ALA launches the S+ CE module

ALA recently launched the SydneyPLUS Continuing Education (CE) module to further the professional development of its staff. The following post is derived from the December 2010 SydneyPLUS Client NewsLetter article available from the SydneyPLUS website.

Founded on October 6, 1876 during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the American Library Association was created to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.

ALA succeeded in making it easier for the presenter and attendees to manage registrations. Described by ALA as “intuitive,” the SydneyPLUS CE module allows staff to register for courses through a “single click workflow,” which generates an e-mail confirming the registration to staff, along with notification by e-mail to the presenter of the number of seats left.

The SydneyPLUS CE module automatically manages a wait list on behalf of the presenter. As the number of registrations exceeds the number of seats available in the class, participants are wait-listed in order of registration. Any cancellation by a registrant frees up a space and the next person on the wait-list is enrolled and notified by e-mail.

SydneyPLUS provides more than a library system to ALA in that the SydneyPLUS Information Manager is used as the organization’s internal Knowledge Management System. SydneyPLUS CE is the latest initiative, which joins these other projects:

• SydneyPLUS Calling Tree (i.e. a hierarchical representation of staff used to ensure proper communication of important news throughout the organization)
• SydneyPLUS Expertise Management (i.e. staff can describe their expertise and skills to ensure the organization makes best use of them)
• SydneyPLUS Virtual Reference (i.e. a virtual reference desk that automatically routes requests to experts in the organization)

How has ALA accomplished so much using SydneyPLUS? The secret to the successful partnership has been to invest in training, consultation, and even more training. In the last four years ALA has trained five times with SydneyPLUS: three times at SydneyPLUS headquarters and twice onsite at ALA.

SNUG 2010 Virtual Conference

This year’s Sept 20 2010 SNUG (SydneyPLUS National Users Group) meeting was held as a virtual meeting for the second year in a row. The following post is derived from a full press release available from the SydneyPLUS website.

SNUG sessions started with a focus on reporting with a Crystal reports primer that showed how users can start creating their own reports, how they can enhance existing out-of-the-box reports and how they can best leverage their own data for reporting. The meeting’s focus then shifted to a review of how to make best use of Information Manager version 4.1.1. Among the many options explored during the review where; how to enhance a portal database with book jacket covers, how to access a collection via a mobile device and to how to generate reports with the portal’s own built in Report Writer. The final session of the meeting provided case study examples of innovative Information Manager Implementations. The examples showed how IM can be used to apply “terms of use control” by having users enter their network credentials before accessing sensitive corporate reports and how existing IM functionality can be calibrated to manage all aspects of electronic information subscriptions.

SydneyPLUS clients can further network by visiting the client supported SNUG wiki at https://snug.pbworks.com . They are also welcome to follow SydneyPLUS through Twitter at http://twitter.com/sydneyplus.

SydneyPLUS Seeks Librarian Consultant

SydneyPLUS International is looking to hire a Librarian Sales Support / Training Consultant. And the job title reflects your many responsibilities here!

SydneyPLUS employs several librarians, so we asked them, "What do you like about your job?"

1. SydneyPLUS International's headquarters are located in beautiful Richmond, British Columbia and its neighbor, Vancouver, BC is ranked as the top Canadian city for quality of life.

2. SydneyPLUS also has librarians working in many top locations, such as New York, Nottingham (UK), etc. and it is an experience to work with staff around the world.

3. SydneyPLUS clients range from governments to corporations to non-profits, and every industry is represented by our clients, which allows us to meet experts in every field.

4. SydneyPLUS has supported special libraries, archives, and museums for thirty years, and many staff have worked in the company for all of these years.

SydneyPLUS SharePoint Web Part

If your organization is pursuing SharePoint integration and implementation for the library, then you may want a range of options for that integration, including the best choice: a Web Part.







Based on the SydneyPLUS Information Manager platform, SydneyPLUS has supported integration with SharePoint through a number of measures to the extent that it has designed a Web Part specifically for providing access to any SydneyPLUS data through SharePoint.

The SydneyPLUS Web Part may be the best choice for clients using SharePoint for many reasons which we will discuss here. Before we outline the benefits of the Web Part, there are other measures available to clients that provide access to SydneyPLUS data through SharePoint:

· SydneyPLUS RSS Generator can publish RSS feeds for display in SharePoint.
· SharePoint BDC can also query the SydneyPLUS database.

Editor's note: The SharePoint BDC (Business Data Catalog) is also known as the Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010.

