Does your ILS (Integrated Library System) or library management support the broader mission of the company? Or is it used strictly to run a traditional library?
These are questions today’s information professional, knowledge manager, or library manager should ask themselves as they consider their ILS investment and how it is used within the broader organization.
Just as the field of library science has evolved into the information and library science profession, your library management portal and database should also be extensible enough to securely support and organize the work of other departments such as:
- Legal practice areas to organize customer contract terms, electronic license agreements, employment contracts
- Research and development departments to classify laboratory reports and research reports
- Accounting to organize financial documents
- General business audit and compliance reports
- Business documents that support important business decisions made
Today’s information and library science graduates work in a variety of areas within the profession: traditional library, archives, digital asset management (DAM), electronic records, virtual library, digital preservation, and more.
These graduates and the special libraries they work for have many opportunities to interact with other parts of the organization, and as they do, they should take the opportunity to understand the mission, document retention, research needs, record management, or information management needs these other departments have, and learn about the resources they have to support those needs.
If your ILS or library management solution has the flexibility to support the broader needs of your organization, discovering how your department can support these needs will go a long way towards your demonstrating the value of your department. Focus is key for you in aligning a traditional library mindset with an information professional mindset while discovering ways you can augment the work of another department.
To flesh out how your library or information center can bring value to other areas of the organization, consider using collaboration tools such as Yammer or Slack to alert the company about your mission, priorities, and challenges. Let the broader company know of the additional functionality available within Soutron that could be taken advantage of to securely provide easy access to:
- Record institutional memory using the Soutron archival functionality
- Video or audio digital archives from content hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, or Soundcloud
- Auditable record management files that meet security or regulatory requirements
- Knowledge Services due to a high-performance AI-enhanced Enquiry Service that executes against internal & external data sources, web sites and other resources
- Engineering reports, lab reports, technical drawings, or other internal documents that end users submit directly into the database via customizable form
- Documents, drawings, images, videos and more that have been peer reviewed and approved for inclusion in the database
- A Knowledge Core that contains diverse types of structured content such as compliance information that can be easily accessed by other applications via APIs
- An HR database that matches employee resources and skills with upcoming organizational projects
As you work to embed yourself in the broader organization, ask other departments if they have file drive space that takes forever to search, or if they have trouble finding the right material. What Soutron and our clients have found is that the materials put out in various Internet repositories or in the Cloud for storage all need to be categorized and organized for easy access. You and your team have the education and training about collection management, information management, records management, and institutional knowledge management that other departments do not necessarily have. This is your opportunity to explain how Soutron and your departmental resources can be used to securely organize, classify, and make their internal documents more readily available.
This investment in educating other departments about the services you can provide that are outside of a traditional library will help them understand how your department can be of value to them and help you create a community of supporters.
For a refreshing and informative review including practical tips on advocacy you can implement today, watch Archival Advocacy webinar by Samantha Lawrence, Museum Archivist at Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm, Michigan, USA: https://www.soutron.com/archival-advocacy-webinar-with-samantha-lawrence/
Learn More About Soutron
If your organisation is looking for a customisable database solution, the team at Soutron can help. You can learn more about how our library management solution can be customised to meet your business’s unique needs by scheduling a demo.
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