Intranets have become part of the working lives of librarians and other in formation professionals everywhere, as evidenced in January ONLINE'S special intranet issue. An important conclusion drawn from that issue plants intranets firmly in the "next big thing" category, representing a "new frontier" for information professionals. By now, that frontier has been settled, largely by info pros at the forefront of their professions. But as everyone knows, exploring and then setting up shop in a new territory requires an ongoing commitment to new developments-in this case, technology, knowledge management, and the level of involvement for librarians.
To assist in this area, we'd like to welcome Darlene Fichter, who, in this new column, will pick up where January ONLINE left off In each issue, she'll include practical coverage of the librarian's role in intranet development and maintenance-whether it's hands on with software, hardware, and content management, or on a team or committee level where the librarian works with colleagues from different departments within the organization. Involvement of the librarian in intranets is varied, but integral, and engenders departmental and individual promotion through experience. So turn here each issue for new developments, clues, and assistance in managing your organization's intranet.
Bill Mickey
Intranets have been described as "mini-Internets," rich information oceans where information is gathered, selected, organized, and used by staff at all levels of the organization. While it is true that intranets are about information, they are also about communication and collaboration. The power of intranets is in applying these functions to an organization's internal business processes to increase productivity.
Intranets present an exciting opportunity for librarians, a place to apply our skills and "how-to" knowledge. In addition, intranets have the potential to profoundly change corporate cultures. They support and encourage a trend towards self-sufficiency in research. They flatten hierarchies by providing open access to information and facilitate the formation of cross-divisional teams that can rethink and re-engineer internal business processes. These changes can be good news for librarians because information needs to be gathered together and organized appropriately for particular audiences to make the best use of it. Who better than a librarian to do this?
Intranets can be found in all types of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to small research centers to academic libraries. Although academic librarians paved the way with Internet use in libraries, special librarians have moved more quickly into the intranet realm. Intranets provide an unprecedented opportunity for establishing the library's presence on every desktop in the corporation and providing time-sensitive and audience-specific content. Academic librarians started by developing Internet sites and added some extranet services restricted to their faculty, students, and researchers. Many are looking at or experimenting with intranet sites to support the day to day work of the libraries, including sharing reports and minutes, policies and procedures, human resource forms, etc. Some libraries have also added interactive discussion forums, collaborative workspaces for teams, election wizards for academic committees, and special news areas.
Just as each intranet is unique, so are the roles played in it by each librarian. Some librarians are in charge of the corporate intranet, while others serve on steering committees. In many companies, the library has a major site on the corporate intranet, a site that is developed and maintained by librarians. Sometimes intranets are well underway when the library's help is sought, and when intranets implode under their own size and weight, project managers call upon librarians to bring order to chaos and to help intranet users find what they need quickly and accurately Many libraries have set up their own internal intranets to help library staff collaborate and share information. Intranets can help to create virtual teams between remote locations and varying time zones.
Of course, newer isn't always better, and having lots of room to innovate also means having lots of room for mistakes. Change can be overwhelming, and some of you, I imagine, would like to pull your heads back into your shells and hope that this intranet thing will fade away. Please, don't do that! Stick your neck out. Get your feet wet.
This column will focus on the challenges and opportunities we face when dealing with the organization's intranet, and will offer practical advice for intranet content managers. As librarians, we have many skills that can be adapted and applied to this new environment. We can offer our expertise with information, needs assessment, usability of information, and our skills in gathering, selecting, organizing, and managing content. Depending on our role within the intranet project, we may need some new skills as well, and can look forward to learning about such things as the authoring process, version control, workflow, user interface design, communications, virtual teams, intranet-specific software, and other tools that will help us to stay afloat.
Specifically, future columns will discuss intranet architecture, politics, dos and don'ts, metadata, building a portal, integrating external content, usability testing, evaluation, training, and promotion. We'll also look into a few intranet myths, including:
* build it and they will come
* intranets are cheap to build and maintain
* intranets are only for big corporations, and
* intranets are just Web sites
Furthermore, I would like to invite you to share your ideas, reactions, success stories, or suggestions for this column with me. Practical, real-life examples that can show how a particular tool, technique, or approach made a difference are especially valuable. We're all in the same boat together, expanding our knowledge of intranets.
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