SydneyPLUS Web Part capabilities:

1. The SydneyPLUS Web Part is easily configured by librarians. The SydneyPLUS Web Part is configurable to allow your administrator to determine what should be shown:

· Administrators can select any table and fields.
· Administrators can query using a search screen designed for librarians.
· Web Part uses the familiar SydneyPLUS Information Manager user interface.






2. The user does not have to leave SharePoint to interact with the library.

A number of actions are available to your users through the Web Part, which means that they will appreciate the convenience of staying on SharePoint.

· Users can renew items checked out in SydneyPLUS from SharePoint.
· Users can request items from SydneyPLUS through SharePoint.
· Users can search the SydneyPLUS database directly.

3. The SydneyPLUS Web Part can display relevant data based on user identity.

An important feature of the SydneyPLUS Web Part is its ability to display data that is specific to a user.

· Display resources specific to the person's department, office, etc.
· Display a list of journals that are being routed to the person.
· Display a list of requests made by that person.


If you have questions and want to find out more about SydneyPLUS SharePoint Web Part feel free to contact us at 604 278 6717 or email sales@sydneyplus.com

Editor's note: SydneyPLUS also provides intranets and extranets for law firms, and a competitive intelligence solution on the SharePoint platform.

If you would like to learn more about the extent of library-related vendors supporting SharePoint integration, then read this article:

Weldon, Lorette S.J. How is SharePoint used in Libraries? FUMSI, August 2010, online:
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/use/4714

SydneyPLUS New Website

SydneyPLUS International, provider of Library Knowledge Management software and solutions to Fortune 1000 companies, top law firms and government institutions is pleased to announce the launch of their new corporate website.

Rapidly created and deployed in less than two weeks by SydneyPLUS staff librarians, the new site sports a fresh "look and feel" delivering more information on the products and services available from SydneyPLUS, and the many partnerships that SydneyPLUS has forged with other companies that serve related industries.

A press release is available.

SydneyPLUS Welcomes LookUp Precision

SydneyPLUS International would like to welcome the users of LookUp Precision to the SydneyPLUS family. The addition of LookUp Precision will leverage complementary technologies and accelerate innovation, delivering on a strategy of providing powerful, adaptable cost recovery solutions to the professional services sector.

SydneyPLUS and your LookUp Precision team remain dedicated to maintaining and enhancing the qualities their customers have come to expect—technical innovation, exceptional service, outstanding reliability and a lifelong reputation for integrity.

If you have any questions, please feel free to call us at 604 278 6717 or email us at sales@sydneyplus.com.

Best Practices at Conferences

SydneyPLUS staff librarians attend many conferences throughout the year, including conferences that serve museums and archives. At every conference, there may be a session, workshop, or practice that really stands out. We want to share with you some experiences.

Here are some of the best practices for conferences that we have recently seen, which we hope every conference will consider adopting:

SCIP 2010 “Vendor Workshop”

While restricted to vendors, you may find it interesting to know that this workshop allows vendors to practice delivering pitches to our competitors - our peers - while the moderator provides feedback. The conference organizers also review basic interview techniques and measuring our ROI. Many conferences brief us on the most recent survey of the marketplace and demographics. The purpose of these types of workshops is to make your experience, the participants' experience, more productive when you visit our booths. Perhaps a conference will consider offering a similar workshop for the participants? It could be called “Tradeshow Bootcamp” and cover interview techniques, planning your path through the tradeshow floor, best times for private demonstrations, a list of new vendors this year, etc.

Museums and the Web 2010 - Crit Room

Imagine volunteering your portal (e.g. OPAC) up for critical review in front of a room full of your peers. (Your vendor sitting silently at the back of the room will beam with pride). You are only given a few minutes to provide an orientation to the web site, but the volunteers that are going to be asked to perform some tasks on it are waiting outside the room to put the site to its test. After you sit down, these volunteers ranging from end users to experts, attempt to use your portal while describing their experience. Yes, it is intimidating. Can it show you insight into the usability of your portal? Absolutely. We wish every conference offered this session.

Museums and the Web 2010 - Demonstrations

Vendors are always looking for ways to engage participants in the exhibit hall. At some conferences, SydneyPLUS sponsors a client to deliver a presentation. Museums and the Web conference had participants “take over” the exhibit hall floor for part of the day to offer presentations to other participants. While vendors could offer the presentations themselves, it was an opportunity for the vendor to invite one of their clients to occupy the booth. Instead of talking with the vendor, you had the chance to speak to the client using their product. The focus did not need to be on the product, but what the client had achieved with it. As a vendor, these demonstrations succeed in the desired “word of mouth” aspect of marketing products.

