Imagine a crowded “collaboration area” at a future NASA Marshall Space Flight Center when a question comes up about a process or material. The aerospace engineer leading the brainstorming session pauses and turns to …

The team librarian.

With a few screen swipes or whispers to the center computer via headset microphone, the librarian summons all we know about the topic arranged by relevance.

It’s not too big a leap, and something like it was taking shape before managers for NASA, the Army and other organizations at Redstone Arsenal made the controversial decision to close the historic Redstone Scientific Information Center (RSIC).

The center with its hundreds of thousands of books and journals was the largest science and technology library in the Army and the only library shared by the Army and NASA. It has been called “a resource for technical data on a wide variety of topics ranging from rocket propulsion to space physics, from systems design to vehicle operations.” And closing it has complicated an already complex reshaping of information gathering and sharing in the rocket world.

“About the time the decision to close RSIC was made, the NASA headquarters logistics management division was given the go-ahead to start their re-engineering of the agency library. So, we’ve been working two sides of that,” Marshall’s Ed Kiessling said Thursday.

Kiessling is the acting deputy director of center operations, and he said the first priority was a plan to lessen the impact of the RSIC library closing on the Alabama rocket center. “A lot of folks got electronic subscription access to RSIC (that) continue through June 2020,” Kiessling said. “The other piece was access to the hard copy books and materials.”

NASA subject experts have been visiting RSIC and identifying books they want to keep at the center. As closure approached, they checked those books out and brought them to the Marshall side of the base to become part of the center’s own new technical library.

Beyond the books needed now are historic texts also housed in the library. “Our historian Brian Odom is working that issue separately,” Kiessling said.

NASA voted to close the library when the stakeholders made their final decision, and no money was put in the agency’s fiscal year 2020 budget for it. NASA’s plan for life after RSIC is, first, get the materials its people need stored safely and, second, create a new library led by a NASA librarian.

“I’m thinking by the end of the year, we will have the resources (NASA wants) under our control and will still have folks having access to them,” Kiessling said. There will not be a new library building, he said. Resources will be stored in existing space within various NASA mission offices that need them.

Looking toward the library of the future, Kiessling anticipates a “highly electronic facility” with online access to digitized books, files and research papers going back to the Apollo, Skylab and space shuttle eras. That’s where the embedded librarians begin to appear.

“We’ve reconfigured a couple of our facilities to have a large collaboration area,” Kiessling said. “Our plan is to try to co-locate our librarian staff so they can work directly with the people as they are collaborating and the need for information comes up.”

That phase will probably begin in 2021, he said.

“This is a very dynamic process that’s unfolding every day for us,” Kiessling said, “and we’re just doing our best to make sure we’re giving our employees and contractors the resources they need and deserve to do their job.”