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Scientific Generics: an electronic library on every desktop

Company background

Scientific Generics is a technical and business innovation organisation based in Cambridge, UK, and is part of the recently LSE-listed Generics Group. Employing about 200 staff, Scientific Generics offers customised technology solutions and strategic consultancy to a wide range of organisations internationally and, since its early stages, has built up an extensive portfolio of intellectual property.

The company is involved in research and development in emerging science and technology areas across an immensely broad subject coverage, including engineering, telecommunications, life sciences and biotechnology, applied sciences, business management and IT software.

Business challenge

As an innovative organisation offering cutting-edge solutions in the technology and business arena, Scientific Generics has a vast information requirement. Managing the company's information needs presents a major challenge to Sarah Hinton, the company's information manager who operates virtually single-handedly.

In today's Internet age and the move towards using much more electronic information, we are witnessing an ever-changing environment where end users expect to carry out much of their everyday research needs at the desktop. This is particularly in evidence at Scientific Generics, where many of the staff come straight from university and often come equipped with certain expectations about information searching.

Users' needs, in terms of support from an information professional, are also changing. Rather than requiring searches to be carried out on their behalf, users doing their own searching now require expertise and advice about information, as the question "can you find…?" becomes "where can I find…?". As Sarah says, "Increasingly, people like to search for themselves and will do so, whether you give them the tools or not. As such, the information manager's function is becoming more of a training and guidance role".

Sarah is addressing the changing needs of users through her aim to provide an electronic library on every desktop.

Business solution

Scientific Generics turned to Dialog, one of the world's leading providers of Internet-based information solutions, to assist in harnessing its Intranet to give users a powerful information research tool at the desktop.

Dialog Intranet Toolkit was selected by Scientific Generics for several reasons. In a nutshell, its customisation capabilities, together with the powerful Dialog search engine, give the company the ability to provide end user access via the company Intranet to targeted content sourced from Dialog, enabling precision searching.

This is achieved by creating custom search forms, or using the ready-made forms, with exactly the Dialog databases and options required. Users can then carry out their own searching with as much or as little help as they require, by either devising their own search queries or using pre-defined ones. Dialog Intranet Toolkit is so user-friendly that Sarah herself manages its administration, with no or little intervention from Dialog once initial set-up is complete, although this is optional.

One of the major benefits that Dialog Intranet Toolkit offered Scientific Generics is the range of easy and varied search interfaces that gives users the choice to search according to their level of experience. As Sarah says, "One man's command language is another man's poison. Dialog Intranet Toolkit really helps people who aren't familiar with online searching as it offers them a nice easy portal. You can select and pick out files in specific subject areas so that they have a tailored search. It serves as an introduction to what Dialog content is available without worrying them about any command language at all".

As a company with a broad research remit, breadth of content was a major consideration when selecting a company-wide solution. Scientific Generics has been a customer of Dialog's for at least 5 years, subscribing to all three of its flagship products, Dialog, DataStar and Profound. It had chosen the company for its depth and breadth of content, as Sarah points out, "We needed something that has the broadest scope and Dialog seems to really stand out in the industry". She adds, "I do look at other major information providers and have demonstrations by them but they don't go broad enough for our needs. With Dialog, instead of having to negotiate about 40 separate contracts with information providers on the Internet we can have one negotiated contract with one provider."

Pricing is often a key issue when rolling out access to high quality information across the organisation and Scientific Generics was able to benefit from Dialog's flexible pricing solutions for Dialog Intranet Toolkit. As Sarah says, "paying a flat fee for company-wide use for Dialog content gives us a safety net so I was able to open it up across the company. If we were on a pay-as-you-go model, there would be much more caution about giving all staff access to these databases".

Dialog Intranet Toolkit enabled Sarah to respond to a growing trend amongst researchers to conduct a large part of their searching themselves. She comments, "More and more researchers will do their own searching whether you give them the tools or not; just not quite as well, perhaps, as they would if they had access to tools such as Dialog".

Key Benefits

• Information management: The time gained from conducting ad hoc search requests allowed Sarah to spend more time on important information management activities, such as evaluating different sources and selecting the most appropriate ones for users.
• Breadth and depth of content: The company's requirement for information across a broad range of subjects was fulfilled through gaining access to Dialog's vast and authoritative content collection.
• Range of search interfaces: End users' desire to do their own searching whatever their level of experience was achieved by offering a range of search interfaces.
• Growth of company Intranet usage: The usefulness of the company Intranet is growing as users are offered valuable and relevant information tools.

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