, some likely to be done for companies whose products/services are based on presenting only the best resources/information on a topic, some done on a freelance or independent basis where individuals with recognized subject expertise create monetizable value by aggregating the best information on an in-demand topic.

At this point, content curation sounds like an opportunity with more questions than answers. What’s the difference between data curation and content curation? Who’s doing this type of work and for whom? Are any LIS graduates going into this field? What exactly do job descriptions look like, and how would we sell our LIS skills to hiring managers? What, if any, additional skills would make us more competitive candidates when applying for these jobs?

It would be great to find more information out about this possible career opportunity – is anyone working in this area yet? In the meantime, I’m going to continue to track the field.

Written by information pros who know the LIS space well, both provide profiles of an encouragingly broad range of LIS career paths and practitioner profiles. Concerned about what to do with an LIS skill set when traditional jobs are in freefall? These two books are a great place to start.

I’m happy to report that we’ve now got a third resource that does an excellent job of lining out existing and emerging LIS career opportunities: Neal-Schuman’s recently released The New Information Professional: Your Guide to Careers in the Digital Age, by Judy Lawson, Joanna Kroll, and Kelly Kowatch.

The authors are associated with the University of Michigan School of Information (admissions and/or the career center), and bring an “iSchool” (as opposed to library-centric) conceptual focus to their career guide. The result is a different – and very useful – approach to thinking about LIS career options.

LIS Career Options – In a Digital World
The New Information Professional is structured around eight career paths: archives and preservation; records management; library and information services; human-computer interaction; social computing; information systems management; information policy; and information analysis and retrieval.

For each path, the authors provide an introductory overview (issues, opportunities, future trends), a description of the types of jobs and career paths to be found, requisite hard and soft skills for success in this type of work, salary and employment information, and profiles of individuals and their related career paths.

In addition to these well-done basics, however, readers will find some extremely valuable extras: a list of similar/related jobs and how they differ from each other (for example, archivist vs. preservationist, web designer vs. information architect); a list of actual job titles and companies that employ people in these roles; and notes on whether an advanced degree or simply job experience is more likely to land you a specific job.

Career Flow Charts
In addition, each career chapter provides an extremely useful career-planning diagram “to provide a snapshot of career options and pathways and to help you map your own path to a career in information.” Laid out graphically like flow charts, these diagrams chart a path beginning with education and potential prior work experience through possible grad program paths, relevant coursework within those grad programs, relevant internships, career titles, and finally career industry areas.

This information is simply invaluable, and to my knowledge, doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Organizing Your Career Exploration
The guide’s concluding chapter, “Planning for Your Career in Information,” is meant to help readers determine whether a career in information is right for them, and if so, what type of information work might best suit. It includes several assessment exercises, useful information for researching career options, and coaching on how to develop and execute a career action plan.

In addition, an appendix lists schools with iSchool programs, plus links to lists for ALA-accredited programs, human-computer interaction (HCI) programs, and archives and records management programs.

A Terrific Career Resource for the LIS 2.0 World
The New Information Professional provides valuable information that’s specific, detailed, and actionable. The iSchool conceptual framework will help students and practitioners successfully focus their career pursuits on expanding, rather than contracting, aspects of the LIS world. And given how things are going in the traditional librarianship job market, this is good news all the way.

Here, Stephen talks about working with a vendor as a career path, and the opportunities he sees emerging for LIS professionals in the coming years.

KD: What would you advise someone considering working for a vendor as a possible career direction?
SA: Being on the vendor side of the information world isn’t too much different from the non-vendor side. I’d put these questions out there:

• If you’re uncomfortable with vendors and somehow see earning a profit as unethical, then it’s not for you. However, I’d argue that if you think that people employed in the private sector have different basic value systems than those in libraries, you’re wrong. People want to work in communities and work well with others. The best relationships in vendor/library land are based on the same things – mutual trust, respect and friendship. There are bad eggs on both sides but, generally, it’s a great place. Profit is just a different way of measuring your success in implementing good products and services.

• How open-minded are you? Library environments are famously liberal. You may need to be open to other points of view and occasionally listen to and appreciate very different points of view that challenge your own (internally and with clients). I am very left-wing politically and I find that my POV is respected and heard as long as I respect others’ views and listen. In the vendor environments I’ve worked in, we don’t have to agree or conform any more than anywhere else.

• How do you feel about reporting and numbers? The vendor side of the sector is very numbers driven. This is less about staying within budget but often covers forecasting skills, business cases, return on investment (ROI) justifications, and using numbers and visuals to support your plans. It’s a good skill to have in management for both libraries and vendors but it’s my experience that it is critical in private sector performance evaluations.

• You’ll also need great presentation skills. Written reports, e-mails and memos are not enough to influence agendas.

• How are you at managing short- and long-term goals? Again, this is a critical success factor in doing well in business. The time frames are in weeks and months (and occasionally quarters) in vendor land. Committees still exist but personal accountability for goals and performance is more tightly managed in vendors than I have seen in most libraries.

• Can you describe your strengths well? Marcus Buckingham’s books are a great place to start (Now Discover Your Strengths and Go Put Your Strengths to Work). Are your strengths aligned with what will work well for your target vendor employers? I have found dozens of successful librarians in positions for sales, training, customer support, webinars, management, writing, marketing, public relations, HR, systems development and executive roles. The possibilities are limitless and using your library professional skills is both welcome and desired.

• How do you feel about stability? The private sector is far more susceptible to the vagaries of the economy and mergers and acquisitions than most traditional public sector libraries and organizations. I don’t find that a deal killer, but it can be a stressor.

KD: What professional skills/attitudes do you feel will be most valuable for LIS professionals in the next 5-10 years?
SA: I think there are a number of skills that information professionals and LIS students need to be focusing on in order to add value in the coming years. These are:

1. Leadership skills: The next few decades offer an amazing opportunity for information professionals with library training to influence the path of society in a positive way. We need to develop a cadre of professionals who have – and use – their leadership skills to make a difference. We must move beyond supervision and management alone to grasp this ring.

2. Advocacy skills: Concomitantly, we have to find our voices. Advocacy can be taught and the confidence to achieve our role in society must be instilled and encouraged. We must project confidence with content.

3. Interpretation skills: One of the key challenges of the coming decades is the contextualization of technology and its place in human endeavor. The librarian’s and information professional’s perspective on the intersection of people, service and technology in everything from user behaviours to search-assisted decision-making is critical to enterprise success. We must improve the communication and influencing skills of our profession on every level.

4. Empathy skills: We used to identify this more narrowly as reference interviewing, but it is really about understanding the client and his or her context. Across all sectors of librarianship we see an increasing need for this most human of skills. It’s all about relationships and we can no longer afford to shy away from deeper relationships with our communities of users and management and providing intelligent advice to really delight our clients.

5. Imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial skills: This is about invention and change. The world is changing – irrevocably. And it’s neither fated to change for the better or the worse. It is up to us to create the changes and future we want to see. That requires us to learn the skills of innovation and change management. These can be learned and we can do this. The alternative is having a future happen to us that we neither want nor took a part in creating. And I am not a fatalist.

6. Lastly, we’ll need flexibility, a sense of humour, and the ability to deal with ambiguous signals and situations. I just don’t know if that can be taught. However, I do know it can be recruited by any employer and that’s often what they’re looking for in interviews beyond your C.V.

KD: Where do you think the expanding opportunities for LIS professionals will be in the next 5-10 years?
SA: It has already started. Doubtless there are those who look at shrinking opportunities in traditional libraries or engage in the self destructive debate about whether or not there will be a generational shift due to retirement, but there will be new position openings.

We are in a transformational time and to expect new ‘slots’ to open is to misunderstand the nature of transformation. Jobs are not transitioning from one generation to another. Society is changing and our sector is reinventing itself and new positions will be redesigned and re-conceptualized for the 21st century. LIS skills are good currency in this world – but only for those with the flexibility and insight to exploit the opportunities.

