Corporate scholarship: an oxymoron?
Current awareness services
How to keep up to date
Upstream knowledge management
Monthly table of contents
NOTE: This article excerpt is a collaboration between Montague Institute Fellow John Morelli and Jean Graef. Morelli contributed the main theme, the science example, and comments on the two commercially available software programs. Graef edited the manuscript, contributed the information on the Society Knowledge Base software, and added commentary. Graef's entire commentary, along with a software comparison chart, is available to Society members. June, 2002
Introduction This article discusses three software solutions to a common problem -- how to make current information collected by corporate subject matter experts accessible to the entire enterprise. Typically, these information nuggets are gleaned from specialized electronic databases and then squirreled away on someone's hard disk. Making them available on the web -- either as individual documents or "collections" -- can be accomplished using bibliographic utilities, relational databases, or portal software. Each type of solution has its pros and cons.
Keeping up to date Most business units need a current awareness strategy – a system for keeping up to date on professional and general business topics. In the legal field, this may mean current legislation, judicial rulings, or political trends. In the medical field, it might be the latest treatments for a disease. In science and engineering, it could mean information about new research, technologies, and products.
In most companies, it’s common for different departments to be interested in various aspects (or "facets") of a topic. For example, different facets of the topic of "lead paint removal" might be of interest to three groups:
Someone in each group usually develops a system for keeping up to date on information about these issues. Typically, the system would include:
Leveraging current awareness information A current awareness system can do a good job of meeting the needs of a single business unit, team, or project, but without a special effort it's not available for others in the enterprise. For example, the lawyer who is aware of new tighter legislation may not know about the current limitations of current testing methodologies. Researchers developing new remediation methods may not be aware of new pricing pressures due to competition.
Occasionally, some current awareness trackers become recognized as subject matter experts by employees outside their group. At first, information is shared informally by e-mail, telephone, or conversations around the water cooler. Experts who receive many informal requests for help eventually discover that making their current awareness archives over the web is a time saver. In some cases, the effort evolves into a formal information service with permanent funding.
Searching information sources Electronic databases are a common type of current awareness source. To find relevant information in them, you formulate and submit queries ("canned" searches). For our lead paint example, a query for lead paint analysis methods in the Chemical Abstracts database might look something like this:
(Compound)(lead) and (Word)(analy*) and (Word)(dust or paint)
Designing database queries requires some expertise. Specifically, you have to know:
Furthermore, the queries must be changed to reflect new features in information technologies, scientific advances, and changing business conditions.
Usually the query retrieves several records, each representing a journal article citation like this one from the Chemical Abstracts database. The records are “tagged” to make it easy to identify document's the author, title, publication date, abstract, etc. The tag consists of two parts: a label (e.g. "Title" or "TI") and a value (e.g. "Leveraging current awareness services"). Tags increase the effectiveness of the database query and also make it possible to export the results into a format suitable for sharing.
Capturing, storing, searching, and sharing information Finding information is only the first step. Unless you have a storage and retrieval system, it's of little use. Today, most systems are electronic, since much of the source data is in electronic format to begin with and because electronic documents are cheaper and easier to use. Systems for storing and retrieving current awareness information generally fall into three categories:
Each tool has strengths and weaknesses. All, however, provide the four key elements needed to leverage information on an enterprise basis -- capturing and storing, searching, organizing, and web publishing.
Bibliographic utilities A bibliographic utility is a customized database program that allows researchers to capture, store, and organize reference material, such as bookmarks, web sites, and journal articles. Basically it provides:
A popular example is the family of programs published by ISI ResearchSoft. Three of these programs -- End Note, Reference Manager, and ProCite -- are geared toward capturing information and printing bibliographies. The fourth -- Reference Web Poster® -- is designed for publishing journal article citations on the web.
The ISI programs have multiple record templates to facilitate one-click importing of data from commercial databases as well as multiple report templates to make it easy to produce bibliographies and footnotes in standard formats.
