As part of a bigger effort at Sun to capture Sun's history, the Information Services: Digital Libraires & Research team (previously known as SunLibrary) are pulling together the history of information at Sun. As part of this effort, these image were created that showcase visually the services, innovations, learnings, changes and impact of information to Sun's business over the years.

Keep a watch out here for the full timeline and history of information at Sun as told by Sun's information experts (both current and past)!

Christy

The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is one of the major information professional organization that the information experts at Sun belong to and participate in as part of our profession. This year, SLA is going through an "Align 09", effort looking at how to express the value of the profession in the future, how to communicate that value to executives and looking at a renaming the association.

SLA hired a market research firm to collect and analyze information to guide this effort. One key thing is that explaining the value of information to an organization is difficult and the word "librarian" does not always send the message of unique value and impact as it should.

Here are a few key ways to express the value information professionals at Sun and other organizations provide to the business - it is critical!

Knowledge Sharing
Information professionals are accountable for gathering, organizing and sharing the right information for the best decisions.  Information professionals further create a culture of knowledge sharing by educating colleagues on the best use of information.

Global Networking
Through active global networking, information professionals promote  the exchange of information, innovative ideas, insights and trends.  

Competitive Advantage
Information professionals ensure organizations have the right > information, insights and trends to make good decisions and gain competitive advantage.

Bottom-line Benefits
Information professionals save organizations time and money by providing value-added intelligence that is accurate, reliable and relevant.  We deliver expert information to our organizations in a timely, accessible and convenient manner.

For more information on how the Sun information professionals provide these benefits to Sun, keep reading this external blog, Twitter, check out our various presentations on the Social Learning Exchange at Sun, and watch out for our contribution to the Sun history/museum site (coming soon) where we contributed a section called The History of Information at Sun.

Good Decisions Depend on Good Information - one executive said "To make
strong business decisions we should have the best, most timely information. If we don't have the correct information, we may make faulty decisions." (Outsell Inc., August 2008, "What Executives Think About Information Management")

The Information Services: Digital Libraries & Research team at Sun (previously known as SunLibrary) has been providing information services to Sun employees, teams and programs for about 15 years: digital content, information/knowledge sharing, research, information consulting, information organization, content evaluation/analysis, enterprise search, social networking and other information services.

The research services have gone from answering any and every business related question to focusing on deeper, more complex research for strategic business requests to integrating the information experts/researchers into key programs at the company to today where we focus on the strategic research as well as our pro-active research service (via our Research Blog). This shift began around 1996 in conjunction with providing more digital information services to employees so they could more easily get information on their own, when they need it (we had to wait for information providers and publishers to catch up to our need for web-based content).

Information experts have the ability to understand the organization's information needs and anticipate those needs based on a keen pulse we have on the business and how integrated we are to teams across the organization. With that, we've created a Research Blog where we are sharing research results from key requests as well as conducting research pro-actively on topics that we know are important to Sun's business.

It is critical for employees to have access to quality information to drive their learning, business decisions and to stay competitive. What we've said for years is: Content + Research + Technology = Knowledge, Innovation, and Effectiveness = REVENUE.

From the Special Libraries Association blog, a member was interviewed about research skills. Here is what the interviewer, Chris Kennealy, author and journalist, said: "... discovered that there’s more to research on the Web than just “Google-ing.”  (read the full post and access the interview here)

We have been thrilled to offer these research and information consulting services at Sun and see the impact of information to Sun's business - information is our passion!

"If these highly skilled employees lack authoritative information to inform their decisions, their work is compromised." (Forrester, May 2008, "Best Practices: Reinventing The Corporate Library"

Sun has been a subscriber of Safari Books Online for many years! We started out small but quickly grew the access to employees as well as influenced the content and features based on Sun's business needs. The Safari Books Online service provides Sun employees access to over 8000 books, all online, all from tier 1 publishers. The ability to search, learn, download, discover, share are all key features of what makes Safari Books Online a critical information service for Sun employees.

Here are a few things employees have said about the information availale:

• "Sun makes use of many different software technologies. Usually, a developer's primary focus spans just a few of these technologies but he/she will invariably need to use, interface, or reference several others during their career here at Sun. Although google has become an indispensable reference tool, it is not able to replace authoritative texts on technical subjects. Safari has saved me a great deal of time by allowing me to find the best book for the task at hand. The ability to instantly have an expert available in the form of a book to answer questions or provide training has made it easier and more enjoyable to be a software developer here at Sun."
• "I was recently tasked to write some software in a language I had never used before. I was able to access excellent references within minutes using Safari instead of waiting for a book to be delivered or wasting time in the local bookstores. I consider Safari an essential tool in my work here at Sun."
• "This service helped our team get a very good understanding of the capabilities of an open-source software tool by giving us access to several books on the topic. This saved us a lot of time and effort. It would have saved us even more time and effort if I had thought to use Safari first rather than trying to compose appropriate Google searches to answer our questions...."

Sun has also purchased access to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) books online via Safari. ITIL is a widely-accepted approach to IT service management across the globe. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practices, drawn from public and private sectors internationally. Here is one employee's response to have the ITIL information available at her fingertips:

• "This is the best news.. Sun needs the gift of ITIL V3 Service Management Best Practices, and having them available for regular use is a win for all of us. May we as a community continue to use this to make the most of our service delivery and service management practices. This documentation and our organizations collaborating has competitive value for Sun and the IT Industry as a whole."

Safari recently wrote a case study on Sun's use of Safari Books Online and the value from Sun's perspective. Check out the case study!

Also, Safari created a customer video - a commercial - and interviewed several users of their service including Sun's Neeraj Mathur. Check out the video and hear what customers have to say about the impact to their business and what Neeraj says the impact is to his work at Sun.

For more information about Safari Books Online, Sun employees can see our SunSpace page at Information Services > eBooks > Safari Books Online.

Thanks everyone - enjoy, keep learning!

Christy

The Information Services: Digital Libraires & Research team within Sun Learning Services have been part of Sun for many years. We provide the information that Sun employees need to get their work done, make good decisions, stay competitive and smart.

One way that we help to keep employees informed and connect with employees regarding their information needs is Twitter. Our Twitter handle is libraryresearch.

Follow-us, connect with us - we are Sun's information experts!