Are you seeing the need to manage more digital documents, as an increasingly large proportion of a corporate library collection is now in electronic format? Indeed, is the physical library smaller and smaller?
The move, demanded by a response to Covid, to work away from the office using remote access to systems has denied many organisations normal access to library resources.
Traditionally most enterprises rely on Microsoft 365 to host corporate reports, intelligence and marketing reports and the Library is mainly concerned with externally published materials. Perhaps with SharePoint, all internal content is managed by the IT department, using sites and folders and a free text search. Is that distinction too simple or is there a cross over?
Most staff will access the corporate intranet away from the office via a VPN and then use M365 to search and find source materials. Often multiple versions of the same document are presented and security permissions are applied by the author, thus possibly preventing access to others, when content might be beneficial to other users. Certainly, few content creators inside the company will take care to add indexing terms or security permissions to content that they have created.
Alternative Solutions
While Microsoft dominates the corporate landscape, the Library can provide alternative ways of indexing and filtering content to aid users, easily integrating Library Search Portals into the SharePoint or Teams environment. In legal firms where third-party applications like iManage are used the Library system can integrate and improve on their search capabilities making finding content easier and more accurate.
Information Silos
It’s all too easy for any organisation, small or large to end up with information silos without an ability to search across them.
Recent updates to Soutron complement knowledge creation and approval processes that support policy formulation, research, quality procedures, especially now that users are often out of the office and remote from one another. Users can quickly submit documents, images, reports and enquiries and nominate reviewers before being directed (automatically) to the Library Service to be securely and comprehensively indexed. Audit trails log all activities to ensure documents are assessed correctly and all necessary personnel are included. An in-screen PDF viewer makes it easy for staff and researchers to read and search PDFs.
Taking Control
Security is the watchword for most corporate bodies and making sure access permissions to materials, records, images, audio, video attachments are correctly assigned is critical, not just to protect material from unwanted attention but also to ensure that those who should have access are granted access and can find such digital content.
The Library Service is changing (as always). The ability to provide Search Portal technology combining Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing for one stop searching across internal and external sources is embedded into Soutron’s technology solutions.
Learn more about our cloud-based solutions and how they can help support the Library Service and Knowledge gathering.
Graham Beastall – Senior Consultant and Managing Director. Graham’s background is in Accountancy, Public Administration, Organizational Theory and Library Technologies with a deep technical understanding of databases and web technologies. More posts by Graham.
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