Hey, you got business in my engineering!: Collaborating to support entrepreneurship research

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a mutually beneficial collaboration between an engineering librarian and a business librarian and provides suggestions for engineering librarians looking to form cross-disciplinary partnerships. While engineering and business students have different information needs, topics such as patents, manufacturing standards, and industry research are relevant to both areas. Collaboration between the librarians serving these programs is important to best support users. Yet at large universities, these librarians might be working on different teams and even in different buildings. Such was the case at one university, where the engineering librarian and the business librarian, and their respective collections, were for many years based in libraries on opposite sides of campus. In 2016, a newly hired business librarian was placed in an office in the campus STEM library and the engineering librarian was assigned as her peer mentor. A shared workspace and regular one-on-one meetings between the two librarians facilitated greater collaboration in reference, instruction, and collection development. Both librarians learned more about specialized resources with which they had been less familiar. For instance, the engineering librarian gained new expertise in market research and shared knowledge about patent searching with the business librarian. Their closer working relationship led to a partnership in support of entrepreneurship on campus. They developed and presented a faculty workshop on entrepreneurship research and are currently collaborating on a series of instructional videos on the subject.