The role for special librarians is expanding as companies want more control over all their corporate information with content management systems When Dori Whitehurst, information research services manager at PQ Corporation in Conshohocken, PA, needed to incorporate 104-year-old legacy documents into new systems, she turned to the Microsoft Sharepoint Content Management (CM) application for help. PQ, a chemical manufacturer, was founded 175 years ago. Scanned and adapted into templates, even the oldest extant reports and lab notebooks are now accessible to the company's 57 plants worldwide via an online collaborative research and development portal. The move online was made easier by PQ's existing 3000-word taxonomy, which applied to most items. The new portal became especially valuable when PQ closed one of its two research libraries in June. As always, companies need a comprehensive information management and retrieval strategy that addresses internal documents and records, digital assets, and web content. Nowadays, however, this means CM, a strategy driven by a knowledge of business processes, metadata and taxonomy classification, and technology skills, all leading to the effective capture, retrieval, and repurposing of content. With CM, companies become more efficient in a competitive marketplace and more able to meet users' rising expectations for information technology and fulfill stricter accounting procedures. Librarians are leading this enterprise, whether right out of school with fresh technology and taxonomy skills or via the expansion of traditional research roles in corporate libraries.

CM on the rise

With the explosion of available digital information, open web searching for serious information is less popular among corporate users. They want more targeted, personalized, and/or value-added results. At the same time, the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which calls for strict corporate governance, makes it imperative for public companies to comply with harsher laws and regulations. CM systems can ease these concerns by automatically generating and updating content based on categorization and metadata criteria. Business processes are documented, emails are effectively archived, and decision-making becomes transparent. How CM plays out varies from company to company and from librarian to librarian, but it is increasingly important to firms. According to Outsell analyst Mary Corcoran, her company's surveys reveal that in 2004, 26 percent of corporate information professionals developed or created taxonomies for CM initiatives, 11 percent were involved in enterprise (businesswide) CM, and 20 percent participated in portal or web site projects.

Feeding the bottom line

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Internal information like email and word processing files can be the most frequently used and most valuable, but it can also be the hardest to find and reuse effectively. A content management system is an alternative to an environment of hierarchal folders located on disparate shared drives. It handles document versioning, eliminates problems with renaming, and allows the viewing of all versions. Depending on the document type, the application can be totally automated with flexible security settings, conforming to the specific needs of the organization. CM systems, especially with the advent of XML, offer the means for content to be separated from its format. Metadata lets key portions be retrieved. CM makes the process easier by applying taxonomy terms automatically, according to parameters established by humans. The business can then reuse and/or syndicate the content across disparate systems. Using content that already exists for a new product reduces creation costs. Using a streamlined, automated system to do it brings down ongoing operational costs. Content management leverages information more effectively, adding to a company's bottom line. Its successful adoption relies on a system that understands how users access information, an area in which librarians excel. Content must be analyzed by type, user requirements, and input and output specifications This calls for a synthesis of familiar and updated librarian skills - understanding user needs, developing and implementing taxonomies, applying metadata, learning web management tools - together with business savvy and a willingness to take a risk and learn something new that's critical to the firm's success.

Multiple roles

A crucial role for the content manager is to be the interface between the user and portal database or web site programmers, providing both user and design support. Nichole Kallas, as technical project coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey Biological Informatics Program in Virginia, works on the National Biological Information Infrastructure site, an electronic gateway to biological information maintained by federal, state, and local government agencies, plus private sector organizations. She uses Plumtree portal technology as the delivery mechanism for intranet and extranet services. Over time, her role has evolved from supporting the user as "help desk" to organizing content as a content manager to helping others organize and maintain their own content. A content manager can also serve as business project lead, guiding the entire process according to company systems development requirements. At Guidant Corp., a St. Paul medical device manufacturer, Wendy Joarnt acts as the main contact for outside developers, analyzes the original documents to determine their reuse strategy, and creates the taxonomy. To do this well, she must understand both user needs and business drivers, gather user requirements, do user testing, and plan the implementation and training. She also helps write the test cases and serves as lead tester. Out of the box CM tools can and should be enhanced by in-house development. At the global professional services firm Towers Perrin in Valhalla, NY, a small team of librarians within the knowledge management group manage "intellectual capital" by indexing and abstracting all internal documents, maintaining controlled vocabularies, and assigning keywords to documents and internal web sites. Rebecca Condict writes user manuals (some CM systems are developed in-house), trains users on these systems, creates links to related documents in the database, produces links that operate stored queries to be retrieved dynamically, tags documents, and writes queries to retrieve content-based tags. The ultimate success of a CM system rides on its ongoing usability. Based on their knowledge of corporate requirements, user behavior, and corporate culture, content managers must determine whether users will be adding content to the system themselves. With the established taxonomy at PQ Corp., Whitehurst isn't expecting users to conform. Instead, she asks people to assign their own terms, which she then matches to the taxonomy. At Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, MI, with few exceptions, the user tags the content, choosing from an existing taxonomy. "If they need a new tag, we allow them to suggest it," says Robin Jourdan, technical knowledge specialist III, "and we review it to determine if the new tag is appropriate to add to the taxonomy." Susan Tyrrell, information management specialist at Alliance Pipeline Ltd. in Calgary, Alta., is also flexible. She trains her users according to their preferences, but searching by metadata and/or text is much more effective, she says, once people are used to the technique.

Librarian as CM leader

Most CM solutions tout the strengths of their automation tools, but most practitioners agree that human intervention is crucial to the system's success, leaving an opening for librarians' talents. Exposed to people from all over the company, they are familiar with a wide scope of business practices. This knowledge, mixed with flexibility, leads to leadership opportunities. From her years of corporate library experience, Joarnt singles out several skill sets that have been critical to succeeding with CM: good communication skills (including interviewing), categorization/taxonomy building, and the ability to analyze information needs as well as map the information flow/life cycle. As a librarian, Joarnt adds, "You come to understand hot issues...you also get an idea of information around the company and how it can be better shared, stored, used, searched, etc." Beyond the development of taxonomy management tools, Darin Plutchok, taxonomist/program manager at eLogic in Marina del Rey, CA, considers himself an information organization "thought leader" for his company, a web services arm of business-to-business publisher Reed Business Information (parent company of Library Journal). He reviews and tests automated classification tools, recommending that any corporate librarian should become familiar with them. While none is working out as built for his purposes yet, Plutchok says, "They can be quite accurate if tweaked by a human." Jourdan agrees that no perfect search or automated tool yet exists, creating an important role for librarians. "Your background as a reference librarian will set you apart," says Jourdan, "[because] you understand how people search for information." Learn to be an early tech adopter in general, she says, so that CM is not just about gee-whiz technology. "The key with any CM technology is how it helps deliver the right content to your users."

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Lynn Blumenstein is Senior Editor, Library Hotline, and Contributing Editor, LJ