Chemical industries around the world are moving at great pace. Several technology development efforts, innovative shop floor practices, optimization of design and process parameters, introduction of new equipments etc. are all being made around the world .
It is often found these days that two companies compete with one another in one region and the same two companies collaborate in another region at the same time. Chemical industries are becoming global in character and they can not any more function in water tight compartments.
With the chemical Industries becoming global in character and outlook, it is not desirable for any chemical company in any part of the world to remain isolated, without keeping track of such developments in chemical industries elsewhere and in other parts of the world.
Apart from technological and other related developments in chemical industries, mergers and acquisitions are also taking place very frequently. The price fixing strategies are decided these days by individual companies based on various inner related global factors.
To survive and prosper in such global context, it is imperative that every chemical industry and the professionals serving in the chemical industries, whether technical or managerial, have to keep themselves informed with chemical news on day to day basis.
The chemical professionals, who are busy with the day to day responsibilities often find that they do not have time to study the details of development in depth and are hard pressed to keep themselves adequately informed. They really face the risk of missing details on vital developments, which may be of great significance to them in their area of work.
In such circumstances, it is necessary that the chemical industries and the chemical professionals should evolve a strategy to keep track of such fast pace developments in the chemical industrial sector around the world. The question is as to how to achieve this objective in the present times, when information and data on developments are pouring in from all corners of the globe.
For the chemical industries and chemical professionals, the only way to keep track of such developments is to subscribe related technical journals and study them carefully, apart from attending seminars and symposiums whenever such events take place.
Further, a well organized and continuously updated data base to quickly retrieve the information that would be required from time to time is necessary.
In this context, every chemical industry has to necessarily have an exclusive functionary in the organization, for keeping track of information and maintain them for the benefit of everyone in the company.
Librarian is perhaps the most appropriate functionary to carry out the task to meet such requirement. Obviously, it implies that the librarian should have some level of understanding of the technology, market and other details relating to chemical industries internationally. Such data base management job cannot any more be a job for a generalist. The data base maintenance has to be recognized
as one of the important functions in every organization and dedicated team has to be trained and developed and maintained for this purpose.
With great advancement in information technology, the job of maintaining the data base is fairly manageable, in spite of huge availability of data and information from everywhere.
Unfortunately, it is evident that most of the chemical industries in India do not attach adequate importance for this vital task. It is often seen that the industries are running from pillar to post to get information and they spend substantial time, energy and investment in sourcing such information.On many occasions, they find that the data and information are not available to them when they need them most.
By managing a constantly updated and well maintained data base, the job of identifying and sourcing data and information would become easier and also cost effective.
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Nandini Chemical Journal, Annual subscription, 12 issues, sent as a pdf document by email. US $100.