But the kudzulike spread of information--information that's readily accessible yet often inaccurate, confusing, and more than slightly irrelevant --has actually increased the need for librarians. "Every manager with a budget is a target of innumerable vendors spreading an appealing (if deceiving) gospel: that every man and woman is a knowledge worker, and that all one needs to access the knowledge of the world is a computer and modem," wrote James Matarazzo, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, in a 1995 study titled "The Value of Corporate Libraries." "No profession knows as well as the librarian's the shallowness of this position: it leaves the whole issue of information expertise and quality out of the equation."
Some smart organizations are beginning to draw the distinction between accessibility and value, handing control over much of their external information flow to librarians who act as filters, consultants, analysts, early-warning systems, and royal data tasters. Not surprisingly, most of these influential librarians are found in large companies. At software publisher Adobe Systems, based in San Jose, Calif., librarian Linda Veenker and her four-person staff work out on the floor, where they can be closer to the employees they serve. "The library is one of those rare functions at Adobe that everyone has the same positive feeling about," says Bruce Chizen, Adobe's executive vice-president for worldwide products and marketing.
Adobe is a $912-million business, but companies with shallower pockets sometimes turn to the talented amateurs who are already in their ranks. Matarazzo calls those people "shadow librarians." At the Sawtooth Group, a $150-million advertising, branding, and public-relations firm in Woodbridge, N.J., the shadow is Tom Magnus, a partner and vice-president who is the director of account planning. When employees have a question--How many men make decisions in supermarkets? How are consumers' tastes in spices changing?--they bring it to Magnus, who scans the Web, browses in bookstores and libraries, and even rings up authors in pursuit of answers. "I'm the only person in my function who knows all the clients and the agency departments and the company's strategic direction," he says. "So when I do my search, I have all that floating in my head."
Indeed, small-company librarians may provide even more value than their large-company counterparts. After all, they know most people's needs because they know most people. At Highsmith, because contact between the library staff and employees is frequent, the librarians--Guedea CarreÑo has a staff of two--don't waste time researching, say, Internet marketing for a technology staffer who they know gives a hoot only about electronic transactions. It's far more effective than the arrangement at Guedea CarreÑo's previous employer, a large law firm where "a secretary would relay a request from an associate who got the request from the partner working on the case," says Guedea CarreÑo. "By the time I got it, it was impossible to know how much was lost in translation. It was like that old game of telephone, where 'The truth is elusive' eventually became 'The tooth ate Lucy."
But on Highsmith's organizational chart, which is prominently displayed outside the lunchroom, the library sits on the same line as marketing, human resources, accounting and finance, business-systems development, and--perhaps most sweetly--information systems. Each year the company budgets $185,000 for the library, a figure that covers Guedea CarreÑo's compensation as well as that of her staff, printed and electronic information sources, and library-support software, in addition to things like copyright-license agreements and travel expenses incurred when staff members attend conferences and seminars. The CEO even designed corporate headquarters so that the library sits dead center. It is the Rome all roads lead to.
Presiding at that crossroads is Guedea CarreÑo. The librarian sits in a small, bright office, surrounded by stacks of things: things she's reading, things she's putting aside for people, things that make her think. Immediately outside her office is the library itself, which includes more than 2,500 books, thousands of magazines (the library receives more than 700 subscriptions), and a PC for accessing CD-ROMs and certain databases. Beyond that is the rest of the company, and beyond that, the rest of the world.
Guedea CarreÑo and her crew are responsible for all of it.
Based in Fort Atkinson, Wis., Highsmith is a hive of cogitation surrounded by rural serenity: cornfields, tobacco-drying sheds, cornfields, a stand of maples just beginning to blush, cornfields. A walking trail entwines the low-slung brick building, and by 9 a.m. workers--alone and in pairs--have begun their perambulations, striding across the wooden bridge, past the gazebo, and out into a field where wildflowers seeded by the company grow. The trail is just one element of a much-lauded wellness program that rewards the pursuit of health with reduced insurance premiums.
Besides enjoying flat stomachs, Highsmith employees partake in a flat organization in which self-directed teams, a continuous-learning program, flextime, and other popular management theories are made manifest. Such progessiveness seems a tad incongruous, given the company's geographic isolation and humble origins: Highsmith began life as, among other things, a seller of agricultural implements and publisher of a farm magazine. Early on, the company operated from a family farm. "We had an English receptionist, which was the vogue after World War II, and when a customer would call from New York she would go outside and turn on this powerful light above the building," recalls Hugh Highsmith, who is the company's founder and who--at 84--is still the acting chairman. "We'd see it from the fields and come in to take the call."
