Nerissa Nelson, Bank of America Library in Chicago

This electronic tour is by Nerissa Nelson, who in the fall of 1997, when this interview was made, was working at the Bank of America Library in Chicago. Nerissa graduated from SLIS in May of 1997.

Questions

  1. Describe the organization/corporate culture and political climate.
    The library (Information Services) at Bank of America falls under the Technology Integration unit. The library is the largest component of Technology Integration. There are a total of 5 libraries within Bank of America - one in San Francisco (BA headquarters), one in Los Angeles, one in New York , one in Connecticut and Chicago. Chicago is the central library for all of BA. The other libraries are operated by solo librarians.

    We have 16 people in the Chicago library - 6 librarians, 5 para-professionals, 1 billing person, 1 vendor relations person, 1 circulation/tech service person, 1 tech/MIS person. It's pretty rare to have that many people in a corporate library setting, so I feel fortunate.
    Some brief background on the library. The library was originally part of Continental Bank in Chicago before it was taken over about 4 years ago by the Bank of America. BA decided since the Continental library already had a presence and had been in existence for over 30 years that it would make that library the central core for Information Services. All of our clients are internal. There are approximately 112,000 employees total at BA, so it can be pretty daunting in terms of the pace of work. The bank has offices in the US, Europe and Asia and our library supports all of those units.
    I'm still too new to be completely in tune to the political climate, but feel fortunate that we have a very supportive staff including a manager (Sue Lawson) and a vice president (Janet Reed), both of whom are librarians and are always there to back us up and support us.
  2. Discuss the availability and use of information technology in general, with particular attention to internet/intranet applications.
    The sources we have available are incredible and once again I feel fortunate to be in a place that has such great resources. Here is a list of what we have access to:
    • Nexis (used heavily)
    • DIALOG
    • Dow Jones
    • Investext
    • Laser Disclosure
    • OneSource
    • Bloomberg
    • Dun's Direct Access
    • Law Bulletin
    • Information America
    • FactSet
    • Moody's (collection of various stand-alone CD's of financials)
    • Standard Poor's (similar to Moody's - financials)
  3. We also have about 4 databases that strictly deal with mergers, acquisitions, interest rates and other financial number crunching stuff. We have a live feed of news wires and Reuters business briefs that we get, which is real time. We also have access to certain documents and reports from the Federal Reserve, brokerage houses, and SEC filings.
    The Internet is used heavily too. The bank has a pretty massive Intranet and it is in the process of being re-structured. One of the problems is that the various units and departments never standardized the designor content of pages, so some of the department pages are confusing to get to or are difficult in accessing information. The library has a home page, but it is still in the beginning stages and is constantly being updated and changed. There is a committee now that is re-designing the home page.
  4. How do you align your information services with strategic planning of you organization?
    Janet Reed, the VP of our library, is the person who is in most contact with people in the bank. She does our marketing, as well as meeting with people to find out what people's needs are. She then reports back to us or often times brings people to our meetings and we have tours quite often of the library. Some of the more senior staff in the library also goes out to meet with people and train them on the Internet or other databases that are available on the Web that we have licensing agreements with, such as OneSource.
  5. Describe your responsibilities, with emphasis on those areas in which library school did not prepare you for.
    I primarily do research and have just started getting other projects to do as well. I was told the first week I got here that it would take about 1 year for me to be fully trained. Our turn-around time is 2 days for research requests and the pace is extremely fast . Our clients are internal and I would say the majority of the people are calling from units, such as Structure Finance, Global Wholesale Banking, and others that need this information for investment purposes or presentations they are putting together. We have rush requests all the time. I mainly do industry and company searches. The thing that surprised me the most when I first started here was the nature of the requests. They are so bizarre and I had no clue this is what I would be doing. I was expecting to have to do much more in the way of hard number statistics and financial information, but I was wrong. Here is an example of some of the crazy requests:
    1. Identify the agricultural equipment companies in Brazil that manufacture sugar growing/harvesting equipment. Who are the major players and what trends or growth are happening in that industry in Brazil and Latin America as a whole?
