A new article about the role of law librarians [via explodedlibrary.info] reminds me strongly of observations I made about news librarians in the process of writing my MA thesis.

In 1995 Baker & McKenzie went so far as to fire all 10 members of its main library staff in Chicago, asserting that the move would save money and thrust its lawyers into the digital era. […]
The Baker move was “a wake-up call for the profession,” says Nina Platt, a member of the association’s executive board and director of information resources at Minneapolis’s Faegre & Benson. “Law firms who have tried doing without [librarians] have found they’re worse off. The more information they get their hands on, the harder it is to manage.”

Similar trends occured in news librarianship - as more organisations subscribed to databases and made them directly available to journalists on their desktops, news library budgets began to decline and librarians made way for Factiva. As a result, news librarians worked hard to redefine their roles in the organisation, with some taking on roles like doing more advanced research for journalists, or even writing some articles, as well as providing instruction to journalists due to the emergence of Computer Assisted Reporting. These trends towards in-depth research and training are also noted in the law librarian article. While researching my thesis, most of the articles about instruction in special libraries came from the law library literature (and mostly from Blake Dawson Waldron).