Quantum² : InfoStars : Lee Pharis

Lee Pharis

Lee Pharis manages information resources at Exponent, a leading, international engineering and scientific consulting firm dedicated to providing clients with the critical information required for both day-to-day and strategic decisions. Pharis has worked out of the company's Menlo Park, Calif. office for 13 years.

In providing information services, Pharis believes that opening a dialogue with her customers is the most important thing.

“Only about 25 percent of the firm is located in Menlo Park, so most of our inquiries are received either by e-mail or through our intranet request forms. This requires a lot of constant outreach and education,” Pharis said. “All of these efforts lead to questions such as 'can you also do this?' or 'do you have access to that?' which opens a dialogue.”

The Information Resources team at Exponent's Menlo Park office, which consists of four-and-a-half full time employees, assists customers in understanding the scientific puzzles they face by providing a focused survey of peer-reviewed and authoritative technical literature indexed by leading commercial publishers, most of which is not easily searchable or available for free on the web.

Pharis said that the international nature of Exponent means being available on more than a “9 to 5” basis in order to work with people in every time zone. While the team isn't on call each hour of the day, she and her staff are usually checking e-mail from 6 am to 11 pm or later in order to meet client deadlines.

Pharis said that in recent years, a focus on digital documentation has kept the Information Resources team ahead of the game, noting that materials for projects are both more readily identified and quickly procured if they're in digital format.

“We constantly seek new resources for single-use documents. We're not as interested in subscriptions that might not be used in full,” she said.

A major initiative that Pharis has undertaken that shows this focus on digital documentation is a conversion of Exponent technical reports to PDF files accessible through the firm's intranet .

“I’ve never wanted to convert the reports to another physical format, so when the means to do an electronic conversion presented itself, I saw it as our chance to do a small piece of knowledge management,” she said, explaining that the work is almost never-ending. “We can work on it as time permits. It is slow-going, but it’s going!”

A crucial part of Pharis' job is keeping expenses down. To that end, the information center is expected to bill as much of their work as possible.

“By generating revenue through our services and controlling costs, we recover more than 90 percent of our total cost to the firm. I’m not sure that we’ll ever break even, but it’s always the goal,” she said.

That drive for efficiency also shows up in the work that Pharis' team does. She said the services the Information Resources team provides helps the consultants do their work in a superior fashion.

“As consultants, our engineers and scientists need to make the most effective use of the time they devote to their clients, so it makes more sense for them to work with us to provide the research they need and to locate and obtain the identified publications necessary to support their work,” she said. “We customize the literature searches to eliminate irrelevant material so that the consultants receive a product that addresses their query. Some consultants are reticent to use our services at first because they want to do the work themselves, but commonly, once they've worked with us, they realize the time they've saved and the superior research product they received.”

Pharis said that one task of the Information Resources Team is to notice trends in information requests so that they can better respond to client needs.

“We do notice when there are repetitive questions,” she said. “Currently, questions about journal impact factors have been recurring, so I am developing an intranet page to describe what it is, what it means and how (clients) can identify factors for specific titles.”

Challenges in the information services field include more knowledgeable clients, Pharis said, explaining that the Internet has armed people with more information than they had access to in the past.

“Our users come to us with more complicated questions than they used to because they often find answers to the easier ones via some web site, whether it's government, academic or one of their professionally-related sites,” she said. “While they might start their search, they'll need us to finish it, or what we identify might lead them in an entirely different direction.”

Pharis is a member of the Special Libraries Association, where she serves as Standards Chair for the Engineering Division and also as chapter archivist for the San Andreas, Calif. Chapter. She is also a past President of the San Andreas Chapter.

She said her membership in these groups helps her do her job better by offering her access to others who might have suggestions in her approach to various issues, learning the details of an unfamiliar process, and having a chance to be familiar with potential candidates for various positions.

Additionally, “Quite often, those information professionals on the vendor side who have a commitment to our field are more understanding about how we use or need to use information and develop a working relationship that can evolve into a better business model for both,” she said.