    2. What is the toilet manufacturing business like in India? News and industry info going back 1 year. How many people in India are buying toilets. Do they have second bathrooms? Compare India's industry to the US in terms of outlook and trends.
    3. Give me any information on sheet metal fabrication in the US going back 5 yrs.
    I suppose if I had taken some business classes that would have helped me more in just understanding the nature of business, but I didn't expect to get that from library school. I have to say the one comforting thing that happened to me once I started working is that I realized quickly that I knew a lot more than I thought I did when I graduated. You'd be surprised how much you do absorb in school even though you may feel overwhelmed or confused at at the time (that was and still is a constant state for me though!).
  6. Are you or your organization effected by copyright and intellectual property rights issues? How so?
    I can honestly say that I have not encountered this as a problem yet, but the library staff is conscious of copyright issues.
  7. How do you market yourself and the services of your unit to the organization? Describe successes and failures?
    When there is an opportunity to talk to someone new who is calling for a research request we take the time to tell that person about our services and invite them to come for a tour, so they can see what we have. Otherwise, most of the marketing is done by Janet Reed or Sue Lawson.
  8. 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 do very little resource sharing. I think there used to be more in previous years, but not much anymore. We do have relationships with several law and consulting firm libraries in the city, as well as the Chicago Public Library.
  9. Do you have experience with outsourcing? Please describe the details in depth.
    The only thing that has been outsourced recently is our archives. Everything was shipped from Chicago to San Francisco and is now outsourced by a company out there, but I forgot the name. So, if someone is looking for archive materials we refer them to this company.
  10. What changes or projects have you or are you implementing? How have you approached the management and users about these changes?
    The only project that I asked to work on recently was the Intranet home page and I was encouraged to do so. This was an opportunity to be part of the home page and to also keep up with creating web pages. No one in the library, with the exception of our MIS person has ever written web pages, so I have an advantage in that respect. I will work with our MIS person updating the page. I've just finished what we call an "Industry Focus," something that comes out monthly where we pick a subject and put together a page with links to associations, publications, statistics, meta sites, etc. I just did the home improvement industry for our retail group.
  11. How did you get/keep your job? Any job hunting tips or advice?
    Networking. I actually started networking with people here in Chicago before I even started school in Madison. I worked at the Chicago Tribune Marketing Library for two years with Mari Colello (some of you may remember her from our tour last year) and she started the ball rolling for me. She is an active board member with the SLA Illinois chapter. My job hunting tips are to keep networking and keep doing those tours and all that jazz because it shows potential employers that you are interested in the profession. I got my job by luck. It was a call that Mari made to her friend Linda Hanrath who is the librarian for the Wrigley company who is a friend with my boss Sue Lawson and they were talking... and that's how that happened.
  12. 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?
    I think we all leave school with a certain skill set and I don't know that employers would expect too much more. For me it was very useful to have had experience and practicums during school. I was also asked about my practicum experience during my interviews. My practicum was at the Business School library, which helped in terms of gaining a basic knowledge of business sources for my current job. I also worked in the Agricultural Economics library and now I'm in charge of handling our current awareness services for our Agribusiness unit. The reason Sue gave that to me is because I worked in the Ag library during school. Having a subject specialization is important for certain library positions, such as art history or architecture. I don't think subject specialization for the position I'm in now is all that important, but it probably would have been benefit if I had it.
  13. What is the one thing you wished you had learned in library school?
    The one thing I wish I had more training on was learning more about the Internet and writing web pages. Luckily, we had to write a web page for Gov Docs, so that came in handy. But I know that SLIS has workshops for that now, so take advantage of it. Also, take advantage of the incredible resources that the UW library system has. I wish I had practiced more with NEXIS searching while I was in school. You will never find resources like that anywhere else and it's FREE!!!!

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