Corporate library

Last updated

A corporate library is a special library serving the staff at a corporation. The information services provided by corporate libraries save employees time, and can aid in competitive intelligence work. [1] An information strategist supports the work of an organization through the corporate library.

By offering a corporate library to employees, the corporation is able to encourage learning and give people opportunities for growth and development that may not be offered elsewhere. Corporate libraries also offer the opportunity for employees to share ideas in regards work related tasks or special projects needing to be completed.

Corporate libraries may act as an agent for fulfilling certain needs in the business, patent, personnel, and safety areas of the corporation. A corporate library may be structured as a vital service for research, providing necessary materials on business and marketing, management and personal development, and safety procedures. Corporate libraries may also help employees develop basic knowledge, provide reference for existing research, and prevent employees from wasting time on unproductive research. Also, corporate libraries may provide the corporation with books, periodicals, patents, articles, and general information services. [2]

Corporate libraries were created in the early twentieth century, around the year 1900, as a response to a rapidly changing corporate and commercial environment. Two major developments of the corporate and commercial environment, research infrastructure and the scientific approach to management, were the main contributors that spurred the creation of corporate libraries. The rise of systematic industrial research and the management revolution, which accompanied the implementation of scientific management, benefited from corporate libraries who acted as adjuncts to those changes. [3]

When corporate libraries first appeared in the early twentieth century, the names of those libraries may have differed from one corporation to another (alternatives names included Central Technical File, Information Bureau, and Intelligence Department). Those who worked in such organizations from the early twentieth century onward were not invariably called librarians. Professionals in such roles were referred to a wide variety of names such as systems librarian, technical services librarian, knowledge center manager, computer science librarian, information specialist, director of information strategy, and director of database research. [4]

Information science was born from professionals within corporate libraries. Mortimer Taube and Brian Vickery are two corporate librarians who helped develop information science via academic writing and conference participation. [5]

One major issue in corporate libraries relates to the difficulty of putting a dollar value on the intangible services the library provides to its parent company. [6] The librarian at a corporate library should be prepared to justify the return on investment of an organization hosting such a library. [6] In terms of size, they are seldom very large, and most library departments employ fewer than five full-time staff. [7]

Related Research Articles

Corporate titles or business titles are given to company and organization officials to show what duties and responsibilities they have in the organization. Such titles are used by publicly and privately held for-profit corporations. In addition, many non-profit organizations, educational institutions, partnerships, and sole proprietorships also confer corporate titles.

Library Organized collection of books or other information resources

A library is a collection of materials or media that are accessible for use and not just for display. It provides physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical location or a virtual space, or both. A library's collection can include printed materials and other physical resources in many formats such as DVDs, as well as access to information, music or other content held on bibliographic databases.

Management Coordinating the efforts of people

Management is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a non-profit organization, or government body.

Business Organization undertaking commercial, industrial, or professional activity

Business is the activity of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products. Simply put, it is "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."

Intellectual capital is the result of mental processes that form a set of intangible objects that can be used in economic activity and bring income to its owner (organization), covering the competencies of its people, the value relating to its relationships, and everything that is left when the employees go home, of which intellectual property (IP) is but one component. It is the sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge. The term is used in academia in an attempt to account for the value of intangible assets not listed explicitly on a company's balance sheets. However, what managers understand as intellectual capital within their organizations is not always that evident On a national level intellectual capital refers to national intangible capital (NIC).
A second meaning that is used in academia and was adopted in large corporations is focused on the recycling of knowledge via knowledge management and intellectual capital management (ICM). Creating, shaping and updating the stock of intellectual capital requires the formulation of a strategic vision, which blends together all three dimensions of intellectual capital within the organisational context through exploration, exploitation, measurement, and disclosure. Intellectual capital is used in the context of assessing the wealth of organizations. A metric for the value of intellectual capital is the amount by which the enterprise value of a firm exceeds the value of its tangible assets. Directly visible on corporate books is capital embodied in its physical assets and financial capital; however all three make up the value of an enterprise. Measuring the real value and the total performance of intellectual capital's components is a critical part of running a company in the knowledge economy and Information Age. Understanding the intellectual capital in an enterprise allows leveraging of its intellectual assets. For a corporation, the result will optimize its stock price.

Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar H. Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a shared "pattern of basic assumptions" which group members have acquired over time as they learn to successfully cope with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. Elliott Jaques first introduced the concept of culture in the organizational context in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory. The book was a published report of "a case study of developments in the social life of one industrial community between April, 1948 and November 1950". The "case" involved a publicly-held British company engaged principally in the manufacture, sale, and servicing of metal bearings. The study concerned itself with the description, analysis, and development of corporate group behaviours.

Librarian Profession

A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library, providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users.

The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 57,000 members.

Medical Library Association

The Medical Library Association (MLA) is a nonprofit, educational organization with more than 3,400 health sciences information professional members and partners worldwide.

EBSCO Information Services distributor of eBooks and other digital media

EBSCO Information Services, headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., a private company headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. EBSCO provides products and services to libraries of very many types around the world. Its products include EBSCONET, a complete e-resource management system, and EBSCOhost, which supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus ebooks, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. In 2010, EBSCO introduced its EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to institutions, which allows searches of a portfolio of journals and magazines.

Special Libraries Association (SLA) is an international professional association for library and information professionals working in business, government, law, finance, non-profit, and academic organizations and institutions.

Grey literature

Grey literature is materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports, working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organizations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.

Special library

A special library is a library that provides specialized information resources on a particular subject, serves a specialized and limited clientele, and delivers specialized services to that clientele. Special libraries include corporate libraries, government libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, museum libraries, news libraries. Special libraries also exist within academic institutions. These libraries are included as special libraries because they are often funded separately from the rest of the university and they serve a targeted group of users.

Symbolic behavior is "a person’s capacity to respond to or use a system of significant symbols". The symbolic behavior perspective argues that the reality of an organization is socially constructed through communication. Symbolic messages are used by individuals to understand their environment and create a social reality. When faced with uncertainty, individuals continually organize themselves within their group based reality and respond within that reality.

A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered, communicated, and acknowledged. It is also a belief from the customer about how value (benefit) will be delivered, experienced and acquired.

The National Library and Information System of Trinidad and Tobago is a corporate body established by the NALIS Act No. 18 of 1998 to administer the development and coordination of library and information services in Trinidad and Tobago.

Association of College and Research Libraries Library organization

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academic library and information professionals to serve the information needs of the higher education community and to improving learning, teaching, and research. The association serves librarians in all types of academic libraries at the community college, college, and university level and also serves librarians that work in comprehensive and specialized research libraries.

Library science

Library science is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and other areas to libraries; the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information resources; and the political economy of information. Martin Schrettinger, a Bavarian librarian, coined the discipline within his work (1808–1828) Versuch eines vollständigen Lehrbuchs der Bibliothek-Wissenschaft oder Anleitung zur vollkommenen Geschäftsführung eines Bibliothekars. Rather than classifying information based on nature-oriented elements, as was previously done in his Bavarian library, Schrettinger organized books in alphabetical order. The first American school for library science was founded by Melvil Dewey at Columbia University in 1887.

A guerrilla librarian is a person who may or may not be a professional librarian, but has otherwise taken up the stewardship of books or other material. This stewardship is usually outside the acceptance of authority figures, hence the guerrilla or underground nature of the action taken. Guerrilla librarianship can be politicized and occasionally controversial.

State Library of Iowa

The State Library of Iowa is a library service in the American state of Iowa. Founded around 1840, it is based in Des Moines and is run by the Iowa Department of Education. The State Library supports local libraries in the state and itself acts as a resource for the state government and its citizens.

References

  1. ↑ Keyes, Alison M. "The Value of the Special Library: Review and Analysis." Special Libraries 86, no. 3 (1995): 172–87
  2. ↑ SPINDLER, D. C., & Spindler, D. C. (1982). Management looks at the corporate library. Special Libraries, 73, 251–253.
  3. ↑ Black, A., & Gabb, H. (2016). The Value Proposition of the Corporate Library, Past and Present. Information & Culture, 51(2), 192–225.
  4. ↑ Black, A., & Gabb, H. (2016). The Value Proposition of the Corporate Library, Past and Present. Information & Culture, 51(2), 192–225.
  5. ↑ Black, A., & Gabb, H. (2016). The Value Proposition of the Corporate Library, Past and Present. Information & Culture, 51(2), 192–225.
  6. 1 2 "The ROI of Corporate Libraries & Research Solutions - White Paper". Support - EBSCO Help. EBSCO Industries. 28 June 2016.
  7. ↑ Prusak, Laurence, and Matarazzo, James M. "The Value of Corporate Libraries: The 1995 Survey." SpeciaList 18, no. 1 (1995): 9–15
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.