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

How to Approach a Library Vendor

As library technicians and graduate students near the end of a term, many of them are working on their final projects.

As a matter of becoming a library technician or librarian, there is always at least one course that requires students to approach a library vendor.

The assignment typically involves asking a group of students to approach more than one library vendor with a scenario, such as a law firm library seeking a library system.

As library and knowledge management vendors, we collectively have a responsibility to assist these students for many reasons:

(a) These students will be our future clients.
(b) These students may be our future employees.
(c) These projects are an opportunity for us to see requests for future features

Students should not feel intimidated about contacting a library vendor for the reasons above, since you are doing us a favour. As major vendors employ several consultant librarians and library technicians, you will find a friendly voice on the other end.

For instructors and students, we have the following suggestions to make the most of your assignment.

• Instruct students to contact us as soon as possible

Here is what we eventually want to see in our e-mail correspondence:

o Your contact information
o Your school, course, and instructor
o The due date for a response
o Some key facts about your library
o Your reason for approaching us

The last point – your reason for approaching us – is the most often overlooked item, but it has the most impact on how responsive the vendor will be to assisting you.

Whether it is a student project involving a library vendor, or walking into a job interview with a library, we all want to know why you have approached us.

• Contact us as soon as possible

Most students approach vendors through a sales or support phone numbers, and it will take time for your request to find its way to the best staff person.

• Instructors should compile a list of contacts for the students

One of the best approaches we have seen to helping students with these projects is where the instructor has already screened the vendors that are willing to help. Generally, every major vendor has a designated staff person(s) for these types of student outreach projects.

• Instructors should try to time the assignments where there is a lull for vendors

While this will vary, the major vendors will be busier during conference season, particularly major conferences, such as SLA, ALA (e.g. June).

Some vendors will disagree with the following statement, but in our experience serving special libraries, there is a lull during September, October, and January.

• Follow up with your library vendor after the project

We understand that for many students, the assignment to approach a vendor may be the “final project,” and the last item on your agenda is more work. You are probably tired from your studies and need a break, but similar to any job interview you will leave a lasting impression for yourself and your school, if you send us a quick update.

• Send us a list of questions

For many libraries searching for systems, there is a RFI or RFP (Request For Information/Proposal), which is a formal document asking for detailed information.

While you would not want to send something that expansive to a vendor for a student assignment, sending us a form with a few questions (e.g. 10 questions) is fine.

Vendors are less responsive when you send us a general request for “brochures and marketing literature” because many of us now support numerous products and platforms.

• Consider scheduling a demonstration for the class

In the past, we have had students ask for a tour of our facilities, which required a lot of planning in advance. We have even sent our consultant librarians to the school for a demonstration. Nonetheless, the library vendor may not be able to provide a demo in response to every request from a student group. Consider a demo for your whole class.

Best of luck to the students that SydneyPLUS International has assisted this year!

SydneyPLUS Thanks for Thanksgiving (US)

SydneyPLUS staff librarians working in our headquarters in Vancouver, BC, Canada are fortunate to live in such a beautiful place, which is evident by this photograph from Jeff Xerri, SydneyPLUS Implementation Consultant Librarian on his way to work. We wish all our US-based clients who wish to celebrate Thanksgiving a Happy Thanksgiving! Hopefully many of you will have the opportunity to visit us during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, or perhaps you will see a rainbow when visiting us at the SLA 2014 conference to be held in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Selling Your Library

On Monday, November 16th, some of the staff attended a workshop on “Developing & Presenting the Value Proposition” by Maggie Weaver. The session was intended to help library management develop a presentation and demonstrate the value of their services.

The workshop provided the reason for developing value propositions, a formula for developing the propositions, and specific steps for presenting the pitch.

Some of the recommendations may appear obvious, such as focus on how your library service is going to “accelerate or increase gains” instead of “reducing costs.”

Other suggestions, such as “small samples” being acceptable for making conclusions, and how to measure anything, particularly services, may be new to many librarians.

If you want to know whether or not to use a pie chart or bar graph, then this workshop is right for you; it gets to this detailed level near the end.

Another upcoming workshop some of the SydneyPLUS staff librarians will be attending, if you happen to be in the area of Vancouver, BC:

Sales Techniques for Non-Sales People Seminar offered by the Simon Fraser University (SFU).

As librarians, taking courses on marketing and sales techniques can only better serve our profession. Marketing our library services has never been more important.