National Geographic's Evolving Library

The library has had to reshape itself as the society has changed from a place where it was normal to take as long as three years to properly research, write, and photograph a complex story, to a place where daily deadlines are a fact of life." Behind this telling statement by the staff of the library at the National Geographic Society (NGS), headquartered in Washington, DC, lies a story of team players managed by their leader to reach their fullest potential.

Enabled by technology and driven by a philosophy of customer service, training, and cross-divisional cooperation, the library team has helped fuel NGS's innovations and subsequent success. The venerable, yellow-bordered magazine has been joined by a family of related products, including National Geographic Traveler, National GeographicAdventure, the children's magazine World,books, games, and educational software, and, most recently, National Geographic Today, a recently launched daily news service on the new domestic National Geographic Channel that made its debut this year. In June, Susan Fifer Canby, director of libraries and indexing at NGS, received the Innovations in Technology Award from the Special Libraries Association (SLA) at its annual conference in San Antonio, testimony to the distance the library, and the NGS as an organization, has come in a short time. Fifer Canby is careful to include her entire staff in the award. "The library staff is the library," she says. "It is not the collections or the technology. It is having a team with the strong listening and interpreting skills and versatility to retranslate their jobs as the needs of the organization change."

The library's self-proclaimed mission is to "provide NSG with a competitive advantage…by increasing the productivity of staff and the quality of products," to be accomplished by providing staff with "accurate, efficient, and cost-effective access" to strategic information for the purpose of "researching, creating, and marketing" National Geographic's welter of products.

Fifer Canby says this mission is accomplished in part through the library staff's support of the organization and participation in cross-divisional teams in the editorial and business division: "Finding niches where things should be done to make things work better." According to the results of a recent survey of NGS staff, the library is accomplishing the mission with great success.

The survey was conducted for the library by the society's marketing department in April, the first independent library survey. "We don't want to be a little group on the edge of the organization but integrated and really connected," Fifer Canby says, "so we evolve and keep our fingers on the pulse of change." One focus of the survey was to determine how research habits are changing as the organization enlists a younger staff who seem less print oriented.

Four in ten respondents work in content development/editorial functions. Half of the respondents indicate they use the library daily, while seven in ten use the library at least two to three times per week. Only 12 percent of NGS staff say they've never used the library. Users most often consulted library staff to "stay informed about business/market issues," to "check facts for NG products," or to "learn of scientific discoveries." According to the survey summary, "Majorities indicated that the library saves individuals, as well as departments, time and money…. Four in ten believe it would take ten hours or more to gather the information the library provides them in a typical week, if the library staff and resources were unavailable." Three-quarters disagreed with the following statement: "The library offers too many services and resources." One-third of the society's staff use the library web site daily. The potential future services that created the most interest are an internal/external experts database, web access to the news collection (clipping) files, and interactive web training on research topics, in addition to in-person training classes already provided. Longer hours of operation would also be desirable.

Scattered through the pages of the official report of the survey results are quotes from users offering insight into the value of the library to NGS. "In many ways, the library is the heartbeat of NGS. I couldn't imagine life here without it," said one. Another respondent said the invaluable library staff and services "have been noted as significant assets by consultants and partners with whom we have worked and really help me and my staff do our jobs more efficiently and smartly." Acknowledging the surfeit of information the library has helped him wend through, another staffer said, "The NGS Library and staff provide the long view and help create order amongst the chaos of all the information now available at our fingertips."

"Browsing multiple research materials all in one place" was the top reason for visiting the library on-site. The availability of reference staff was also rated highly. In selecting from a list of library services, respondents rated "reference help" as tops, along with "library staff institutional memory." Help with online searching slightly edged out "performing online searches for you."

The NGS intranet, the specific tool for which SLA gave its Innovations in Technology award to Fifer Canby, is an impressive array of current and archival information, access to internal databases, and guides to creating departmental web sites. Its intuitive arrangement makes research painless for even the most timid information client.

"A cross-divisional team and I designed the intranet to support communication in the NGS," Fifer Canby said. "Initially we focused on the highest needs: news of the organization, a directory of employees, information about divisions, familiar tools translated for the desktop (editorial style manual, credits, market research reports, research grantee materials, and, of course, the library subscriptions, pointers, etc.). After that, divisions added content about themselves," using web site design templates created with Information Systems team members.

The intranet was intended to act as portal to the NGS, according to Fifer Canby. As staff from the various NGS divisions have information, announcements, news to share, they add to their web page and link to the front page of the intranet. "The idea was to provide the organization with a means to publish for itself, with division heads taking responsibility for content created by their staff, so that the intranet is decentralized yet managed," says Fifer Canby. "We offer training on building web pages and writing and posting headlines, to encourage staff to use this tool."

