What type of people are FreePint people?
Arguably, the most important aspect of any online community is participation. Give and take. FreePint is valuable because the information industry today is very broad and vendors and consumers, authors and readers, end-users and intermediaries are all participating. FreePint is now the world's largest community of information searchers, and it is used by people who use the Web for work or serious research. But exactly what do FreePint people use the web (and specifically FreePint) for?
With over 70,000 readers in most countries around the world, we know that many of these people simply read the FreePint newsletter twice a month. With the newsletter funded by advertising we naturally have people who advertise their information related products, services, or jobs. Some authors write regularly for us as well as reading the newsletter themselves. Some people prefer to only use the FreePint Bar or Student Bar, both giving and taking invaluable advice and tips regularly. 12,000 of you subscribe to the Bar Digest too. You may only be interested in searching for jobs. Or perhaps you have purchased one or more of our reports or taken part in a training exchange? Some of you may be considering signing up for our new subscription publication VIP. A few truly "super users" perhaps use FreePint for all of the above activities! Ultimately FreePinters all use FreePint in a different way and for different things.
Diversification of Job roles in the Information Industry
When we launched FreePint in 1997, we reached library and information professionals, mainly in the UK. As information became global, and the Internet common place, the pace of the information revolution increased. Employment opportunities have developed and diversified. It's practically guaranteed that every conference of librarians you ever go to will have a session about changing job
roles.
FreePint's growth testifies that in today's business environment, almost every sector has information rich demands. Our reach today is way beyond the boundaries of the traditional information and library profession. We are read by IT consultants,
trainers, directors of small businesses, journalists, publishers, academics and
students in all fields and yes, by information professionals and knowledge managers too. Our reach is also now 65% outside the UK.
What are 'personas'?
The demographics above are useful but statistics don't always give a tangible picture, so we have developed the personas below. Personas are hypothetical archetypes for actual users and the way they behave. This technique is used by Web Professionals to help guide decisions about product features, navigation or visual design.
The following personas are not real people but hypothetical archetypes. Names are made up and any resemblance to anyone real is entirely coincidental.
The FreePint Personas
Gary is Senior Knowledge Manager for a US Government Department
Originally trained in IT, his previous job was designing and supporting Government information systems. He took a year out to do a Knowledge Management qualification, and has returned with the wider responsibility for content management of the Departments' Intranet and external web site. He is currently managing two major projects for the department. "Web site usability" and "project KM". The latter involves the purchase and implementation of taxonomy software for the Departments Intranet. He is reviewing a number of potential vendors. He uses the FreePint Bar and the VIP Lounge, as he needs to find out best practice and opinions on latest vendors. It is essential to him that he reads well researched, accurate and timely product reviews for a wide range of Library and Knowledge Management Software so he also subscribes to VIP.
Jane is a UK freelance consultant and trainer in Information and Knowledge Management for the financial service sector.
She has been in the information industry for 20 years. Formerly an information manager for a leading Merchant Bank, she has a number of FTSE 100 clients for whom she undertakes competitive intelligence and knowledge management research projects. She has worked for a number of Government agencies and private companies teaching online research techniques. She speaks at various international conferences. She has been a FreePint Newsletter author a couple of times, is a regular reader of the newsletter, and uses the FreePint Bar.
Julia is Librarian for a City of London Law Firm.
In addition to undertaking information research for the firm's lawyers, she is responsible for monitoring the latest deals and subscriptions on offer from online legal databases and hard copy publications. She monitors FreePint Events, as she is keen to attend relevant information industry events to network and spot potential information for the firm and for herself. She often recommends online products and databases to her boss or the IT department. She purchased a copy of FreePint's Practical Guide to Negotiating Licenses for Electronic Products by Paul Pedley. The move to multi-site licences via the company Intranet for the most used legal databases was Julia's idea. She reads the FreePint Newsletter and looks at the resources on the FreePint Web site. She feels unappreciated in her current job so she is always on the lookout for a new position by monitoring the FreePint Jobs regularly.
James is Content Manager for the Press office of a very busy major international relief agency with offices in London, Washington, Paris and Stockholm.
He originally worked as a print and online journalist. He is a major consumer of online news information, as he monitors relevant international events closely, so he can distribute headlines via the Charity's corporate Intranet. To help him with this, he is currently on the lookout for a good deal for aggregated news sources or an RSS feed. He sometimes looks at the FreePint Newsletter when it comes into his email, but he uses other resources on the FreePint Web portal more - such as Resource Shelf. He finds the technical and IT tips on the FreePint Bar invaluable, as his background is mainly editorial. He subscribes to the FreePint Bar Digest to make sure he doesn't miss any tips. He manages a team of six including two junior online journalists. Currently there is a high staff turnover, and he says, "it's quite difficult to find staff with the right mix of editorial and technical skills to fit the bill". He has recently started to look at the FreePint Jobs area for this and is considering advertising.
Anya is a lecturer in Information Management in the school of Social Studies at a University in the Netherlands
She teaches in the areas of online searching, information literacy and Internet applications. She is a published author of books and reports for the European Commission on Electronic Copyright and researches in the area of the electronic document delivery. She has written a couple of book reviews for the FreePint Bookshelf. She always prints out the FreePint Newsletter and reads it on her way to work, often passing it on to colleagues in the School of Information Technology. She often uses the Search facility on the FreePint Web site to search for ideas and material to use in her teaching from Bar and Newsletter Archive.
Simon is Managing Director of a European company based in the UK that provides sales and marketing services to small businesses.
He worked for 15 years for the UK National Business Link service as a regional advisor. His company provides a range of services but has a strong reputation for specialising in helping small businesses in the UK to identify opportunities in Europe and compliance with EU standards. He regularly posts to the FreePint Bar both to give and take advice. He is a FreePint annual account advertiser, and says that a number of key clients have found him through cost effective newsletter and banner adverts on FreePint.
Cindy is a Business Studies student at a University in Mid West USA.
She is majoring in electronic business information and through a friend has just discovered the FreePint Student Bar to get ideas for her dissertation. She has started to look at the FreePint Jobs page for when she graduates next year. A keen student, she is interested in some of the subjects of the topical FreePint Exchanges and FreePint Reports and has told her lecturers about them. She'd never heard of the Special Library Association until she read some Dispatches to the FreePint Bar from their annual conference in New York. She had no idea that the topics discussed by librarians would be things that they are covering in their "Evaluating online business information " module next year. She thought that librarians "Worked in public libraries just sorting out books and stuff".
Ultimately, these personas were built up through the FreePint teams many years of experience contacts and networking in the information industry. We also based them on demographic information about job titles at sign up, knowledge of our consultant authors and their very varied career backgrounds, and an understanding of successful previous advertisers.
The FreePint Bar is also crucial in measuring current issues and concerns. Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of Search Day recently reviewed the FreePint Bar, <http://digbig.com/3fjj>. As he put it, continual monitoring of the Bar indeed provides us all with an excellent way to observe the methods and thought processes of some of the world's foremost search experts.
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