The Intranet is the Library
By Dale Copps, dgc@creare.com
Library Manager, Creare Incorporated

Two days from my deadline for this piece, I will present a newly designed Intranet to my company, bringing to fruition a project I have been working on for more than a year.

In my view, the corporate intranet is the library, and the library will enjoy the influence it deserves within the corporate structure since it has control over intranet design, management, and maintenance.

I consider myself to be lucky at Creare. We are a 43-year-old company with 100 employees, 40 of whom are engineers who invent new technologies in several high-tech areas (www.creare.com). Our corporate culture encourages entrepreneurism throughout the ranks. Once Creare has the right person in the right job, it largely leaves them alone to pursue their role as they see fit.

When I arrived six years ago, the library was happily already in charge of the intranet. It was a first-generation intranet, consisting of static HTML pages in a frame-based environment. Here is its Home Page, displayed in venerable Netscape 4.77:

I maintained this structure for four years, tweaking it in minor ways, and adding a few major services to it, including an index of useful web sites and a utility that assisted in the locating and fetching of online documents and other corporate information. This utility was produced with back-end Microsoft Access databases and with ColdFusion providing the front end Intranet-based user interface. ColdFusion is an HTML-like scripting language that allows users access to information resources in MS Access (and other databases) without necessitating users have MS Access on their systems or knowledge about how to use it. (Microsoft’s Active Server Pages and Apache Software Foundation’s PHP are two competing technologies.)

While learning to exploit the power of the Access/Cold Fusion synergy, I came to realize that the same partnership could and should be employed to run the entire intranet. The advantages would be many, such as:

1) The homepage would be self-generating. I wouldn’t have to show up at 7:30 every morning just to get the new Bulletin Board up by 8 am.

2) Many of my labor-intensive “housekeeping” tasks could be relegated to date fields that automatically managed the displaying and discarding of various items.

3) Perhaps most importantly, the intranet would henceforth be interactive, with anyone in the company empowered to add news or events or marketplace items with little or no assistance from me. Users can also add, edit, or delete departmental documents and the links that point to and open them. These features have the option of being password protected, as appropriate.

Transforming the intranet from a static to a dynamic environment utilizing Cold Fusion was only the most obvious and dramatic improvement made to it. By incorporating web standards such as XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I have made my life as a webmaster far more efficient. The webpages share a consistency of appearance with a minimum of repetitive tagging. My pages haven’t entirely bidden farewell to table and font tags, which CSS is designed to replace, but I’m getting there. I’m a librarian, not a web site designer, and I don’t have to master these technologies in order to use them.

In fact, I borrowed the basic three-column structure of my user interface—the “look and feel” of the new site—from the winning entry in a makeover contest for the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) site. Most people who have no ambition to be professional web designers learn HTML this way, by viewing and modifying existing pages. Thankfully, we can do the same thing with CSS. Here is my Intranet 2004 homepage. And if you will, wish me luck on Tuesday:

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