Peter Zeimet, Barr Engineering

This electronic tour is by Peter Zeimet, who in the fall of 1997, when this interview was made, was working at Barr Engineering Co. in Minnesota. Pete graduated from SLIS in May of 1997.

Barr Engineering Co. is a 300 employee organization. There are about 250 engineers, and the rest are internal staff, like myself, computer support (IS), word processing, drafting, and marketing. Our company does environmental and civil engineering, such as working with a company to clean up a toxic site, building landfills, helping companies make sure they continue to work in compliance with local, State, and Federal regulations, and so on. Although our main office is in Minneapolis, we also have offices in Hibbing, Duluth, and Michigan. We try to tackle any project. One of our mottos is, "We have never done it, but we're bound to be good at it." Our projects range from flood control to an amusement park ride.

Questions

  1. Describe the organization/corporate culture and political climate.
    From my first contact with Barr, the company struck me as very forward thinking in their organizational structure. The organization is fairly flat (I've never seen a truly flat organization) and employees are encouraged to be innovative. Instead of departments, the company is divided up into business units, like Environmental Management, Air Quality, Assessment and Remediation, Water Resources, etc.
    The company started out as an organization of just a couple aggressive entrepreneurs. As the company grew, the climate was very permissive. Employees were encouraged to work how they worked best. The philosophy, then and now, is that successful employees are those that can empower others while maintaining an independence in themselves. Today, some of that flavor is still left over. Because we are a consulting company, we have to be very responsive to the environment and externalities. Employees are encouraged to try out new ideas. More than just lip service, the company actually puts up some money for this. The library is a self directed work team, and another administrative department (administrative services are still called departments) is considering this kind of structure. When the organization does well, all the employees are rewarded with bonuses. The atmosphere, I find, to be very sharing. People seem very willing to help out others and the company has it's own identity.
  2. Discuss the availability and use of information technology in general, with particular attention to internet/intranet applications.
    This is a strong area for us, and it is only getting better. At the time I started, the company already had a strong intranet in place. Almost every employee had access to the internet using a 512k connection. Not as fast as a T1, but pretty fast. Employees can communicate with each other via email using a three digit address - usually your initials. The network is becoming more stable and growing.
    The library has access to not only the web, but we subscribe to DIALOG, Dun & Bradstreet,UMI's DataTimes EyeQ, and we are considering a subscription to Dow Jones. We also use lots and lots of CD-ROMS, some of which we network so that they are available to everyone's desktop (a regulatory database), and some we keep in the library next to a community station (StreetAtlas, PhoneSearch, Federal Register, etc.).
    Recently the library created a web site for the intranet. We would like to use it as a place to share internal documents, company information, good ideas, favorite web bookmarks, and as a public forum to give people credit. We are also considering using a table-of-contents service, and looking in to getting copyright permission to scan articles for use on our library web site.
  3. How do you align your information services with strategic planning of your organizations?
    Barr Engineering makes it a practice to have all the business units submit their strategic plans first, then the administrative units use these plans to develop their goals and objectives. We are in the process of doing this now for 1998 so I don't know a whole lot about this process yet.
  4. Describe your responsibilities, with emphasis on those areas in which library school did not prepare you for.
    As the Systems Librarian, I have three main responsibilities. First, I am responsible for maintaining the electronic resources in the library. We subscribe to a couple dozen CD-ROM products, some of which we network and some of which we use on a stand-alone station. When something goes wrong with the network, I work with the Network Administrator to get the problem fixed. For these troubleshooting problems, I mostly act as a liaison between the Network Administrator and the clients because I lack network architecture knowledge necessary to fix most of these problems.
    I also am responsible for organizing, building, and maintaining our library web page. This has been a relatively easy, but time consuming task. We use a software package called FrontPage that makes building web sites easy. My experience with web page design in school has been a real help.
    Lastly, our library is in the process of implementing a database management system called Cuadra STAR. This package will allow us to integrate our records management files with our library files in one database. Implementing this package is a real challenge. I have very little knowledge of database design, and the software runs on a UNIX platform. I find myself having to work in UNIX a lot, and having no real background with UNIX forced me to buy a book and teach myself some of the basics. I expect that this project will take several more months.
  5. Are you or your organization effected by copyright and intellectual property rights issues? How so?
