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.
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 the offices from one central location.
In addition to the challenges of the global organization, the recent increase in fuel costs have led many organizations to limit employee travel and to look for new ways to reduce courier and shipping fees. These two reductions are also triggering organizations to investigate new methods for sharing documents and content electronically.
Beyond physical access, the increased perceived value of information is also prompting organizations to make better use of shared knowledge and resources. The shift in management style in many organizations has created flatter chains of command, giving more employees the power and the responsibility for making decisions. A digital library allows an organization to index content so that all employees have searchable access to both internal and licensed content under a single search function. This improves knowledge of what resources an organization has access to, and maximizes the use of content that an organization has acquired.
An eLibrary offers users self-service access to credible, often hand-selected, reference materials from any location, at any time. Just like a physical library, the librarian can control who has access to materials and what they can do with them (access, read, copy, save, email).