SLA “Hot Topic” Sessions

Among many sessions offered at SLA, the value of having sessions that bring you up to speed on developments in your industry is invaluable. Along with the “Ideas” bulletin boards, which allow you to share innovation with other participants, there are many efforts to foster discussion. With the growth in virtual participation among attendees updating blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc., the speed at which a good idea can spread among participants at a conference is astounding.

The Future of Conferences

Whether you are a museum, library, or archive, there is value in attending a conference in a related field. As a vendor, we have the privilege of experiencing the “best of the best.”

We have noticed some trends among recent conferences:

- rise in panels as participants want more perspectives in a shorter amount of time

- part of every conference is being left open for spontaneity (e.g. Museums and the Web offered an “Unconference Session” where the participants propose their own topics for discussion)

- use of portable technology is outpacing the infrastructure at many conference sites (e.g. ranging from saturating the Wi-Fi to not finding an available outlet for charing your device)

- memorizing the Flickr, Twitter, etc. tags is essential to participate online while at the conference, but many participates will participate after the conference

- organizers increasingly have to brand their Flickr, Twitter, etc. tags in their banners and prominently display them everywhere (e.g. web site, program, pre and post e-mail, etc.)

- vendors are increasingly offering more services and products in more disciplines, which is making it more challenging for participants to make comparisons on the tradeshow floor

SydneyPLUS Welcomes Questor

SydneyPLUS International would like to welcome Questor employees and the users of Argus to the SydneyPLUS family. We are pleased with the opportunity of leveraging our complementary technologies to accelerate innovation and deliver on a shared vision of new, powerful and adaptable collection management solutions for the cultural and academic world.

In our partnership with Questor employees and Argus users, we continue our dedication to maintaining and enhancing a quality that all our customers have come to expect — technical innovation, exceptional service, outstanding reliability and a lifelong reputation for integrity.

If you have any questions, please feel free to call us at 310 316 9511 or email us at info@questorsys.com. A full press release is available here.

SydneyPLUS launches Competitive Intelligence Dashboard

SydneyPLUS attended the 2010 SCIP Conference on March 10-12, 2010 which was held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals is an organization for everyone involved in creating and managing business knowledge. This was a milestone event for SydneyPLUS as we had the opportunity to launch our competitive intelligence product and solution offering, SydneyPLUS CI.

SydneyPLUS CI was met with a great deal of interest by myriad firms represented at the conference. SydneyPLUS' capabilities in enterprise class data aggregation, integration to both in-house and external content stores and research databases (public domain and subscribed), and our ability to deliver relevant information dynamically and instantaneously to those that need it set us apart from many solutions on the market.

SydneyPLUS Listens to Library Directors

SydneyPLUS staff recently attended the Ark Group / Managing Partner Magazine's 4th Annual "Best Practice & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library & Information Service Centers" on February 25 held in New York.

The seminar was attended by more than 50 directors and managers of law firm libraries. Notably, 6 out of the 11 speakers were SydneyPLUS clients; it is always admirable to see our clients share with their peers! If you were not able to attend in person, then you may want to read the posting by Greg Lambert, Library & Records Manager, King & Spalding.

There were a number of KM initiatives discussed as means for the library to serve the business interests of the firm, including expertise management, which is the practice of providing a means of collecting the skills and experience of staff for the purpose of helping identify the right person for a given project. SydneyPLUS offers an expertise management system.

SydneyPLUS published an article in LibraryWorks describing such an expertise management system, which uses SydneyPLUS kmBuilder, our user interface for creating relational databases (SQL or Oracle), and SydneyPLUS Information Manager, our user interface for building a KM portal. The result is a flexible system for storing any data about a person's experience.

SydneyPLUS during the Olympic Games

As you may know, SydneyPLUS has its headquarters near Vancouver, BC, which is the host of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. SydneyPLUS has taken steps ahead of the games to ensure service levels remain in place.

There is a lot of excitement surrounding the games, which you can see in this photograph of the torch being shared through Vancouver on its way to the Games.

Photograph credit: Alicia

Showcase Your Library to Senior Management

Start 2010 with your best foot forward by reminding senior management of the high value service your library provides to your organization.

We are committed to helping you prepare for any presentation to senior management that involves SydneyPLUS. As part of that commitment, SydneyPLUS is offering to its library directors the services of its consultant librarians.

