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The London Business School Library: collection, classification scheme, services and practicum.
Suzanne Ottewell, UBC SLAIS
Introduction
This article provides information about the London Business School (LBS) Library and my practicum experience. In addition, I have included some optional interactive activities for you to try with the LBS library website and the award winning bestofbiz website, the commercial library service website of the LBS. You can then explore some of the unique and very innovative features of these websites.
Practicum Details
My practicum took place during the period April 15-26 2002 at the London Business School Library,
Regent's park, London U.K., NW1 4SA. I chose the London Business School because of its reputation
(one of the top ten business schools in the world and the highest ranked business school in Europe)
and because I was curious about how a world class business academic library would operate.
Practicum Experience
The practicum was organized into two parts: information gathering activities and task orientated
activities.
Information Gathering Activities
These activities consisted of:
- Tours of the library and the London Business School.
- Learning about the school, collection, catalogue and classification system.
- Meetings with each member of the library staff to learn about the duties and responsibilities of
their positions.
- Attending weekly staff meetings
1. Tours
The tours took place on the first day of the practicum and each tour lasted one hour.
Tour of the library, which was spread over three floors:
- The lower floor contained the Annual Report Collection, the Working Paper Collection, the
Video collection, School Archives, study carrels and equipment to watch/listen to the audio
video collection.
- The middle floor was the main floor and entrance. Admittance was through security gates by
using authorized library cards or by requesting library staff to release the gates. There were
several areas on this floor including the Enquiry Desk, the Circulating Monograph collection
[book stock], the Reference Collection, Research area with eight terminals, the Financial Zone
[dedicated Bloomberg and Reuters financial database terminals and television tuned to
CNN/Business News]; the Alumni area with five terminals, study carrels and photocopying room.
The staff offices were also on this floor.
- The top floor had a serials/journals room, a computer lab [with 40 computers], more study
carrels and the newspaper collection and lounge.
The library was located just behind the business school in a separate building at Taunton Place.
The second tour concerned the London Business School and covered the lecture halls, classrooms,
staff and faculty offices and grounds. The London Business School is located close to Regents Park
in a beautiful crescent shaped building. The library was originally located in the school but had
to move recently when it outgrew its facilities.
2. Learning about the school, collection, catalogue and classification system.
- The School
The school offers graduate programs and offers a variety of Masters and PhD's in Finance and Business Administration including the Executive MBA, Global MBA (a joint program with the Columbia Business School in New York), Sloan MBA (condensed ten month MBA) and the Masters in Finance. The school also offers short-term courses for continuing development of executives. Details about the school can be found at http://www.london.edu.
- The Collection
The collection consists of print and electronic resources.
Print Resources
The library has over 20,000 monograph titles, 1000 journal titles, an important company report collection, market research reports and 8000 working papers, financial newspapers and a reference collection.
Interactive Activity
- The LBS Library has an online tool on its website to help students locate materials
within the library.
- Visit http://www.london.edu/library/Print_Resources/print_resources.html and click on
the question mark "?" next to "Reference books including handbooks, guides, directories
& encyclopedias". Can you find the Reference book collection?
- Hint: look for the flashing cross on the left hand side of the library map.
Electronic Resources
The LBS library has more than 40 databases and various electronic journals available to students. The business databases included many top quality databases such as Bloomberg, Business Source Premier, Datastream, Lexis Nexis and Reuters Business Briefing. The students can access an A-Z summary listing of the databases which states who has access (students, alumini, corporate) and where access can be obtained i.e only within the library, on campus or through the school intranet.
Interactive Activity
- The LBS librarians have developed a visual overview of the databases at http://www.bestofbiz.com/resource/map.asp. Can you find the databases you would use for information on market research? How many of these are only available on campus?
- Hint: scroll to the bottom of the webpage, use the map key to find the market research line and look on the map. Only two are available on campus.