I think that there will be fewer traditional job but those will not go away entirely. There will be more jobs that use your LIS skills in non-traditional ways. Even in the traditional environments, the people who will succeed will be those who seek to lead and transform libraries to adapt. I often quote David Penniman, who said, “In order for libraries to remain what they are, they must change; if they don’t change they can’t remain what they are.”

So, in the next 5-10 years we will see growth in positions related to information literacy training, copyright compliance and management, licensing, technology development, content development, library programs (physical and virtual), management, e-collection development, e-learning development and support, social media, communications, knowledge management, intranet development, custom taxonomies and ontology development, and much more. As they say, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

KD: What do you read/monitor/listen to stay current – or ahead of the curve?
SA: Lordy, I read a lot. I don’t do so much paper-based reading but I do subscribe to all of the major library magazines (Information Outlook, Library Journal, American Libraries, Public Libraries, LAMA, LITA, Computers in Libraries, Information Today, Multimedia and Internet@Schools, Searcher, eContent, etc.) and enjoy reading them on the subway and during quiet times. But the majority of my reading is electronic. I access this content using three laptops (two personal – Sony VAIO and an ACER Netbook and the corporate Lenovo) as well as an iPad and two smartphones (an iPhone and a Blackberry). I also have two e-readers, a Sony Reader and a Kobo. Yep, I am geeky.

So this is what I read, broadly:
• I have various apps on my iPad – news sources mostly since I travel a lot and this keeps me connected to home. Also have the Kindle, Kobo and Nook e-reader apps on it. I have the Kindle app on my iPhone too.

• I have over 800 RSS feeds from blogs and I guess RSS is my main reading source for professional news.

• I subscribe to quite a few electronic newsletters that mostly arrive via e-mail.

• I used to listen to more podcasts but I now only listen to a few in my iTunes account.

• I have a huge network that sends me stuff to read all the time (I have five different e-mail accounts to manage these feeds).

• I follow a few thousand people on Twitter and find things to read there, too. It’s a growing source.

• I get to read many commissioned research studies that are internal to Cengage Learning (Gale) as well as market research reports that we acquire.

• I also go to dozens of conferences and get to see the latest speakers, panels and keynotes. Sometimes I am lucky enough to get a speaker I want to hear placed on conference programs that I am attending. I am blessed that many of these speakers are personal friends. I am in awe of the depth of talent in our field and I learn from my colleagues everywhere – including the lobby bar and coffee shop.

I enjoy reading about our profession and I am a speedy reader and scanner. I also find that blogging what I find interesting is a useful way to increase retention of the information.

KD: What else do you feel is important to consider regarding LIS careers?
SA: I think that a key consideration for everyone should be balance and quality of life. There are a few things that I wouldn’t have considered when I started out, including:
• When I was recovering from cancer treatment (I’m fine now, cured and cancer-free for 14 years), my library network of friends and colleagues around the world were unbelievably supportive. It’s not every profession that looks after its own like our profession does. I deeply appreciate that and will remember it forever.

• Travel. Lots of it if you choose it. At least that has been my experience. I have managed through library work to visit every Canadian province, every US state but one (WV, Call me!), and many countries around the world including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, UK, Sweden, Denmark, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Jamaica, and more. I love to travel and having the opportunity to travel for work has been a delight. I often get to add a few days for personal trips in addition to meeting librarians around the world. I have chosen to speak out for libraries and that has resulted in invitations to speak at conferences where my employers and/or the conferences have paid for some or all of the expenses.

• My wife and family have benefited from my career choice. Sometimes they can travel with me but I also have found that my time is more flexible in my career than it would have been in others. I have been able to plan to be around the kids’ significant events (dance competitions, gymnastics, music performance, plays, choirs, recitals, and team sports, etc.) that might not have been possible with a more strict routine and shift work. I think they’ve enjoyed meeting many of my colleagues and friends.

• I’m happy. I enjoy waking up and going to work every day. I respect myself and the work that we do. We make a difference in the world. At the end of the day, if you can say that, you’re ahead of the game.

If anyone has any questions I’ll try to continue this conversation through e-mail. My e-mail address is stephen.abram@gmail.com.

