SLA Crosses Bridge To The 21st Century

Citation

Bleakley, K. (1999), "SLA Crosses Bridge To The 21st Century", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916eac.002

SLA Crosses Bridge To The 21st Century

Overview

On 24-26 January, Special Libraries Association (SLA) held its Winter Meeting and Education Conference, "Crossing the Bridge to the 21st Century", in San Francisco. The education conference, which focuses on technology and was attended by over 200 information professionals, consisted of many workshops devoted to specific technological issues. The workshops covered topics such as HTML, intranets, copyright, Web site development and the Internet in general. Courses offered included advanced html, "Building the Corporate Intranet Knowledge Center", "Copyright in the Electronic Age", "Knowledge Management", and "Using the Internet to Train Users and Staff". The Management Competencies Insitute (formerly Middle Management Institute) offered the course "Technology and Applications". Also presented were two Strategic Technology Alliance Workshops which are vendor presentations of new technologies. This year they were given by Lexis Nexis and Ovid Technologies, Inc. Participants had to pick and choose between sessions but there was certainly something for everyone.

The keynote speech kicked off the conference. Larry Bowden, Director of Content Management for IBM Corporation, gave an insightful look at how content will be managed in the 21st century. His speech, entitled "Tools of the Visionary Librarian," made some thought-provoking points. Bowden maintained that approximately 1 percent of the world's data is currently in digital format or in a format that can be digitized. Paper content is still growing at 3 percent per year, and has done so for the last five years. Digital information, on the other hand, is growing at 20 percent per year. Bowden estimated that only 20 to 30 percent of the world's data will ever be digitized. Content management is definitely an issue that will need careful consideration. The World Wide Web contains about 300 million Web pages; IBM has some clients who have anywhere from three to 300 "Web-worths" of information to manage.

In the future information managers will need tools that can do text mining to make sense, and keep track, of the mounds of data available. Issues that will affect the design of these tools include: how to visualize and navigate the data; how to mine and map the data; how to keep the data in context; and how to search, retrieve, and capture the data. One specific tool Bowden mentioned was"Clever,"an IBM product that monitors how people gather information and tries to develop an algorithm for how people who are authorities in a given area find the information they need, so that this algorithm can be used by others to find data. Bowden gave everyone a lot to think about regarding the future developments in the area of content management, and a few clues as to where to start looking for solutions.

"Re-Creating Your Services with New Technologies"

This workshop looked at ways to take existing services provided by the library and transform them using technology. The instructors, Jane Dysart and Rebecca Jones, of Dysart & Jones Associates, pointed out that it is important to remember that technology is a tool available to us, not a trend, nor a service in and of itself. Technology has provided us with opportunities to change and improve the services we provide to our clientele, whether by providing service faster or perhaps offering a new service altogether. However, 80 percent of effective communication comes from personal interaction due to visual cues and facial expressions so it is important that the information professional not try to replace personal service with impersonal electronic communication simply to use technology.

In order to best recreate our services using technology, we must focus on the customer, sometimes by targeting specific groups we will serve and deciding to no longer serve other groups. Services we can provide to our clients include computer training on information products or the Internet; providing guidelines to best Web sites, and most useful tools; providing customized business intelligence research; and partnering with other groups within the firm to lend our expertise on projects concerning company archives, records management, and intranet development. Recreating our services will allow us to review the purposes of what we are doing, refocus the directions we are taking, revamp our services, and, hopefully, reap the rewards of doing so. Only by focusing on what our organizations are doing and what our role within the organization is can we hope to recreate our services.

The second part of the workshop focused on some of the tools we might end up using to provide these revamped services. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing tools such as CU-See Me and Ivisit allow for better interaction between groups with an organization and can improve the overall productivity of projects. Community building tools such as The Palace, Firely Network, and Alexa Group allow us to build virtual training rooms or information desks for our organizations. Some new tools lend themselves to our core activities such as Cartia, Inference, and Access Innovations for capturing, storing, and classifying information.

The overall theme of the workshop was that we must stay aware and current of developments in technology if we are going to recreate our services to best serve our clients in the 21st century.

"Creating Your Own Home Page Using HTML"

This three-hour hands-on workshop delivered exactly what it promised. Henry "Pete" Stair, President, Mycroft Information LLC, New Canaan, Connecticut stair@mycroft.com presented the course covering the main aspects of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The class of participants included a range of experience.

Following an introduction to HTML, past and future, the presentation allowed participants to work hands-on at their individual levels of competence. Those students with previous experience were pleased with the information on adding sound and simplifying their work. Those students with limited or no previous experience created their own home pages. The instructor made excellent use of the technology with diskette handouts and a Web site URL for future reference. A printed handout and excellent references also were distributed.

