Scientific Information Strategies: “Disintermediation” or a New Way of Intermediation?

Summary

The library and scientific information department in pharmaceutical firms play an important role in relation to basic knowledge. New technologies and new facilities call into question the role of librarians and information professionals from their present role as intermediates to a situation in which there will be no need for intermediation (i.e., “disintermediation”). “Disintermediation” in information management looks like the future. Librarians and information professionals need not feel threatened by this new scenario, but they do need to rethink certain strategies, acquire new skills and reformulate their own identity. They must focus on understanding the customers’s expressed and latent needs and offer new solutions. They must shift from the traditional role of capturing, sorting, organizing and disseminating literature to analysis of resources and educational initiatives. Training users in new technologies, helping them identify internal and external information resources, nurturing users information searching skills and boosting the effective use of literature (e.g. building personal digital reprint files) are only some of the new challenges. In the “Internet information era”, librarians and information professionals have to acquire other management skills such as resources analysis, continuing information, communication, knowledge management and outsourcing. Our cooperation with Sanofi Research Cardiovascular Department was discussed as one example.