Skill Sets of Information Professionals (Part 3 of 4)

Whether named Information Professionals, Digital Asset Managers, Virtual Librarians or something else, these essential people possess a special skill-set necessary to organize and manage your intellectual properties, especially important as you implement digital access to your data via the web to your employees, clients and prospects. Candidates with strong IT backgrounds only, often lack the depth of knowledge required to understand how your assets are used from a business application perspective. And, traditional librarians most often lack the technical expertise needed to properly copyright, catalog, meta-tag and organize assets in digital format for online access. Information professionals today must have both technical expertise, and strong organizational proficiency. Finding, hiring and training, or contracting the right Information Manager (Digital Asset Manager, Librarian, Information Professional) is critical to the successful implementation of a digital or digital and hard-copy combined library.

In addition to experience in cataloging, indexing, meta-tagging, digital file formats, and strong organizational and research skills, many information professionals now also possess certifications in Knowledge Management, Copyright Management, Digital Rights Management, Business and Competitive Intelligence. They have a strong working knowledge of information technology and office applications, including: content aggregation tools, SharePoint and other tools including: Factiva, LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Factset, Thomson ONE Analytics, and FinancialTimes.com, to name a few.  Information Managers posses the technical skills necessary to function as the system administrator of your library, providing different users with different access levels to your assets.

In Part-4 of this series, I will speak directly to LAC-Group’s expertise and 25-years experience in library services, as we employee nearly 400 information professionals, all of which are working from client sites all over the world today.

“He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge -where it is written and where it is to be found.”- A.A. Hodge