If you want to showcase your services or projects in SydneyPLUS, then we want to help you by assigning one of our consultant librarians to assist you. SydneyPLUS staff will assist you in a number of ways:

- creating PowerPoint presentations
- providing talking points

Some clients may prefer to have our consultant librarians partner with them during the presentation. SydneyPLUS can deliver the presentation on your behalf, or participate on a call as to answer questions.

Looking Inward to Expand Library Services Outward

Libraries are always looking for ways to offer more services without increasing their workload, which often means making more use of existing products and services. In fact, special libraries have reported that librarians should market services that align themselves with the essential needs of the parent organization, which has proven to be one of the best ways to prevent downsizing and cost cutting during a recession. Where could we find a new service that we could market to the organization, while addressing the priorities of senior management? Special libraries should look within for inspiration, because information about their own firms’ staff - information more valuable than all of its books and journals combined - can be found there. Special libraries can help achieve their firms’ business objectives by providing senior management with the ability to identify such expertise.

Most special libraries have the potential to offer a new service at little to no additional cost without realizing it. The product of many libraries is access to organized information, which is stored in the catalog in the form of books, journals, etc. Your library may have already expanded the catalog to include a FAQ, competitive intelligence, continuing education courses, etc. There are obviously many uses for a catalog, in terms of providing access to information, that your parent organization needs. The distinguishing factor for expanding into these areas is the realization that your organization is already using other products and services, other vendors, and may even have internal departments set up to manage such information. Special libraries should compete to be the provider of these other uses for information. Senior management, if we are successful, should be left turning to the library as their first choice.

The thread that ties all these uses of information together is people. Whether it is circulating a book to a borrower, or conducting research on behalf of a patron, special libraries know a lot about the most valuable resource in an organization – their staff. At a minimum, your library probably has the name and contact information for the employees within the organization. Many special libraries are set up to receive an import from HR or IT departments to keep their borrower records current. Very few special libraries have made any effort to make their borrower records available on their intranets or internal portals.

While there is already a system in place for HR, these systems are rigid and defined for their application, which is to support payroll, medical benefits, and manage work performance. As librarians, we can see a much bigger picture when we look to social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook where individuals and organizations describe their expertise to market their services outwardly. There is an equally strong demand within any organization to know who the best person is for a particular job or client, but this is usually left to an informal process, such as the judgment call of a manager, which is more difficult in large organizations with many offices spread out across other divisions, such as language, time zones, etc....

There is a more detailed article by SydneyPLUS International in the January 2010 issue of LibraryWorks

Summary of 2010 predictions for legal technology

Are you too busy to read all of the predictions for 2010 about the technology used by law firms? We asked our SydneyPLUS consultant librarians to take on the task of reading several blogs and articles for you and provide a summary.

Next, we decided to ask our team to report back to us a list of predictions that appeared on the majority of the sources we consulted. Here is what 2010 appears to hold for legal technology according to the "wisdom of the crowds" online:

1. More applications will be developed for mobile phones (e.g. iPhones, BlackBerry), more firms will support the use of these devices, and there will be more competition.

2. Social networking (e.g. LinkedIn) will become more important to firms.

Obviously, when you try to summarize so many sources, some of the details fall to the side, but feel free to read some of the many 2010 predictions made by the experts, editors, etc. working with legal technology, and we feel you will agree that these two predictions seemed to be shared.

When we asked one of our SydneyPLUS consultant librarians for the “most interesting” prediction of 2010 that he reviewed, he cited the prediction about the importance of touch screen technology, similar to tablet computing, in terms of the future development of web sites, a prediction made by many experts, such as Steven Matthews and Dennis Kennedy.

For a reality check, we compared the 2010 predictions in legal technology to the 2009 predictions by Dennis Kennedy. Spoiler alert: his predictions from 2009 are nearly identical to the predictions made for 2010, which can be interpreted many, many ways. The simplest explanation is that predicting what will happen in legal technology from year to year is naturally going to have some repetitiveness because it often takes more than a year for the predictions to come true, and it certainly takes time for predictions to become true for everyone.

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Some of the blogs and articles we consulted in no particular order:

Jason Plant, "Top 5 Legal IT Technologies of 2010," No Option for Law Firm!, 1 January 2010: http://tinyurl.com/ye97vo4

Neyah Kane Bennett, "Pondering the Year Ahead in Technology, The Connecticut Law Tribune on Law.com, 5 January 2010: http://tinyurl.com/yctuj4r

Steven Matthews, "Web Law Predictions for 2010," Slaw.ca: http://tinyurl.com/y8toekq

"Nine Legal Technology Trends for 2009: The Year of Hunkering Down," DennisKennedy.com, 29 April 2009: http://tinyurl.com/dma6mu