The Standards Challenge For Corporate Librarians
The Special Libraries Association (SLA) held its 92nd annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, on June 9-14, 2001. Among information providers and other research companies, Global Engineering Documents® and IHS were there to offer industry standards services to librarians.
The Special Libraries Association has a membership of more than 10,000 librarians who work for private industry, universities and for sectors of the government. SLA members join more than thirty divisions of librarians responsible for information on everything from BioMedical and Life Sciences to Engineering and Aerospace.
SLA's Engineering and Aerospace Division can count more than 700 librarians among its members. Librarians from Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, and members of ASTM and IEEE are part of this division. Finding strategies for managing engineering content is at the top of their agenda.
"Managing technical documents is a huge challenge for many librarians," said Kathleen Sullivan, Manager of the Technical Search Department for Global Engineering Documents®. "Standards and other engineering documents are always changing. And, what seems like a little change on paper can translate to big differences in the creation of a product. It's a real battle to keep your holdings up to date."
During the conference, librarians learned about subjects such as "Business Intelligence Toolkit for Science and Technical Librarians," "Building Bridges to Our Users," and "Standards Management."
Sullivan said, "The key to success with standards is the funnel approach. Standards come from everywhere. At IHS, we work with over 400 standards developing organizations to gather, update, and publish standards as they are released. Libraries receive these standards in a nice controlled stream from us. We are their funnel."
Research methods were hotly discussed at the SLA conference. One panel discussion focused on methods for gleaning competitive product and strategic information from traditional engineering documents. With markets tightening around the globe, the race for competitive advantages is on. Finding the right documents, even obscure standards documents, can make the difference between products that are accepted and products that fail.
"Our Search Department has received some pretty interesting assignments lately," said Sullivan. "Most are national standards from exotic places, unpublished documents and interesting historical documents. (I can't actually tell you what we found. All searches are confidential.) We specialize in finding hard-to-find standards and other technical documents. Our database has more than a million document listings and we have access to many more. We also provide Engineering Resource Summaries (ERS) for companies looking for a research springboard to compliance."
Sullivan and other library professionals are at the forefront of change. They know the power of knowledge sharing in organizations and they value the annual SLA conference as one of the best and easiest ways to find tools to stay in front of the competition.
SLA 2002 Annual Conference will be held June 8-12, 2002. For information, contact www.sla.org.
Contact: Kathleen Sullivan, Technical Search Department
IHS Engineering and Global Engineering Documents®
CALL: 1-800-624-3974 (ext. 7967) or 303-397-7967
SITE: store.ihs.com
More Information: IHS Resources for Librarians |