Linda Dumper and colleagues tell Update how the Welding Institute’s Information Services team developed core content and value for members.
One of the paradoxes for a truly excellent information service like that offered by the Welding Institute (TWI) is that users may take it for granted. Recently TWI opened its new library – and so provided an opportunity for Update to review the service and its evolution into an industry showcase.
TWI is one of Europe’s largest research and technology organisations. It is a not-for-profit company, limited by guarantee, and is ultimately owned by its membership – industrial companies, which pay an annual fee. It does not have shareholders. Any surplus is ploughed back into the business for new equipment to improve the quality of research. It is also a learned society, and has a training and qualification role within the welding and joining industry. Its 3,200 member companies and 5,000 professional members are distributed across the world, and include most of the major manufacturing companies in most industrial sectors. If you think about the items in life that have joints – everything from the seal on a packet of crisps to a nuclear power station – TWI will probably have been involved in developing the joining technology.
The range of expertise offered by its 450 staff is enormous. TWI uses multidisciplinary teams who are able to implement established or advanced joining technology, or solve problems arising at any stage, from initial design, material selection, production and quality assurance, through to service performance and repair. Its services are used by all its member companies and organisations. They represent virtually all sectors of manufacturing industry from 60 countries.
TWI’s Library and Information Services recently moved into a newly refurbished facility, the Alan Wells Building, which one of East Anglia’s leading entrepreneurs, Michael Marshall of Marshalls of Cambridge, opened formally in July this year. The building, completed in 1987, is hexagonal, built with an externally supported structure of carbon manganese steel tubular supports and aluminium and glass infill panels. As a result there are no internal pillars. The library is on the ground floor, with a quiet reading room and offices for the rest of the Information Services staff upstairs, fitted around TWI’s council room in the centre.
By the end of 2004, the complete library stock (more than 100,000 items) will be housed in one building for the first time. This will include the nationally important archive of publications on joining materials, which dates back to the early 1900s. The collection is currently stored in various rooms in the early Georgian Abington Hall in less than ideal conditions. The move has made it possible to organise the stock more efficiently, as well as making it available in a more spacious and modern facility.
Access to funding through widening access
TWI’s Information Services won a £50,000 grant from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund to enhance access to its collections. Part of the money has been put towards housing the archive, and the rest will be used to catalogue previously uncatalogued material. Staff will also work with local schools and libraries to produce packages of information from the archive. The service will help members of the public who want to undertake research into industrial history. This opening up to the public will benefit members too, as it will make the entire archive available to them for the first time.
It is quite unusual for a private organisation to receive this type of award. When the move to the current facility was first suggested, the Library and Information Services’ budget was insufficient to refurbish the archive. Up until then, it had been difficult to justify public access. But this imaginative approach to the HLF made it possible. The bid was assisted by TWI’s contracts group. It is normally involved in winning technical work or European-funded projects. It was not a simple exercise. The bid had to be carefully constructed and amended several times, and the whole process took 18 months.
The jewel in the crown
These new developments should not overshadow the information service’s core business. Most of the requests received by the library involve searches conducted on Weldasearch®, a bibliographic database of the literature on welding and allied processes published worldwide in the last 36 years. It now contains more than 185,000 abstracts produced since 1968. Its searchability has been improved over the years. TWI has always been ahead of the game, using the latest in database technologies and retrieval tools.
At the moment, work is under way to complete new software to enable the production and searching of Weldasearch via the TWI portal. It is already possible to use the improved search system, and library staff are available to help users obtain optimum results from a search.
Weldasearch is a triumphant manifestation of the value of information science. It was managed for 33 years by Peter Adams, who recently retired. He has a long and distinguished history of involvement with the BSI (British Standards Institution) and ISO (International Standards Organisation), and was instrumental in the creation (and several revisions) of the International Welding Thesaurus.
The thesaurus is used to provide an index of terms to the database. ‘We use it constantly as a working tool,’ says Sheila Thomas, Web Manager at TWI. Revisions – ‘an enormous update’ – were necessary because a lot of new technologies came out in the late 1980s. So did more commercial items. ‘It used to be purely for research, but we added other terms and indexed them.’ The thesaurus is a powerful tool. For its continuing success as an aid to retrieval, control by information scientists over any new terms that are added is essential.
The library catalogue’s subject index does not require such strict control. ‘People ask for specific things – like the Alexander Keilland [an oil rig that collapsed], or Sea Gem, or the King’s Bridge. In cases like that, you don’t want terms from the thesaurus.’ In the early days, you could not obtain material using a free-text search. Now you can. The catalogue has developed over time. The information staff have tried to make it as easy as possible to use without direct recourse to the thesaurus. But they provide a detailed query answer service too, to cover all eventualities.
The library bibliographic database and library catalogue are not the only services provided. Information Services produces a number of other items for the website, including weekly standards updates, news files (Joining News and Environment and Recycling News) plus reading lists.
TWI also offers access to JoinIT, a materials database, originally developed in collaboration with BT. In recent years it was redesigned to come within TWI’s content management system. The CMS was built by the information team under Sheila’s supervision, and draws on the thesaurus to provide index terms. Keywords for searching this database too are carefully controlled. This was Sheila’s area of responsibility before she moved to take over Peter Adam’s work on Weldasearch. Finding a replacement for her is not easy.