A daily scan of 3000 newspaper sources aimed at senior management, division heads, teams, and the legal department, the library's Business Intelligence Reports (BIR) ranks as one of the most impressive segments of the intranet. The equivalent of one full-time staff member ingests articles from Dow Jones into Lotus Notes. Librarians, in their frequent role as filters of information, select roughly three top stories in every industry of interest to NGS. They write a two- to three-sentence précis of the article and provide a direct link to the full text and also maintain a 90-day archive of the BIR. A new service this year is a monthly summary of the daily content, followed by an annual analysis of the trends that have been identified and how they have developed.

"NGS in the News" tracks ways in which the society has been featured in the media. Another segment is "Corporate Watch," in which the library staff select one competitor company to review in depth each month. The service is e-mailed to more than 100 off-site board members, employees, and partners as well as made available over the NGS intranet. This external group will benefit when the intranet is joined by a secure extranet that will share valuable information outside the limits of the local office.

Another product that provides "filtered" information is Science Digest, a twice-weekly digest of web sites providing up-to-the-minute information on topics prominently featured in NGS products. It provides ideas and leads, and the nationalgeographic.com team and the new NG Channel News staff rely on it heavily for their science reporting. Clients estimate that Science Digest saves them 3.2 hours per week. "The BIR and NGS in the News alone are worth whatever it costs to support the library," said one enthusiastic respondent to the recent market survey.

Fifer Canby's senior staff work with divisional staff formally via liaison programs, to make sure they stay in touch with problems and issues. The liaisons attend the planning and editorial meetings of their assigned divisions. Key partnerships are with IT and communications. The library also works closely with Market Research, Development, Editorial Research, and Law, Business and Government Affairs. "We work side by side to lead, support, and confer on strategies," Fifer Canby says, in describing the close involvement in organizational success maintained by the library. "As the organization evolves, we work to stay in touch with the users…helping them to translate their needs so the library can [assist them]."

Fifer Canby is responsible for the library, the Archives & Records Library, and indexing. She looks for a variety of competencies when building, retaining, and retraining her team. Nine of the 30 staffers hold an MLS; five have advanced degrees in English, history, journalism, and geography; and four others have technical certificates. Two staff members are currently attending library school. The majority of staff have liberal arts backgrounds, but three are business specialists, one has a background in science, and two in education.

Fifer Canby estimates that library staff spend 25 percent of their time building, tending, and circulating the collections; 25 percent on creating original content (indexes, research guides, web content, time line); ten percent on consulting, research, and reference; ten percent on training users; ten percent on planning, managing, meetings, reporting, and learning; 15 percent on cross-divisional efforts (intranet, knowledge management [KM], editorial, marketing, and liaison meetings); and five percent on technical support.

The qualities Fifer Canby seeks in a potential NGS librarian or to inculcate in present staff go beyond the traditional skills one would expect a special librarian to have. "I look for strong written and oral communication skills, energy, flexibility, intellectual curiosity, team player [sensibilities], organizational skills, an interest in technology, and leadership. I think about how best to get the work of the library done and respond to the opportunities the organization offers, while helping each person do his or her best work."

"The most innovative thing and the one we are especially suited to do is help the society evolve knowledge management—the sharing for productive gains," Fifer Canby said. At the CFO's request, Fifer Canby and her staff have pulled together a cross-divisional KM team, with Fifer Canby as its leader, to develop a knowledge-sharing process across the society. An early step in that direction is represented by the "Competitive Edge Seminars." People in the organization with special skills that will benefit others are identified and invited to teach a seminar to share this knowledge base. Topics have included negotiation, due diligence, geography, and story creation. These sessions are full-day seminars, developed across divisional lines. The concept originated with the library, which often acts as coordinator. On the other end of the spectrum from these formal classes is the Noon-time Forum, started nearly ten years ago by a library staffer. A cross-divisional committee invites people who are starting new products, doing innovative work, or involved in a project that needs to be widely known by staff to speak to the organization over lunch.

"When new products are in development, it usually means that those managers are open and even eager for help. The library tries to be there to determine what they are doing and translate our skills to assist them. We use the orientation process to the libraries as one of the access vehicles. New staff seem most open to seeing the libraries in less traditional roles, particularly if we position ourselves that way from the beginning."

Fifer Canby was asked whether there is funding for library support built into new initiatives. "New initiatives are part of our plan but are usually not supported initially by the organization. Management likes to see things up and running—to feel no extra cost while new services become institutionalized. Even then, they may just be folded in under the library umbrella, as we reduce other services to make room for the new.

"[NGS] staff say that our libraries create a serious competitive edge for the organization and are a resource that competitors would kill for. And yet in difficult fiscal times, there is always extreme pressure to reduce all services in the organization, forgetting that it is this synergy and centralization that make the organization work so well," says Fifer Canby. "Competition for resources is constant, change is constant; libraries have to stay vigilant about new opportunities, translating our services to best support our organizations, because they can't make this leap by themselves."