I ve been doing it for years. All we intermediary searchers insist customers commit to paying without requiring us to commit to finding. We promise to look, but they have to pay whether we find what they want or not. The stakes for making mistakes have just gotten a lot higher. Let s just approach our work a little differently.
Information professionals take pride in their status as generalists.
Anything you can ask, we can answer, we proudly boast. Nor should we give that up at least, not completely. We do possess talents and techniques that can forage far and wide into all sorts of fields. Information itself does have underlying structures, independent of topic. Like geologists scanning satellite photos to find prospective oil fields, our professional training and experience can let us view the surfaces beneath the surface to find the hidden substance our clients need.