Succession planning
Recruitment, in fact, is an issue. So is the future. TWI is rather extraordinary these days in the loyalty it continues to command from its staff. Many come in straight from postgraduate research. They may leave for a spell in industry, but subsequently return. Their length of service – and knowledge capture when or if they leave – are concerns for TWI as a whole.
‘Succession planning is as much a concern for the information team as for the engineers and materials scientists,’ says Linda Dumper, head of the service. ‘A few years ago, when I interviewed for librarian posts, very few people knew how to catalogue. A lot of people want to do customer-facing stuff, but they didn’t want to do the nitty-gritty creation of information products.’ It is the latter which has made the service what it is, and this reluctance to get to grips with core information science is a source of regret for the team of professionals here. ‘I wouldn’t feel I was being a proper librarian without it,’ head of the library John Ayres told Update when asked to comment on the recent lack of interest in cataloguing principles and their application.
Actually, the perception among non-cataloguers that people skills are not required for cataloguing is false. TWI has been involved with European projects, including Inkass, a database service to facilitate ‘knowledge trading’. It uses ontologies instead of free text. During the writing of the software, databases were needed to try out the system. ‘In the early stages we got lost. The people we were talking to didn’t understand our side of things. Once we started talking to the software people it became clearer what was going on.’
TWI’s information service has always been a central part of the facilities offered to industrial and WJS (Welding and Joining Society) members. The staff in the department can help to access the entire collection of published items, including more than 300 current journals, the collection of books, conference proceedings, patents, standards, reports, reference works and product literature. They can also help to source the 58 years’ worth of information produced by TWI. They will liaise with research staff to ensure that enquirers receive a detailed and accurate response to their enquiries. The library also provides a rapid document delivery service from the items held in stock. The service is available to outsiders, as well as members.
Market intelligence
The availability of so many resources in electronic form means that the information team can target a client’s needs more precisely, such as providing market information, or data to back up a project proposal. (‘Failures in pressure vessels are costing £x. We anticipate that by the time this project is implemented there will be an exponential saving.’) The information service is now able to help clients make a business case, backed by evidence. Not all the material comes from specialist scientific and engineering sources – the information team will use external resources such as Dialog and Profound to provide the statistics it needs. It is expert at searching European Community websites, and those of the UK and US governments, various statistical bodies, and so on. The results – real market intelligence – are compiled for the client.
Some non-negotiable costs
The information team has always kept a look-out for developments in technology that will enable them to enhance the value of their service to members. Wherever appropriate, the website resource now has links. The team is using the Olib database and new software for Weldasearch that enables them to provide both general URLs and internet URLs. There are all sorts of interesting challenges. Like all organisations using scientific, technical and engineering applications, they need to be able to provide access to earlier as well as current versions of standards – the ones that were in operation at the time of execution of particular projects or contracts. The costs to support services of this kind are high. A quarter of the library’s budget goes on access to British Standards Online alone. The figures are huge, Linda says, but ‘we have to have this and cannot manage without it. You simply have to make a case’.
Information Services has done and continues to do so. There is careful monitoring of costs. Weldasearch has cost at least £9m over 36 years. TWI has had to find most of the funds itself. Money to develop a technology transfer service has come from a variety of other external sources, including the European Social Fund and regional funding. Cutting back was not really an option. ‘The members expected the service.’
That the information team has always been ahead of the game was demonstrated graphically when it consulted its users recently, to establish what else it should be doing. The team was a little disconcerted when nothing was suggested that it was not already doing (or prevented from doing by current copyright and licensing regimes).
‘One of the things we always have to do – it’s one of the things that worries us – is keep up to date. We have to be cost effective. We need to know we are still doing what our users want. I have a concern that we shouldn’t get complacent. A major challenge at present is finding a way to provide e-journals to all our users at an affordable price.’
Within TWI (the information team serves internal customers as well as members) staff want to do more of their own bibliographic searching. The results they obtain are not always satisfactory. ‘They don’t do it often enough to become good at it.’ So many staff come back to the library team when they are trying to do a complete literature search, and suspect they haven’t found all that they should.
One improvement for members would be to incorporate the International Welding Thesaurus within the Weldasearch search engine on the TWI website. The copyright does not belong to TWI but to the International Institute of Welding. TWI is on the committee and Linda hopes that this will make it ‘easier to reach an agreement’.
If it is possible to make improvements, you can be sure that the information team will. TWI’s is as interesting a showcase of professional excellence in information services as you could hope to find. Always pro-active, for years the staff have anticipated, planned and budgeted for future demand, capitalising on technology as it has developed. Their product demonstrates incontrovertibly the value that top-notch information scientists can add to the service a research and technology organisation offers its client communities.
Linda Dumper is Manager, Information Services, the Welding Institute.
To visit Information Services, or for help with any enquiries, the following contacts should help. For library enquiries contact: library@two.co.uk
For Weldasearch enquiries, or for any detailed literature searches, contact: weldasearch@twi.co.uk
Or just telephone TWI on 01223 891162 and ask for Information Services, or fax 01223 894342.
Updated: 20 January 2005