For a few years, librarians have seen their job changing. Considered as real architects of information, they are now responsible for the classification and accessibility to documents and publications of their organization. Sandrine Rollin works for APCA (Assemblée Permanente des Chambres d’Agriculture) as knowledge and web-project manager. Using everyday the knowledge base PMB, she explains below strategic choices of its organization.
With PMB, the APCA opens its knowledge base to its employees? contributions
This article is translated from the magazine Archimag (March 2018 – n°312)
Structuration of information is nowadays crucial, especially for APCA which offers its employees the possibility to record their own information (publications, synthesis, reports, surveys, presentations…) in the knowledge base PMB. As a consequence, librarians stand out as experts of the adequate qualification of documents and of their enrichment with metadata.
Sandrine Rollin says « The important thing is to make sure that we can easily find the documents that we are looking for and to grant their access to everyone. »
Different tools to make pulications easier and inform the community of their availibility
When employees connect to PMB web portal, they access to different contribution forms. After choosing the right one, they only have to pick their document up from their computer and complete some information (title, author, summary) to add it to the documentary base. Contributors can also connect to the Intranet, which is the same for every Agricultural Chamber, and publish a piece of news to inform the whole community that a new document is available in the base.
Sandrine Rollin adds : « It is a personal initiative of the contributors. In parallel, with all the team of librarians, we use the e-mail alerts to spread specific news to particular publics. »
This project is very important for APCA, which hopes above all capitalize on the documents that are produced by its employees.
Capitalizing knowledge is a necessity
APCA’s employees were already used to drop documents into Alfresco, a document management software. On the opposite, it was not the case for other members of the Agricultural Chambers. Sandrine Rollin and its team have helped them to feel comfortable with this new process and have convinced them of the importance to capitalize and valorize every publication.
« Our main task consisted in explaining that the new process was simple and necessary » says Sandrine Rollin. First contributions are in the documentary base and the feedbacks are already very positive.
Structuration, archiving and interoperability
This opening of the PMB database to the contributions was very useful to highlight the basis of the next 3 projects that should mobilize the administrators of the tool during the whole year :
- structuration of the information. Employees are not librarians : they don’t know how to categorize a document in order to identify it clearly. As a consequence, the ambition is to make sure that contributors use relevant data so that documents can be easily found ;
- setting an archiving system in order to keep in the database only the necessary documents ;
- making the documentary base interoperable with those of other organizations: every Agricultural Chamber could make visible and available their documents in several thematic basis after dropping their documents only in one database and only once.
