In a recent post, we found a 1994 quote from Curtis L. Kendrick of the American Historical Society describing new emerging technologies in document delivery such as CD-ROM’s, “digital transmission” and full text databases. While our industry is still referred to as document delivery service, it’s almost a misnomer with regard to the capabilities of Mobile Library™. Strictly speaking, Mobile Library does indeed deliver documents. However, the product extends so far beyond simple document delivery it almost seems fair that it should be called something else.
Our CTO, Fred Pandolfi once said “Traditionally many companies thought of themselves as simply as document delivery companies. People ordered documents and they delivered them. Based on the extensive discussions our executive team had with existing customers one of the concepts that emerged was that we needed a set of supply chain management tools for articles and documents. So that’s the direction we started to take. We are not just an STM document delivery service company. We are really about managing the supply chain of this information from front to back.”
Fred’s description of Mobile Library as a supply chain management tool seems somewhat more accurate than “document delivery”, as the system is designed to facilitate the access, management and control of a large inventory of STM content. Specifically, Mobile Library is a cloud-based system that provides end users access to all enterprise information assets including e-journals, e-books and internal repositories, their complete collection of personal files, and a database of 50 million citations. In one of our thought leadership briefings Fred described the system this way, “We have a large catalog of scientific, technical and medical content that customers can license in a copyright compliant manner. With Mobile Library customers are buying much of the same licensed content from our huge STM library in the cloud.”
The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) defines one element of supply chain management as follows: “Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers.” Another analogy to a supply chain management tool would be the secure social media tools within Mobile Library, which enables collaboration among customers. In the same briefing, Fred describes the collaboration features as follows: “The ability to conduct creative discussions about collective research, follow colleagues through notes and activity feeds, to query subject matter experts for input, create internal documentation, action plans and reports seemed to make a great deal of sense. So having collaborative and social extension to Mobile Library seemed natural to us.”
For the time being, we will resign ourselves to accept the industry terminology of “document delivery.” However, there are more information supply chain analogies we could make. If you have not read the thought leadership briefing from which we quoted Fred Pandolfi, just click here to download your complimentary copy.