What is your current position or professional role?
I’m the taxonomy manager at First Wind, a wind energy company in Boston.

How long have you been doing this work?
I’ve been at First Wind only a couple of weeks, but I have been working in the field of taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri for about 14 years.

What career path (in terms of previous jobs, education, volunteer work, etc.) led you to this work?
My career path into this field started as a database indexer of periodical articles at a library vendor, what was then Information Access Company (which then became Gale Group, then Thomson Gale, then Thomson Learning, now Cengage Learning).

I sort of fell into indexing, because the job title was posted as “abstractor,” and I had a writing/editorial background. They had a 6-week in-house training program for new-hire indexer-abstractors to learn how to use the controlled vocabularies and follow the in-house editorial policies. I indexed (and abstracted some) trade journals for the Trade & Industry database, and then for a change of pace switched to index Predicasts Overview of Markets and Technology (PROMT) before moving into the vocabulary group.

I really liked the work in controlled vocabulary: researching and adding new terms, suggesting terms to indexers to index current events, writing indexing policies, mapping our terms to those of third party vendors, and then restructuring large sections of the vocabularies when it was decided to put them into a true thesaurus form. One of the leading consultant experts in the field, Jessica Milstead, came in to train us vocabulary editors on correct thesaurus standards.

When I got laid off, I then started my own freelance business of indexing and taxonomy work and eventually training services as well. I also dabbled in website design and information architecture, learning more about how taxonomies fit into web site navigation and design. Freelance taxonomy projects included various information services and directory-type websites and designing some internal (enterprise) taxonomies.

For the latter I did some subcontracting for a taxonomy consultancy, Earley & Associates. It was quite a different experience to work as a consultant, coming into a company knowing rather little and having to ask the right people all the right questions in order to provide a taxonomy plan.

Preferring a steady paycheck, I left freelancing to work as the taxonomist at an enterprise search engine software start-up company. I developed standard taxonomies from scratch to integrate with the auto-classification and search engine to classify documents. I learned about the field of search engines and auto-classification and how to create taxonomies for automatic indexing instead of human indexing. The startup didn’t make it, though, so after a year and half I was back to freelancing, consulting, and writing a book on taxonomy work.

Last month I started in my most recent position. As the taxonomy manager at First Wind, I am responsible for both the design of classification of content in the intranet (SharePoint-based), the metadata fields for documents, and a new taxonomy to support the auto-classification system the company is starting to use. This position requires skills in all areas of taxonomy work I have had previously: web site navigation, hierarchical taxonomies, faceted taxonomies based on metadata, and working with information technology people, and interviewing users in different departments as I did when I was a consultant.

What do you like most about your work?
Taxonomists do not have to specialize in one subject area, and I’ve been fortunate to work with terms and content in all kinds of subject areas, learning about different things. I also appreciate that with this one career I’ve been able to work in different industries and with different kinds of professionals. Taxonomy work, especially for enterprise taxonomies, is also very much an analytical problem-solving type of work which makes it quite intellectually stimulating and challenging.

What least?
There are challenges in communication and understandings in this field. There are different perspectives and opinions on what a taxonomy is and what it should do, and how it should be designed. Sometimes people with less experience think they know better, because they know the customers or the technology better. Sometimes, especially in consulting with a new client, it can be difficult to determine what exactly the task at hand is and what the scope should be. It’s difficult to estimate how long it will take to build a taxonomy.

What do you see as the various career paths LIS professionals could follow with this type of skill set?
The career opportunities for taxonomies are really quite varied. There are the library vendors, which index vast numbers of periodical and reference content with taxonomies, which includes both the traditional, large vendors and newer niche specialty vendors. There are search engines and other software companies that may make use of taxonomies. There is consulting, whether on your own or as a subcontractor or employee of a consulting firm. Finally, increasingly, medium to large companies, nonprofits, and government agencies realize that they need a taxonomist on staff to design, create, and maintain internal custom taxonomies to manage internal content.

Career paths may be from a general corporate librarian, a subject matter expert, an indexer or cataloger, a web information architect, a database designer. It’s really quite varied.

