2021 JoVE Librarian Innovation Award Winner: Gabriele (Gabi) Tanis | JoVE

The 2021 JoVE Science Education and Research Innovation awards have paved the way for a series of blog posts highlighting how science educators, researchers, and Librarians worldwide have used visual resources to support their remote efforts. We hope these blog posts will help find practical answers to the questions imposed while juggling online or hybrid formats.

This blog post highlights the 2021 Librarian Innovation Award’s winning entry by Gabi Tanis, Associate Director, Organizational Excellence at Janssen Research & Development, LLC in the United States. In collaboration with Phyllis Minicuci of Copyright Clearance Center and Nicholas Collison at Couranto, Gabi elaborates on creating the JRD eLibrary Portal, a centralized resource hub.

In her entry, Gabi points out that pre-pandemic interviews revealed that many of the 12,000 staff across Janssen R&D lacked awareness of the full scope of information assets available to them, despite the Library Services team’s investment in resources and technology. She and her team knew they needed to enhance library services, showcase more than forty digital, enterprise-wide assets, and demonstrate value to the community of scientists and researchers.  

She further adds that a single centralized resource hub was the desired solution to this challenge. The solution needed to be robust, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to navigate but not overly complex. JRD Library Services partners with publishers and suppliers to offer solutions that provide maximum value to customers. During a meeting with Couranto, the team discovered they could help design, build, and maintain a cloud-based, customized resource hub. The Library Services team expressed their desire for a portal that would provide access to their licensed content, built explicitly with researchers and scientists in mind, to simplify sharing information assets to drive innovation.  

Gabi explains that halfway through the design process of this portal, COVID-19 struck, changing everything about their day-to-day work life. JRD’s entire workforce was suddenly remote and still needed information at their fingertips to continue to be productive and functional. COVID-19 added pressure to the library team, forcing them to adapt quickly while balancing and prioritizing deliverables. She explains how it became more imperative than ever to build the platform and have it up and running quickly.  

Want to gain first-hand insights into what it takes to bring a centralized resource hub to life, identify primary digital resources for research, and better support library users in challenging times?

Register for our webinar “The Journey to Building an eLibrary Portal in a Large R&D Organization,” where Gabi and her team will discuss the JRD eLibrary Portal, from conception and design to the implementation and roll-out of this visual platform.

For any questions you’d like the speakers to address during this session, write to [email protected].