The Corporate Librarian

When looking for a topic to post on, it never hurts to check out other blogs. And thus I discovered the brouhaha resulting from Steven Cohen’s post on his new job.

We work with outside research providers on occasion, but the relationship is very carefully managed and the value that our research group provides as opposed to external service providers is always communicated. As I’ve noted, we’re constantly working to market ourselves.
Nevertheless, there is always pressure to deliver services more cheaply, so we have been building up staff in lower-cost locations. Even here though, American and European researchers have advanced presentation skills, deep client relationships and a wealth of industry expertise, so it’s more of a partnership then a case of “Oh my God, those [insert nationality] are taking away chargeable* work from me!” Although I won’t deny that some of us had that very fear initially.

Do any of you have experience with outsourcing of library services, and what has the impact been (I refuse to use “impact” as a verb)?

* We have recoverability targets for our time, with the exact percentage varying based on level. Not meeting recoverability targets is grounds for a downgrade come performance review time.

Bonus link: Wikipedia’s poorly-cited article on Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), which I should edit one of these days. The “$17 billion by 2010″ comes from Evalueserve’s 2004 study “The Next Big Opportunity – Moving up the Value Chain – From BPO to KPO” (the “recent study” mentioned in the article). That report which “predicts that India will capture more than 70 percent of the KPO sector by 2010″? Evalueserve again, though I haven’t found the primary source yet.

I’ve taken the liberty of creating a short poll using SurveyMonkey.com, to get a better understanding of the corporate library blogs out there. It’s only eight questions, and most of them are multiple choice. Feel free to pass the link to the poll on to other corporate librarians of your acquaintance.

As I note in the introduction, I’m no survey expert, so feel free to suggest re-wording of questions or additional questions. I’ll report back on results of the poll after one month, but I’ll leave it open.

You can take the survey here

On a conference call at work today we discussed the progress of our marketing and branding efforts. With a potential clientele of over 100,000 people across six continents and consulting being a high-turnover business, you can imagine the challenges inherent in building awareness of us and the services we offer. Some of the steps we're taking:

• Developing templates for deliverables (consultant-speak for end-product, like presentations or reports) in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, with our group's name and logo prominently displayed
• Seeking opportunities to promote our past work in existing communications
• Segmenting our customers and targeting key segments (i.e. influencers within the firm)

Do any of you face similar issues in building customer awareness? And what tips and techniques have you found helpful?

Corporate Librarian’s only been around for a few days, and it’s already been picked up by Steven M. Cohen (of LibraryStuff fame, as part of LISfeeds) and some kindly soul who’s set up a LiveJournal feed. I’ll add info for the latter once I’ve found it - WordPress just tells me someone’s reading the feed through LiveJournal.

Since the theme I’m using doesn’t display the RSS feed, here it is:

http://buslib.wordpress.com/feed/

And if you want to e-mail me, send an e-mail to box_nine(at)ix.netcom.com.

While doing my regular search for new items on corporate libraries, I ran across Primary Research Group Inc.’s Corporate Library Benchmarks 2004-05 Edition. You can get the table of contents as a .txt file here. Much of the contents of the report, as summarized in this press release, are no surprise: less space for libraries, not much growth in budgets, increased spending on electronic information.

But this jumped out at me:

Attitude of Library Management Towards Knowledge Management

For about half of the libraries in the sample, knowledge management software and practices had little impact on their day to day work life, while for a third, the impact was quite important.

What’s wrong with this picture? If corporate librarians aren’t involved in the aggregation and dissemination of information, doesn’t that hurt our position in companies? I’m flabbergasted, honestly. I looked at the SLA’s Competencies for Special Librarians document, just to make sure I wasn’t misremembering.

Participates in knowledge management activities that create, capture, exchange, use and communicate the organization’s “intellectual capital”

That’s from a SLA publication that’s now 10 years old:

Remeikis, Lois A. “Knowledge Management — Roles for Information Professionals.” Business and Finance Division Bulletin, SLA, 101, Winter 1996, 41-43.

Building on one of the topics of my inaugural post, via the SLA Government Division's website, a pointer to the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Service's compilation of Advisory Panel white papers on the "Future of Librarians in the Workforce," which includes business libraries.

I found it interesting that business librarians are increasingly expected to work in "virtual libraries":

In the next ten years it is likely that the majority of information needed by a business library’s customers will be digital. Business libraries will become virtual libraries. They will require less physical space; perhaps they will occupy no physical space. Business librarians may work in a small office or workspace or from home. This virtualization will bring about more outreach; we will go to our customers rather than have our customers come to us.

At my organization, we are eligible for a work-at-home program, which many of my colleagues and I took up with great eagerness. Permission was required from our supervisors, and a one-time reimbursement was made available for necessary office equipment. It does take some discipline to work effectively from home, but as a corporate researcher most of the resources I use are either online or on my laptop, and most of the people I support are not located in my "official" office. I don't travel much (budgetary restrictions), so I try to stay in contact with the people I support via e-mail, IM and phone. I come into the office 1-2 days a week for face-time with co-workers - we've adopted a hoteling system. However, there has been something of a backlash against the widespread use of telecommuting, with official "in-office days" being established twice a month.

Does your organization support telecommuting? If so, how do you remain visible to your clients? Have you experimented with offering online training at all, or other "virtual" services?

A meme that's been sweeping the library blogosphere over the past several months has been "Library 2.0," coined by analogy with "Web 2.0."

Walt Crawford has a good survey of the various definitions offered for Library 2.0, from focus on technologies (blogs, IM, social software, wikis) to a model for service (user outreach, user participation, constant innovation being my favorite, but there are other models).

How do you see Library 2.0 applying to your corporate libraries? Are there modifications required when either librarians or patrons are geographically wide-spread, possibly never meeting face-to-face? How do you make the case for experimenting with blogs, social software and wikis? Do you set knowledge management priorities yourselves for yourselves, or partner with the larger organization?