A business library during coronavirus and beyond: City Business Library

City Business Library librarian Wendy Foster is a Business Librarian and Adviser at City Business Library in London. She has worked to provide her business community with the information for 17 years.

“The most dangerous assumption for businesses is that sufficient market intelligence will be available through a quick Google search” is something Wendy firmly believes and will strike a chord with all library workers, but particularly those who are that rare breed, the business librarian.

“In the first two to three weeks of lockdown, the majority of questions we received were about how to get financial support whilst in lockdown. From the third week, we saw a return to the wider range of questions, including sector market research, including the impact of the pandemic, and also company contacts. Also, from about the third week, we also started to have questions from people now wanting to start their own business, and are looking for advice.

In a way, it is not so much the type of questions we receive that has changed, but more the delivery of our business support. Not being in a physical space that people can visit, we have redirected (I believe the word commonly used it pivot) our methods of communication so that we can continue to support our customer needs. We have been very fortunate that some of our specialist information suppliers – including yourselves – have allowed us to share data with our City Business Library members, so we have been able to provide relevant market data and forecasts for a wide range of sectors.

“Not being in a physical space that people can visit, we have redirected (I believe the word commonly used it pivot) our methods of communication so that we can continue to support our customer needs.”

We have also run online training sessions for pre-start-ups, and we have done dozens of 121 advice sessions on starting a business, via video chat, and we are organising a digital training programme for further support. An interesting outcome for us, is that this change of delivery model will allow us to reach a wider audience.

“this change of delivery model will allow us to reach a wider audience.”

As the general population becomes more comfortable with, or at least used to, video chat, then more people are ready to connect remotely for business advice. This means we will continue in the future to support business needs of people wherever they are located in the UK, rather than just those who could get into the Library. In the last 10 weeks we have had 160 new members join.

At present we do not have a specialist collection on Intellectual Property (it’s the British Library that has a dedicated IP centre), but we do provide information and guidance on IP, using our resources. We have also produced a two-page starter guide on the various aspects of IP. IP remains a vital part of any business, and although there are free websites that can help with this, it is often the experience and expertise of library staff to help guide customers through this maze. Most of our customers will not have knowledge or experience so need some guidance as to where to look and what to look for.

A bit about Marketline

[I thought this was interesting and have included. It is not part of any advertising agreement. Edward Kitchener from Marketline set up the information above as well – we met via LinkedIn as his job title of providing library intelligence interested me – Ed]

Wendy says of Marketline:

• Enables them to support start-ups, pre-start ups and Micro Businesses
• Helps businesses secure investment, justify existence, position products, tweak ideas
• Completely intuitive which means non tech savy people don’t need as much support as they need with other databases
• Key areas of interest on the platform – Market research reports and Company SWOT analysis
• Considerable gratitude is received from business clients as not many libraries have access to this sort of information
• Many libraries have resources that are “practical tools” to help businesses but lack the data to power their decisions

Libraries who don’t use it ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ in relation to big data.

Edwards Kitchener can be contacted via Edward.kitchener@marketline.com