- The Catalogue
The library catalogue is online and allows students to do a basic keyword search or a power
search. There is also a "browse" feature, which enables you to browse by subject, author or
keyword. In addition, the catalogue has information about the most popular books, subjects
and authors that have been borrowed in the preceding three months. There are direct links for
ordering materials, renewing books and checking on short-loan items. In addition, there are
links to information on all the new collection items recently received, a faculty publication
database and the online reference assistance tool called Business Brain. For more information
see
http://www.london.edu/library/Library_Catalogue/library_catalogue.html.
- The Classification System
The London Business School Library has developed its own classification scheme known as the
"London Classification of Business Studies" (LCBS). The classification scheme is alphabetical
and is divided into 26 groups from Class A to Class Y. For example, Class A is Management and
Class Y is Information Science. There are various lettered sub-classifications within each of
these groups. Then there are seven numerical groupings, which further classify the literature
according to people and occupational roles/ geographical source, and type of material. Some
special business libraries also use this classification scheme and if you are interested in
using it within your library, you can find out more information at
http://www.london.edu/library/Print_Resources/LCBS/lcbs.html. The classification scheme
costs approximately $120-$150 (fifty pounds plus shipping).
Interactive Activity
- Visit the website
and click on the "concept space" at the top right hand side of the page and follow through all
the E-Business concept circles for a visual overview. Can you find the unique London
Classification Of Business Studies (class mark) for E Business?
- Answer:
AZA/WR
- Library Services
The library offers traditional academic library services for students, faculty and alumni such as lending materials, document delivery, inter-library loan, reference assistance, and database instruction. It also offers a fee based research service for business and library memberships and services to corporate organizations and individuals for an annual fee.
3. Meetings with each member of the library staff to learn about the duties and responsibilities of their positions.
The library falls within the Information Services Division along with the database development and
support staff. The head librarian is responsible for the 25 staff within the division and 18 of these
staff work within the library.
The practicum was structured so that I was able to spend an hour with each member of the staff learning
about his or her job responsibilities. This was a very useful activity as I learnt about all the
different library functions such as collection management, serials, inter-library loan, bibliographic
services, document delivery, desk supervision, multimedia and electronic resource management: selection,
testing, networking and training. In addition, I was able to learn about the services provided by the
Business Information Specialists for the students and faculty and the fee based information services
offered to companies (http://www.bestofbiz.com/). I also learnt about some of the administration functions
such as the annual staff appraisals and budgeting and I was also given time to review the library website in depth and to try out some of the databases that I had not used before.
4. Attending weekly staff meetings
I was invited to attend the weekly staff meetings and these were run by the desk supervisor, primarily
to discuss issues that had arisen in the previous week. However, often other issues relating to the
running of the library would be mentioned.
Task Orientated Activities
These activities consisted of:
- Desk duty (2 hours per day)
Two people staffed the desk at all times. Every member of the library staff spent two hours per day on the desk dealing with inquiries from students, staff, alumni and the public. These enquiries ranged from questions on the databases, to locating books, fines, course materials, etc. It was good to have the opportunity to see the different type of issues that could arise and have a chance to work alongside the staff and with the library patrons. There was not a separate reference desk, all staff were trained to assist with basic enquiries on all the databases and if they were unable to resolve the query, the Business Information Specialists (reference librarians) were called from their office. Alternatively, graduates could book an appointment with the Business Information Specialists for reference assistance.
- Shelving of journals (2 hours per week)
This task required the reshelving of journals, working papers and company reports that had been used the previous day. I found this a useful activity for learning what type of materials was in these collections.
- Projects
The main project that I worked upon was called
"Score Search Company Reports". This project was a joint project between the London Business
School, the British Library, the University of Strathclyde, the University of Warwick, the
Manchester Business School and the Guildhall Library. Score is an online fully searchable union
database designed to hold information on the location of important company material such as company
reports that higher education users require for their studies and research. Many libraries were
discarding company reports that were becoming available in an electronic format and valuable
historical company information was being lost.
I was involved in a variety of tasks for this project. I was trained on how to enter or update information in the online database, according to predefined criteria and ranking of a company report. I also labeled and filed the reports and discarded, or archived, out of date reports.
Conclusion
Overall, an excellent practicum that I would recommend to other students interested in business librarianship!
Comments and/or questions can be directed to sto@interchange.ubc.ca.
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