Jinfo: Introduction to FreePint's Research into Visibility

Introduction to FreePint's Research into Visibility
Jinfo Blog

25th March 2015

Abstract

Robin Neidorf presents an introduction to FreePint's recent research into visibility. She looks at areas such as respondents' involvement in technology-related decisions that may affect information visibility, budgets for resource discovery and what the information managers polled think of when discussing "visibility".

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At the start of the FreePint Topic Series "Making Information Visible", I posed a basic question: What is visibility? In that article, I described the challenge of supporting information managers with their objectives around making sure that users find and use the right information at the time of need.

Some organisations perceive the challenge of visibility as being largely about technology. Others focus instead on user training and awareness.

Three Essential Areas

FreePint's own perspective, after working with and discussing the issue with a wide range of customers, is that three overlapping areas need to be addressed for any "visibility" initiative to be successful:

Technology
Content
User behaviour.

We launched a survey to better understand how information managers understand and address these three areas, with regard to their visibility efforts.

The survey was launched in January 2015, and we invited customers, Topic Series registrants and FreePint Newsletter readers to participate. We also put out the call for participation through social media and professional associations.

Cross-Sector Participation

When we closed the survey in early March, 145 information managers had participated.

Figure 1: Industries covered by respondents of the survey

Figure 1 shows the range of industries covered by the respondents of the survey. Under "Other", representative industries include:

Accounting
Architecture and Engineering
Government
Healthcare
Insurance
Not-for-profit
Publishing
Research.

Varying Information Centre Set-Ups

Figure 2: Relative sizes of information staff to supported staff

We asked respondents how many staff members they have in their information department, library or equivalent. We also asked how many members of staff those information professionals support. 112 respondents provided valid data for both questions, enabling us to create a scattergram of relative sizes of information staff to supported staff. This is shown in Figure 2.

The average number of staff in information centres for this set of data is 10.48, and the median is 5. The average number of supported headcount is 7,625.78, and the median is 1,650.

We asked respondents if they support staff on a global or regional basis. The respondent pool was just about evenly split between the two options.

Involvement in Technology-Related Decisions

We asked respondents how involved they are in technology-related decisions that may affect information visibility. They could select from the following choices:

Very involved - I help make the decision
Somewhat involved - I am asked for input into decisions
Slightly involved - I learn about decisions as they are being made
Not involved - I learn about decisions after the fact

Their responses are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Involvement in technology-related decisions

Budget for Supporting and Improving Visibility

Finally, we asked if they have any budget that is or could be used towards supporting or improving visibility, and the answer options were as follows:

Yes, currently used towards resource discovery
Yes, but not currently used towards resource discovery
No, budget for this would be managed in this area of the business:

Their responses are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Do you have any budget that is or could be used towards supporting or improving visibility?

Among the "other" parts of the business that might manage this budget were named:

Accounting
Administration (2 repondents)
Banking/finance (2 respondents)
Collection development
Communications (2 respondents)
Corporate strategy (3 respondents)
IT (12 respondents)
Intranet team
Knowledge services (2 respondents)
Marketing
Partner group
Shared services.

Several respondents commented that they weren't sure where in the business this would sit, and two commented that there is no formal budgeting process and any projects like this would be determined on a case by case basis.

What is Visibility?

We asked respondents what they mean by "visibility". This was an open-ended question that respondents could complete however they wanted. The word cloud in Figure 5 provides an initial view of what concepts come up when information managers think of visibility. We'll provide a more detailed analysis of their answers later in the survey report.

Figure 5: Information managers' views on visibility

Questions and Analysis

The survey was divided into three parts to cover current environment, emerging needs and attitudes around technology, content and user behaviour. In each of the following chapters, we examine one of these three areas in detail followed by a section on overall strategy and success.

In-depth analysis can be found in the following FreePint Subscription Articles:

Full report (PDF) contains all of the above content, in a convenient package for reference and sharing: