Return to Table of Contents
 
 

CIC-14 Becomes a Bridge to Human Knowledge

 This article is one in a series of interviews BITS is conducting with CIC managers to get their views of the "big picture" as it relates to their work and the Laboratory mission. These people have also been asked to do a little forecasting as it applies to their business. BITS invites readers to join in the spirit of these interviews, treating the forecasts as a sort of informed speculation without holding anyone's "feet to the fire" to make the predictions come true.

 The designation "The Library Group" hardly fits anymore. Yes, CIC-14 still operates a library; people can come in and browse the stacks, but the group's organization and focus have changed in response to customer needs. As a result of discussions with customers as well as frequent surveys, the group is now organized around product teams. "Product output teams" include the books and journals team, including electronic books and journals; electronic databases (the newest); reports team; customer services; and the Library Without Walls (LWW) team. The business support and resource team sustains the product teams.

 Group Leader Rick Luce explains why the library focuses on customers: "We must be user-centered to serve our customers best. Our viability as a group and as an institution is a function of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is not just a result of satisfaction-it's a function of delight. Otherwise, today's customers could just as well go elsewhere." The group formally surveys one fourth of its customers quarterly; thus, each library customer has an opportunity to collaborate with the library on its future directions at least once each year.
 
 

The Future of Knowledge Management

Customers have told Luce and his teams that electronic access to information is essential. But Luce takes the idea a giant step further. "It's not enough to collect scientific data from the outside and add it to our own. Our job now is to wire people's brains together so that sharing, reasoning, and collaboration become almost instinctive and part of everyday work." Luce sees the LANL Research Library of the future as an organization that does much more than collect ever larger amounts of information digitally. "The challenge is to organize, manage, and add value to the information to make it useful, especially for scientific collaborations," he says. He sees the role of the library in the future as one of "knowledge management": making more effective use of the intellectual capital of the Laboratory. This will enable LANL to better compete or enable collaboration, both internally and external to the Laboratory, as appropriate.

 To manage knowledge effectively, we need to tap our "corporate intelligence," which includes the following components and related tasks:
 
 

  1. Archives of documents, collections. Maintaining these is the most traditional library role.
  2. Dynamic scientific databases for accessing scientific literature. (e.g., SciSearch at LANL, BIOSIS at LANL, etc.) We must build and maintain these as customer needs evolve.
  3. High-bandwidth, multimedia communications; e.g., CNN-type multimedia, experimental simulations, and so on, not only text. Our task is to integrate these components.
  4. Organizational human knowledge-knowledge of corporate resources-the who knows what; who does what? We will map this component of corporate intelligence.
  5. Information analysis. We will perform this task by focusing on real needs as identified through dialog with customers.
The added value of performing these tasks is in the recognition that everyone is, in fact, drowning in information, and time is precious, so the tasks must be focused in such a way as to make information useful. Knowledge must be presented in such a way that it can be easily tapped and integrated into a whole that is coherent and makes sense to the user. The group's customers say the library is on the right track with the LWW digital library project. (The LWW will be a topic of another article in this series.) The group has also found that the library must adapt its products to the customers' work environments. An example is integrating SciSearch citations into users' personal bibliographic management tools.
 
 

Getting There from Here

"Our task over the next few years is to complete the bridge between the traditional library paradigm and new digital library services," Luce says, "although we will always maintain a physical space and physical collections." At the present the library has some 1,600 physical journal subscriptions, of which roughly 700 are also available electronically. During the transition library users will have access to both versions. "As we learn how people use these new formats, we will probably make a gradual move to the electronic-only versions for many titles," Luce adds. There are also some 260 electronic books such as Encyclopedia Brittanica, which have come on-line in a sort of "ripple effect" from the journal world.

 When asked what are the impediments to getting more journals on-line, Luce explains that publishers are still learning how to make a paradigm shift from paper presses. They understood how to make money in the paper world, and they are relatively slow to adopt new technologies. Many see a threat to their business, including concerns about pirating, lost profits, and copyright issues. There are some innovative, although user unfriendly, solutions being tried or in the development stages: pay-per-view schemes and software for read-only documents so that they cannot be saved or copied.

 Being proactive about future directions involves training library staff to have a far greater depth of knowledge of customer needs as well as more comprehensive knowledge about information technology as it develops. The staff, in turn, helps users to increase their understanding; an example might be explaining what a database such as SciSearch at LANL is optimized to do as well as how to use it. In addition, the library recognizes that LANL users have a wide variety of skill levels and sophistication. The group takes responsibility for raising these levels by providing classes.

 The Research Library's vision of itself has changed from that of the "knowledge archive" to one of being a vital partner with its customers in managing knowledge. The group carries out its end of the partnership by keeping in close touch with customers' present needs and keeping an eye on the future of technology and innovations in information management that will maximize the benefits of this partnership.

 Luce is the Research Library Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Project Leader of the Library Without Walls. He received a 1996 LANL Distinguished Performance Award for contributions supporting science and technology through the transformation of the Research Library. He is known nationally for his work in linking heterogeneous library systems. He is an avid road cyclist and likes to spend time with his family exploring the Southwest.

 Rick Luce, rick.luce@lanl.gov, (505) 667-4448
Research Library (CIC-14)

 Ann Mauzy, mauzy@lanl.gov, (505) 667-5387
Communications Arts and Services (CIC-1)