by Jay Shuck, West Customer and Product Documentation

Today's librarians increasingly view themselves as "information facilitators and partners in the information retrieval process."* As they say about the library, it's "all about connections."†

For West Librarian Relations Manager Elaine Lee, it's all about connections, too. Before coming to West, Lee was a longtime librarian in New York City, with law librarian experience at White & Case LLP and Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP. She knows the value of building and maintaining relationships—within the library, within the firm, and within the community of information professionals.

Now Lee acts as a liaison between Thomson West and law librarians in the New York City area, sharing the territory with West colleagues Sue Camargo-Pohl and Renee Cullmann. In that capacity, Lee consults with law librarians and delivers presentations and training sessions. More important, she listens.

"I like working with our product specialists when the librarians give me ideas," she says. In particular, Lee relays suggestions to West product developers so that librarian concerns are incorporated into the evolution of West products-including print and online resources. "A librarian might say 'no one's listened to me before, but I've always wanted West materials numbers printed in a bar-code format.' And I say: Let me send this idea over to Eagan. Let's connect the two sides."

Lee is especially interested in knowledge management and the harnessing of new technology to the needs of the firm. "There's all this information that West can deliver by integrating things into portals, putting Westlaw Watch® clips on firm intranets, and so forth. It's really under the umbrella of knowledge management. I think that's where the future of this profession is. But we're not there yet." During her six-plus years at Dewey, Lee collaborated with the IT department in the course of managing the library intranet, wiki, portals, and other electronic resources.

At Dewey, Lee also had responsibility for creating an integrated marketing strategy for the firm library, which required her to work closely with the firm's business development marketers. "It's not a traditional working relationship. These were two departments that reported to two different people. You have to sell people on the benefits of working together. As time went on, they realized the value we were providing."

She believes an international focus is vital for law librarianship and the information industry. "I think that the field is getting more international in scope," says Lee, who earned her M.L.I.S. at the University of Western Ontario. "In order to survive, we need to be more international and global."

But for now, her focus is closer to home. "A client of mine once asked how to know if I'm doing a good job. My boss joked, 'It's very easy. If you hug her during a conference, then we know she's doing a good job because this job is all about building relationships.' That's a very difficult measurement! But I do feel that if librarians tell me that some of their concerns should just be between us, then I'm doing a good job because that means I'm listening."

* Randy Diamond, Professionalism in Librarianship: Shifting the Focus from Malpractice to Good Practice, 49 LIBR. TRENDS 395 (2001).

† Gladys S. Maharam, "Taming the Complexity of Libraries: Using Information Architecture at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh," address to the Metropolitan Libraries Section of IFLA Conference (2004).