More than half the class continued with the advanced workshop on Monday. I recommend that anyone with interest in the creation or maintenance of a Web site take these workshops.(Contributed by Mary E. Marshall, Director, K.G. Saur Research Collections North America).

"Advanced HTML"

If you know little about how Web pages are created, and need to learn more so that you can create your own or converse with someone who will create one for you, this class was for you. Pete Stair (introduced above) briefly went over HTML basics and provided suggestions for obtaining additional information. The first new topic introduced was how to add images to Web pages. Attendees had the opportunity to write the HTML text that told the browser where to find the image files to display on the Web page. Stair also discussed the differences between GIF and jpeg images; for instance, jpeg images require less storage space, but cannot be animated. The class then learned about creating and using tables and frames as methods of organizing the contents of Web pages. Tables allow one to create columns and rows of information that are easier to read than just a long list, and frames can be used to keep navigation buttons always visible. The popularity of frames waxes and wanes frequently, and recently many larger, popular sites have moved away from using frames. The class also learned to create and use forms to request input from users of the Web pages, and how cascading style sheets can be used to control how Web pages display. Less time was spent and a more cursory introduction was provided for using image maps, Java Script, and Java; but even here attendees were given a basic understanding of their usefulness.(Contributed by Deanna Johnson, Librarian, Monsanto Information Resources and Services).

"Knowledge Management: Cases, Complexities, and Competencies"

In this workshop, the instructors, Jane Dysart and Rebecca Jones (introduced above), started out by giving a brief introduction to Knowledge Management (KM). They described Knowledge Management as a way of doing business; a way of leveraging internal and external know-how; and a process that relies on both technology and human interaction, with the human piece being the most critical. In the post-technology age that we have now entered, what the worker knows is at the heart of most organization functions. Global competitiveness requires that keeping employees, or at least what they know, in the organization is of utmost importance. Equally important, however, is determining how to capture, classify, and store that knowledge for future use.

Knowledge Management is the transformation of raw data into knowledge. Many organizations are now adept at using technology to bring mass amounts of data into their companies, and using technology again to store this data, and that which is created by their workforce. These data are usually raw facts having no meaning of their own. Key success factors for data are implementing standards and quality control to give context and meaning. Information is the tangible representation of data within a specific context; key success factors here are presenting and communicating the information. Knowledge is information within the contexts of the individual; the key success factor here is how well the information meshes with the individual's context. The transformation of data into knowledge consists of applying standards to the data, making tangible representations of the data to create information, and then learning, filtering, evaluating, and balancing information to create knowledge.

Knowledge Management is about changing behaviors with information ­ making decisions based on information and acting on those decisions. Thus the KM process should end in a behavior ­ doing, deciding, choosing, or applying something.

Some of the same technologies that were discussed in the Recreating session (see above) come into play with Knowledge Management. Tools that enable the capturing, storing, and communication of information provide the technology infrastructure for KM. Groupware products such as Lotus Notes and intranets help in this process ­ they allow both communication (e-mail) and information management tools (databases). KM is not about data, however, or external sources of information; it is more concerned with tacit knowledge ­ what people know ­ the linking and sharing of knowledge. As in the Recreating session, the technology is simply a tool to enable the process ­ not an end in itself.

Some of the competencies information professionals are going to need include business acumen, industry knowledge, technological know-how (even if you're not the techie), analytical skills, and comfort in data modeling and process mapping. The good news is many of us already have these skills and for those who don't there are workshops such as these.

"Best Business Resources on the Internet"

This hands-on workshop provided a thorough overview of some of the best Web sites for business information, and the instructor provided a diskette with an HTML bookmark file of all the sites. The instructor, Pamela Cibbarelli, of Cibbarelli's, began by explaining what kinds of sites the Web is best for (basic company information, current news, delayed stock quotes, and annual report or public documents) and what kinds of information to be cautious about (competitive intelligence, company financial, historical information). Some of the best sources to use for locating company Web pages include Companies Online www.companiesonline.com, Dow Jones Business Directory http://www.businessdirectory/dowjones.com, and search engines such as Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com Specific company databases include Hoovers http://www.hoovers.com/ and the Corporate Information Research Site http://www.corporateinformation.com. The other categories of Web sites included business directories, industry information, and federal/government databases.

Cibbarelli demonstrated each of the sites and encouraged attendees to go to the sites themselves and test out the information available. While the course content leaned heavily toward American information, the principles of the sites, and how to find them, would apply globally as well. A suggestion for this type of session in the future would be to expand the content to include international information.

Karen Bleakley is Manager, Knowledge Services, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Montréal. karen.bleakley@ca.pwcglobal.com