    Copyright issues are very relevant to our company. Not long after joining the company, I was asked to look in to our photocopying license. We have an account with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) that allows us unlimited photocopying of all the journals we subscribe to as long as we don't distribute these copies outside the company. We pay the CCC an annual fee, which in turn pays the publisher for this license. With the recent creation of the library web page, we would like to occasionally add journal article contents to our intranet. This is not part of our current license, and we are in the process of making an arrangement with the CCC to get permission to do this with a few key journals.
  6. How do you market yourself and the services of your unit to the organization? Describe successes and failures.
    Marketing the library is always an issue for the librarian, especially the special librarian. I try to get ideas from Information Outlook because they seem to have articles on this topic in every issue. I recently tried to take some hints to help me promote the library web page. I had worked with our marketing department to carefully print a poster which we hung all over the company, on bulletin boards and in the common areas. I also made sure to mention the web page at every opportunity that seemed appropriate, and refer some reference questions to the site.
    I have yet to get ANY feedback on the web page. If people are looking at it, they are not telling me. I don't have any success stories yet, but we are making it one of our official 1998 goals to work on promoting the library. I've been thinking about ordering some sort of small label to put on documents that we give clients to show that it comes from the library. Ideally it would have the library logo (to be developed) on it and can be removed without damaging the document, like a "Post It" note. We feel that a cover page would be a waste of paper, especially at an environmental engineering company.
  7. How much resource sharing do you use? Describe ILL and other activities which help you meet the information needs of your users when resources are not locally available.
    We have a good relationship with the University of Minnesota's map library, and we often borrow books from the University and Hennepin County collection. When we can't get the information we need from DIALOG, the internet, or any other resource, we use one of several document delivery vendors. A couple of times I've even called Professors who wrote papers that we needed.
  8. Do you have experience with outsourcing? Please describe the details in depth.
    The only real outsourcing we use is having a cataloger come in about once or twice a month to do our book cataloging. Our book collection is small and does not grow very fast. We have an experienced cataloger come to the library as needed. She spends about a day cataloging the books that we had been storing in a cabinet awaiting her arrival. Every month or so she reports her hours and our accounting department issues her a check. That's about it. I am suppose to be the one who supervises this operation but I don't really know what she does. She was coming in before I started and I have yet to take the time to sit down with her and watch her work. I should really do this soon because I would be the "cataloging" guy if she left.
  9. What changes or projects have you or are you implementing? How have you approached the management and users about these changes?
    I am working on implementing the STAR database, I created the library web page, and I sit in on a couple of the business unit's meetings. I've been selling the idea of promoting the library as something that we can all buy into, and it is now one of our official goals. I have not done anything yet that is much of a departure from how things have been. I'm a little too new and too green to make major changes. Fortunately, the library has a an ally who is the head of both the library and IS departments, and is not afraid to try out new ideas and spend some money. This is good because I am going to have to ask him for some funds to get more training on Cuadra STAR.
  10. How did you get/keep your job? Any job hunting tips or advice?
    How one gets a job is about as random as random gets. Some people get the one job they applied for, while others apply for hundreds. My only advice is to keep statistics on your side. The more resumes you send out, the better your chances are. I worked hard at sending out resumes during the Winter break in my second year. By April I had a job. Also, don't be afraid to count your part-time experience as "years." My job advertised for someone with 3 years of experience and I was still a student.
  11. What can be realistically expected from new graduates in terms of specific skills and orientation? How important is previous experience prior to the MLS degree? How important is subject specialization? How can deficiencies be compensated for? For example, do you look for students who have had practicums in relevant areas?
    In my opinion, your work experience is at least as important as the courses you take. As long as you have an MLS, nobody cares what courses you took (with some exceptions). But they do look at what experience you have, and you can make up for some deficiencies with this. Try to get as much experience as you can while you are still in school. I wasn't sure if I would work in an academic, public, or special library so I took courses relevant to all three. I also had three practica - indexing, public reference, and academic reference. I also worked part-time at various libraries. For this job I didn't need any formal background in engineering or science. The company was more concerned with online searching and computer skills.
  12. What is the one thing you wished you had learned in library school, or learned before you got the job?
    There are several things, but the most important to me now is getting more education in network administration.

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