SLA - Los Angeles
Chemistry Corporate Roundtable
June 10, 2002

Moderated by: Dawn French, Millennium Chemicals
dawn.french@millenniumchem.com

Topics Discussed:
1. E-Publishing

• New Products & Reactions to them
• Pitfalls & Advantages

E-journals -time and staffing issues.

Manager spends lots of time handling licensing issues, so the time that you save not having to handle print is used dealing with e-access problems.

Cost-prohibitive. Pricing models are still not a good deal for corporate libraries.

There are notable changes in end-user expectations. Now, our users want everything online.

Many felt that e-journals/e-publishers who offer good usage statistics will help support/justify purchase. These statistics or reports should be very easy for us to retrieve and pull the information we need.

Other issues of concern/discussion:

• Equity of access
• Access vs. Ownership
• Archival issues
• Downtime issues
• Copyright issues
• Computer Literacy issues

2. Intranets

• Does library have input
• Easy to use/find info

Many of our corporate intranets have a decentralized model of responsibility farmed out to many departments rather than one. Therefore, our corporate intranets are not very useful and we, as librarians, are being sought out to discuss content and organization needs for the company. Now, we are entering "phase 2" of our intranets - the focus is organizing the data available. Many of the participants discussed also being involved in the creation and maintenance of a library intranet, or are involved in helping plan intranets or portals.

3. Promoting the Library to other departments

• Promoting library skills to others
• Designing systems for other departments

Some good ideas in use:

• Creation of a library board - similar to a "Friends of the Library" group. This group can be called on for support when needed, or to use a core group of users to test services.
• Communities of Practice groups or poster session events. Take the opportunity to get involved when companies coordinate daylong events geared to our researchers. One participant included a poster session on library services and many of the researchers "learned" about the library. Use this time to market to core users. It's also a learning opportunity for us to hear what new research is going on in our companies.
• New hire orientations are a great time to promote library services. Try to contact HR and be involved in the hiring process.
• "Roving" Librarians - a subject specialist goes to different departments every two days or so ("get" out of the library and with users) to concentrate on helping them with specific issues. When you're out among the researchers, you'll be surprised at the types of questions you receive, AND your users start to see you as a core team member. This is a problem with 1-person libraries - need to partner with other groups when you don't have a staff.
• Information fair - ask vendors to come in and help promote the libraries. Some discussed that this isn't so successful as users don't always come to events.

4. Promoting to Library users