Quantum² : InfoStars : Paul Roemhild

Paul Roemhild

Avery Dennison's Paul Roemhild

When Paul Roemhild started in the R&D division of Avery Dennison, the library relied heavily on physical documents and journal subscriptions. In the 15 years subsequent, he's seen the library shrink in physical size, but grow in just about every other way.

“Although our space has been reduced, our reach has expanded, both in terms of the tools we use and the people we serve,” said Roemhild, a research information analyst in the Corporate Information Services group at Avery Dennison, the Pasadena, Calif.-based producer of adhesives, labeling, converting, coating, consumer products, and electronics. “A lot of that (growth) has come from the increased use of electronic databases, changes and improvements to the internet, the increased availability of electronic documents, and the increasing sophistication of our customers.”

Roemhild is one of ProQuest's 2010 InfoStar award winners for North America. The award is given to information professionals who exhibit a high degree of innovation and quality in their work. Avery Dennison is headquartered in Pasadena, but has divisions and offices in the United States, Europe, Latin America and China, and employs roughly 30,000 workers across the globe.

“Customers are more comfortable now using electronic resources and are quicker to adapt. They are often the first ones to tell us about a new resource they've discovered and are eager to test the new resources that we bring in,” Roemhild continued. “Currently we're testing some new patent systems and are looking at document delivery services to allow people do their own ordering.”

Roemhild sees the future of information services as one in which the profession evolves, becoming ever-increasingly trusted partners to researchers, legal professionals, and business and marketing people.

“Not only will we retrieve information, but we will be asked more and more to provide an interpretation and an opinion on the information and create intelligence that will be used to make business or product development decisions,” he explained. “For the future, I would like to see more data sources that support semantic, context, or intelligence that is built into the search structure. Why can’t a data source learn from your input?”

Roemhild also hopes to see an increased focus, technology-wise, on context and how it affects what one searches for.

“I know as a searcher the context of what I want to retrieve, but most databases are only able to pull back what is keyed in, not the context of the words or phrases. I'd like to see software that can learn relationships between words, so that what you retrieve can be more meaningful,” he said.

Avery Dennison’s Corporate Information Services group, managed by Debbie Hartzman, provide information services to Avery Dennison businesses worldwide, sharing responsibility for literature and patent searching, market research, reference services, alerting, document delivery, library catalog, resource training, and records management. They've also developed a research toolkit, a customized set of Dialog databases, and have provided web-based patent searching and analytics services.

“Many of our customers are several time zones or a continent away, and they need resource access to effectively perform their jobs,” he said. “We recently launched a web-based library catalog and are actively seeking electronic additions to it from across Avery.”

The team also provides Alerting services and Watches to users, tracking patents and patent applications both manually and using automated features. They also provide competitive intelligence and business alerts in the form of monitoring competitors and suppliers, and do special reviews which provide forecasts and trends. The team also works with users to help them create their own alerts.