Reference Web Poster® search results
Results of a search using Reference Web Poster® shows a list of results about lead paint and lead dust analysis. The first item in the list shows an article of interest to our lawyers. They might add keywords in the query to refine the search to focus on the law, lawyers, etc. The second “hit” is clearly something of interest to our scientists.
*I wish to thank yess, a limited liability company, for the use of their lead paint remediation database for screen shots. They also donated access on the server for me to search and generate the screenshots."-- John Morelli
Reference Web Poster® full record display
Notice the words we searched for ("lead dust") are highlighted in bold. The word “lead-based-paint” is also highlighted because a search for “lead” will also find “lead-base-paint."
Tag labels are displayed at the far left, followed by tag values.
Society Knowledge Base Another option is the Society Knowledge Base software, included with every Montague Institute seminar. The software -- basically a custom relational database -- can store tagged bibliographic records. Researchers can link them to author contact information as well as a taxonomy of terms and topics. Researchers can produce bibliographies in HTML format as well as dynamic (always up-to-date) A - Z indexes (as an example, see the Montague Institute A - Z Index page).
While the ISI programs are designed to store and publish citations from commercial bibliographic databases, the Society Knowledge Base serves as a one-stop-shop. It can be used for all kinds of research sources (including images and programs) as well as information about people, including complete contact details, e-mail exchanges, and interview notes.
Society Knowledge Base: Documents view
The General Resource View in the Knowledge Base can be used for a variety of sources -- web sites, reports, MS Office documents, PDF files. Each record can be linked via an active URL to the complete document or file on the Internet, an intranet, or a local hard drive. Records can include images, topics, taxonomy terms, and keywords.
Data can be exported as text, HTML, or XML. The entire Knowledge Base can also be published and updated as a "live" database on the web.
Society Knowledge Base taxonomy
The Thesaurus part of the Knowledge Base consists of records for controlled vocabulary terms (index terms). Each record can include:
Portal software A third option is a web portal, which allows individuals or business units to create custom web browser views of corporate information. With portal software, it's possible to:
In this scenario, subject matter experts deposit current awareness documents into the portal repository. Employees from other departments can then (if they have permission) "subscribe" to this information so that it shows up regularly on their own portal screen or arrives as an e-mail message.
An example of portal software suitable for work groups and business units is Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server®. Unlike the two other options discussed above, SharePoint uses the computer's folder and file system as a repository. This makes it easier to integrate current awareness information with other applications, but it won't work on other operating systems (e.g. Macintosh or Unix).
SharePoint portal server
This screen (the portal "dashboard") shows a personalized web site with custom search engine, categories, links, news stories, and announcements. The "dashboard" screen is the window into the portal's information. Other key components of the portal system are:
Storing and retrieving collections Storing and publishing individual reference sources is useful, but often it's necessary to retrieve a whole set (collection) of references for a specific project. The most common solution is to store downloaded documents in separate project folders on your hard disk. But what if a document is used for more than one project? What if you remember the document but forget where you filed it (or what you named it)?
Once the document reference is stored in a database, researchers can create tag (field) labels and values which can be searched -- alone or in combination. Examples of tags that might be useful for retrieving collections of sources are:
With these tags and values in place, it's possible to construct a "canned" search that can be run periodically. For example, the attorney might run a search once a month to retrieve a list of new articles on the legal aspects of "lead paint" posted during the last 30 days.
Summary Exposing the results of individual current awareness researchers to employees outside their immediate work group is possible through informal people networking and web publishing. Before source material can be shared over the web, it must be captured, stored, and indexed. Bibliographic utilities are useful for a specific kind of material -- citations downloaded from commercial bibliographic databases. The Society Knowledge Base provides a one-stop-shop for all kinds of sources, including people. Portal software includes personalized views of information and integration of data from different internal and external systems.
Created on June 19, 2002 | Updated on November 1, 2006
