MANY WOULD-BE LIBRARIANS, as they make their way through library school, are not necessarily thinking about employment opportunities offered by library vendors. And yet a good number of people bearing MLS degrees and with library experience end up working for companies like EBSCO Publishing, ProQuest, Innovative Interfaces (III), and others. These librarians feel that more aspirants in the library field need to take advantage of this career path.

Eve-Marie Miller, director of collection development for EBSCO Publishing, came to the company three years ago as part of the NetLibrary transition. Miller teaches a class on ebooks in libraries at Simmons College in Boston; she formerly was an academic librarian at the University of Washington.

EBSCO was particularly interested in having Miller help with the integration of products the company acquired when it purchased the H.W. Wilson Co. in 2011. Miller has a team of four librarians who have been charged with continuing and enhancing the comprehensive collection development guides called Core Collections that Wilson started in 1918.

“EBSCO asked me specifically: you’re a librarian, you know collection development, we know this is a product line that’s very well esteemed but needs some updating,” Miller says. “So they asked me to come and do that.”

Miller says that her students at Simmons are often surprised to find out how many librarians work just at EBSCO Publishing (about 75), which is a division of EBSCO Information Services.

“I know there are librarians here from several different departments who are called upon, and some even feel personally duty-bound to speak up and help concretely represent what vendors can do to serve the library community better,” Miller says. “I like to call it internal advocacy from a librarian’s point-of-view.”

According to LJ’s Placements and Salaries Survey(LJ 10/15/12, p. 18–25), there were only 18 vendor placements in 2012, a number dwarfed by the 430 public library placements and the 471 academic library placements, but a number that holds up against the 49 placements in archives or the 34 in government libraries.

Salary-wise, the vendor jobs averaged $41,500 compared to $43,544 at academic libraries and $37,399 at public libraries.

Amanda Schukle started at III in October 2012 after working at San Diego County Library and then San Mateo County Library, CA, for the previous 12 years.

Schukle had been an III customer since 2004, and she had spent much of her career managing collection development departments and figuring out ways to use data to make decisions.

“I was excited to hear that Innovative was developing Decision Center, a new collection management application,” Schukle says.

In 2012, Schukle met with III’s Decision Center development team several times in order to provide feedback.

“After our last meeting over the summer, they called to say, ‘You’re already telling us what to do, so why don’t you come work here and tell us what to do,’ and invited me to apply as product manager for Decision Center,” Schukle says.

“I have always worked toward using data to create patron-driven collections and to make collection management processes as efficient as possible, so it seemed like a natural fit for me to do that work on a larger scale,” she says.

Schukle says the best way for librarians to create new career opportunities is to talk to vendor contacts. And even though software has its own culture that is different from library culture, Schukle says she still feels she is practicing librarianship.

“Yes, absolutely. What I’m doing at Innovative can be summed up like this: I’m building this awesome thing that will help my friends do their jobs and serve their communities,” Schukle says. “It’s a natural continuation of the work I have been doing for years.”

Aron Wolf, a librarian who works as a data program analyst for Serials Solutions, a unit of ProQuest employing 137 librarians, says that straight out of library school working for a vendor is not really on the radar of the average student. Having a definite career trajectory in mind, Wolf says, could limit the scope of experiences students seek out.

“I looked at it myself primarily because I was interested in working in metadata, and the trend in the library sphere is definitely moving toward outsourcing metadata production from libraries to vendors,” Wolf says.

Wolf’s colleague, Ben Johnson, a lead metadata librarian, says a lot of librarians may discount or stigmatize working for a vendor because it may smack of salesmanship and not seem like “real” librarianship “simply because you don’t work in a building that says ‘LIBRARY’ on the side.”

“However, as a metadata guy, I work with bibliographic metadata that powers our products for thousands of libraries, that countless library patrons use for learning and research—and maybe even a little fun,” Johnson says. “I feel like I have a lot more capacity for furthering library missions through improving library data across many libraries than I would if I were just working at one.”

Everyone says there is a growing awareness and interest among library students in vendor work, which all clearly feel is rewarding.