Blow up the corporate library

摘要

This article seeks to examine why the many corporate libraries play such a marginal role in today's corporation. This is especially vexing since we are constantly told how we are living in the ‘information age’ and librarians rightly perceive themselves as information professionals. We feel that librarians often operate under the wrong conceptual model of what an information service should be in the 1990s. This outmoded concept, we call the ‘warehouse’ model. Alternatives are needed which are better suited to today's corporate needs and constraints. The two alternatives are the ‘expertise centre’ and the ‘network’. These concepts are all fully developed in the text, as are the reasons (with accompanying research findings) for this situation.