What personal characteristics do you feel are important for someone doing this work?
I mention some of these in my book, The Accidental Taxonomist:
•Analytical skills
•Organization/categorization skills
•Language skills (dealing with words, concepts, and their meanings)
•Attention to detail
•Attention to user needs (as your goal is always to help users find information)
•Ability to work independently (often you will be the sole taxonomist)
•Ability to work with diverse people
•Communication skills (often to explain what taxonomies are and/or how they are to be used)

What type of education would best prepare someone for this type of work?
MLIS program courses in taxonomies, thesauri or controlled vocabularies are most applicable, although not all degree programs even have them. Other relevant courses would be in knowledge organization, classification, subject analysis, or organization of information.

Continuing education workshops, such as the one I teach (“Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies” through Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science), are another good option.

There are also conference full-day and half-day workshops on taxonomies offered at ALA, SLA, ASIS&T, the American Society for Indexing, and the IA Summit, in addition to commercial conferences, such as Taxonomy Boot Camp.

What advice do you have for someone contemplating a career doing the type of work you do?
Jobs that are strictly taxonomists are still relatively rare, but jobs that include taxonomy work are numerous. If you already have a job, see if you can start a taxonomy project as part of that job. You’ll gain invaluable experience just doing it. You may be able to design your own taxonomy job, or keep your eyes open for taxonomy job openings.

Join the Taxonomy Jobs list to see occasional job postings, and join the Taxonomy Community of Practice discussion group to learn more about the field. And read my book! It’s The Accidental Taxonomist (Information Today, 2010).

Anything that, looking back, you wish you’d learned in grad school that you didn’t?
Well, I didn’t study the right field in grad school, so I took an extra couple of years to get on track with my career, but that was 20 years ago, and after many years of experience, what I studied then doesn’t matter as much as the practical experience I gained.

Technology has also changed a lot in the meantime, and technology has a big impact on taxonomies. I do think that a course or training in metadata management would be very useful.

Where can we follow your career?
You can check out the website for The Accidental Tourist, which is a sub-site of my Heather Hedden website. Although I’m no longer freelancing, I maintain that site with lists of articles I have written and presentations I’ve given or plan to give.

I don’t have my own blog, but have contributed to The Taxonomy Blog, and to another blog here.

Lastly, you can check out my LinkedIn profile.

The goal of the group is to provide a forum for asking your career questions, sharing your career and professional expertise, finding out more about career paths that may be of interest to you, and finding ways to connect with people who may be able to help with your career goals.

How To Join the Group
If you’re already a LinkedIn member, just go to the LIS Career Options group page (it’s a subgroup of the ALA groups page; you don’t have to be an ALA member to join, but you will have to join the ALA LinkedIn Group) and sign up – no approval process necessary. Then jump in and start asking or answering questions, start a new discussion thread, recommend a great resource, or contribute in any way you’d like. (And yep, lurkers are welcome, too!)

If you’re not already a LinkedIn member, then clearly we need to have a chat about professional branding and social media tools. Consider this the lowest-maintenance, easiest-to-get-a-handle-on approach to at least getting started building your professional brand. Join LinkedIn, join the LIS Career Options group, and we’ll all be happy to connect with you. It’s a start!

Develop Your LIS Career With These Discussions
What will we be covering? So far ongoing discussions are focusing on how to market LIS skills, putting a dollar figure on what various LIS skills are worth, who we want to interview to learn more about various career paths, embedded librarianship, negotiating independent contracts, deploying LIS skills in non-LIS settings, considering additional jobs within the library community, job hunting tips, best practices in online teaching, and working for an LIS vendor.

My goal with this subgroup is to provide a “safe haven” for people to ask any career question that may come to mind, and then have others be able to benefit from the answers as well. Since “what are the LIS career options” is the question I get asked most often when I present, write, teach, or give workshops, it seemed like this might be a great way for all of us to benefit from “crowd-sourced” career coaching.

Please join us and offer your expertise or ask your questions – we’ll all benefit from your participation!