The Corporate Librarian

As promised, the results of the survey I did, after a month of collecting results.

• 17 respondents, the majority of which came in after I shamelessly promoted the survey on BUSLIB-L. I checked with Dan Lester first.
• 7 respondents categorized their blog as internally-focused, 4 as externally-focused, 2 as both and 4 didn’t have corporate library blogs.
• The majority of respondents, 12, said their company didn’t have an official blogging policy. 3 respondents said their company did have an official blogging policy, 1 said it was under development, and one respondent didn’t know.
• 11 responses to why people had corporate library blogs, which I’ll list at the end of this piece.
• Responses were evenly split between those who tracked readers/subscribers to their blogs, with 6 apiece. One person only tracked hits, one person wasn’t tracking yet, and 3 respondents skipped the question.
• Of those who responded to the question asking estimated number of readers/subscribers, results varied widely: 1-10 (1 respondent), 11-20 (3 respondents), 21-30 (1 respondent), 31-40 (2 respondents), don’t know (2 respondents).
• Most blogs were active for less than one year (8 respondents), with 4 respondents saying their blogs were active for 1-3 years and 1 respondent having his/her blog active for 3-5 years.
• Respondents overwhelmingly came from North America (4 respondents from Canada, 9 from the United States), with others coming from Japan (1 respondent), the Seychelles (1 respondent) and the United Kingdom (1 respondent). 1 person skipped the question. I suspect the North American bias is a product of posting to BUSLIB.

Reasons cited for having a corporate library blog:

1. Under construction at the moment
2. I’m trying to help improve the bottom line (no kidding)by combining competitor intelligence, marketing stats,industry information with knowledge not found in usual sources…knowledge from service techs, salespeople, engineers, chemists, marketing.
3. To help a friend promote his Library Services
4. to disseminate info fast, raise the visibility of the library and encourage knowledge sharing
5. To keep users informed about competitive issues or new things arriving in the library
6. I have a RSS reader to which I put our table of contents of our journals
7. As a forum for sharing my observations and experiences with the library community
8. Another channel to get information out
9. Currently do not have the capability/support.
10. I have it as a quick and easy way to get news out to my users. The blog software I use allows employees to sign up for e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, or else they can simply browse the web page. It gives them a choice in how they’d rather receive information.
11. Started out as a place to put things i found and did not want to lose.

I didn’t submit responses to the survey, but if I did I would be based in the United States, active for less than a year, I’d classify this blog as externally-focused, our company’s still developing a blogging policy last I heard. And I started this blog to share experiences and best practices with other corporate librarians out there, who seemed fairly under-represented compared to academic and public librarians last time I went looking through library blogs.

So, comments on the results? Suggestions for another version of this survey? Worse comes to worst, I might run this annually, see how results change over time. I realize 17 data points isn’t much, but at least it can kick off a conversation.

I’m surprised so many people are interested in our budgeting process, but I suppose I shouldn’t be. After all, we never learned how to do budgeting in library school. With that said, here we go.

First, there’s a global research budget, for sources which are not country or industry-specific. The heads of the research group handle this, so I don’t really have a sense for how that process works, I’m afraid. Given that contracts are involved, we generally need several months lead time to get legal to review contracts, finance to cut the checks, etc.

Then there are the budgets specific to the various industry research groups. Practice varies widely here, but basically whoever handles the budget for a specific group goes to the person controlling the purse strings and asks for $X. X usually includes a certain amount of extra funds for purchases that might come up during the year - market research reports and the like. In the group I belong to, I believe the budget’s around $300,000. The figure for X is based on input from the researchers as to what sources they need to have and what sources they’d like to have. If possible, we go for online sources, but I know our industry group has 3 CD-ROM sources, in addition to various industry periodicals and print publications. Sources are generally for researchers only, not everyone in the firm, and for some sources we’ve only gotten a fixed number of passwords (another way of reducing costs). In some industry research groups, part of the budgeting process is showing how valuable a given source has been (tracking usage, feedback from projects the source has been used with, etc.). At least one industry group gets funds for a particular source with the promise that it will develop a number of profiles for the practice using that source. Again, given that contracts are involved, we generally need several months lead time to get legal to review contracts, finance to cut the checks, etc.. We’re fortunate to have people who specialize in negotiating for sources, which frees up management’s time considerably.

One practice which I believe is unique to our industry group within the larger research group is that we negotiate with vendors to bill on a quarterly basis. With other groups it’s often a race to spend the money before potential cutbacks.

Further questions or comments? I’ll be visiting my parents, sister, niece and nephew this week so I likely won’t be posting, but I’ll try and check e-mail to see what questions you might have.

I was going to post about our budgeting process, but thought that might not be of interest to the readers of this blog. So I leave it up to you - what would you like to see discussed next on The Corporate Librarian?