Creating Your Corporate eLibrary

Creating Your Corporate eLibrary
By Andrea Simmons
A White Paper from Integration New Media
Integration New Media, Inc.1600 Rene-Levesque Blvd W, Suite 900 Montreal, QC H3H 1P9 CanadaTel.: +1 514 871 1333 Fax: +1 514 871 9251www.INM.comCreating Your Corporate eLibrary
Introduction
The role of the corporate librarian is changing. With the dependence that organizations have built on information, there is also a paradoxical shift in how employees find information. The role of the corporate librarian has moved from one of knowledge expert, to one of controlling budgets and negotiating the purchase and management of various information sources.
At the same time, organizations are becoming more and more global, employees are working remotely, and resources are moving toward electronic formats. The clear path for the corporate library is to become an online resource that smartly leverages the corporate information budget to provide the most credible information to the largest base of users. With this shift, a librarian must be more technology savvy and must simultaneously wear many hats, including those of: information provider, technology consultant, project manager, and evangelist.
Making the jump to an online corporate library for your organization can seem like a daunting task. However, with the proper planning and the right resources, you can make it a smooth transition for everyone in your organization. The key to a successful eLibrary project lies in the planning. By breaking down your project into smaller steps, with a milestone for each, you can make your project more accessible for everyone and keep it on track and on budget.
This paper walks you through the process for creating your corporate eLibrary, while discussing the definition and merits and providing an overview of the key elements to consider while creating your plan. It provides users with a framework for determining needs, choosing the right technology, and finally using this information to formulate a recommendation and turn it into a compelling business case.
What is a Corporate eLibrary?
A digital or electronic library, also called an eLibrary, refers to a portal, intranet, extranet or Internet site that replicates the resources of a physical library in an electronic format, while improving access and search capabilities. When we add the word "corporate" to this definition, we are then referring to an organizational or institutional electronic library.
Even though the definition of a corporate eLibrary is relatively fixed, it can differ greatly in terms of form and function.
Some examples of corporate eLibraries include:
. A customer or partner resource center for your products and/or services . A company-wide resource library (internal). A department specific library (i.e. sales and marketing resources) . A collection of industry or topic-specific reference materials
© Integration New Media, Inc. 2008 2Creating Your Corporate eLibrary
. A collection of digital assets that are leveraged throughout your organization (images, text, stock photos, logos, etc.)
An eLibrary essentially involves putting search functionality on top of a volume of content, and combining it with a smart user interface to deliver results.
The content of an eLibrary can contain:
. electronically acquired documents such as journals, magazines and eBooks. digitized content (originally in print format, but has been converted to digital format). digital content that's available on the web . links to free and open content that exists in web page format. electronically published original works
Why Create a Corporate eLibrary?
Organizations are moving more and more toward electronic libraries for a variety of different reasons. For some organizations, the choice to go digital is motivated by the need to support employee research across multiple locations with a single collection of documents. Other corporations are becoming increasingly global, with satellite offices across the globe. This factor, combined with the increase in home workers or telecommuters, means that employees are no longer working in a central location. For these organizations, the choice comes down to either duplicating resources and hosting on-site libraries in each of the regional offices, or in looking at a solution that can serve all of th... [download for more]