INLS 247: SPECIAL LIBRARIES AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Assignment #3: Intranet Design, Collection Detail and Performance Standards

Collection list and policy: due Mar. 31
Performance Standards: due Mar. 31
Intranet Presentation and Annotated Printout: due Apr. 5


Background. This assignment builds on Assignment #2. It assumes you were successful in persuading the CEO of your organization to support your proposal. You have now been asked to prepare a second set of recommendations with additional detail in three areas: the collection, performance standards for proposed products and services, and Intranet design. This proposal is directed to the individual you selected as the person to whom the Library Director should report.

Collection. For this area, please describe the kind of physical and virtual collections the library will make available to its clientele. Include a bibliography of the core collection (print, nonprint, serials, websites, etc.). Write a collection development policy outlining the kinds of material to be added and how selections will be made. Discuss which materials will be provided in hard copy, which will be made available electronically, and which will be borrowed from other sources as needed. Consider as well any special type of non-book materials that might be important for your organizations (for example, patents, technical reports, trade catalogs, technical standards, lab notebooks, maps, pictures and photos, blueprints, films, videos, drawings, and the like). For any special type of material, indicate how it will be handled.

Service Performance Standards. For each of the products and services you listed in assignment #2 (with the exception of the collection and the Intranet), specify the standard of performance the clients can expect. (One example: if one of the products offered is a report writing service where information from a number of different sources is analyzed and summarized, the standard of performance could be specified as follows: 1) one week turnaround time, 2) guaranteed inclusion of the most current material, 3) no mis-statements or other inaccuracies, 4) a list of all sources used with complete bibliographic citations.) Of course, the particular standard of performance will differ according to the nature of the product or service.

Design of an Intranet. In Assignment #2, you were asked to include the design and management of an Intranet site for your organization as part of the library's products and services. Here you are asked to elaborate your recommended plans for the Intranet. This will be an excellent marketing opportunity for the library, so make sure you "brand" the page and give the library's products and services prominence on the website, but don't neglect other information providers within the organization. Consider all the information needs and uses of the company. Include appropriate Internet links as well as [inactive] links indicating other internal resources.

A few useful articles and examples on Intranets are as follows:

Address the policy for updating and making decisions about how decisions are made for inclusions of new material (similar to the collection development policy).

Presentation of the Proposal. Your proposal will be in three parts:

  1. the core collection list and the collection development policy
  2. the performance standards for each product and service
  3. the Intranet plan with printout of webpage(s) (or mock-ups) with annotations explaining the design and content plus the written Intranet management policy.
For class presentation, prepare a tour of the Intranet site explaining how members of the company will use the site. Describe how you chose the overall design and the links plus internal resources that we won't be able to see. Plan for a 7-8 minute presentation.


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Email Evelyn Daniel if you have any questions or want to discuss the assignment.