National Science Foundation Project
Virtual Library
Introduction
This virtual library is modified from a project I am currently working on for my job as information specialist at Foresight Science and Technology, in New Bedford, MA. Foresight is a small consulting company which focuses mainly on technology transfer -- helping people move new technology out of the laboratory and into the commercial marketplace. The project I am working on right now is for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Small Business and Innovation Research (SBIR) award winners. The SBIR program is active in about 12 federal agencies. In the program, small companies of under 500 people are eligible to win funding of up to $500,000 to help develop new technologies in a variety of areas. Once the initial round of funding has been used, if the experiments are successful, the companies are allowed to submit a request for more money, known as Phase II funding. Foresight has a contract from the NSF to assist SBIR award winners in writing a commercialization plan as part of their application for Phase II funding. The commercialization plan is a fifteen page document that outlines how the small company plans to market their new technology -- are the going to manufacture and sell it on their own, are the going to team up with a partner, will they license it, are there people out there who actually WANT it, and so on. There are a number of requirements that must be discussed in the commercialization plan, and our role, at Foresight, is to help make sure that our customers meet all of the requirements and understand how and to whom they can sell or market their new product. The customers write the plan themselves, but we help them understand the NSF requirements, help them find market research on their technology area, and help edit the documents. To assist our customers, my coworkers and I first created a commercialization plan template document which contains tables and headers that address all of the NSF requirements. Next, we wrote lessons and tutorials for each section of the template, explaining what NSF was looking for in each section, and how the customer could find the information required in each section. As information specialist, I then created a few pages of Resource Links and Web Sites that we discuss in our lessons, and that is what you see here. Because the information we work on for the NSF is proprietary, I cannot give you access to all of the lessons, tutorials and templates. However, my boss said I could use the library portion of my work for this class. This has been an ongoing project for us. The template was first created last summer, and is constantly being revised as we work with more customers. The tutorials and website were revised this winter and spring. I first put up the skeleton of the virtual library in late April, and I am continually adding new sites as customers and co-workers alert me to new information. I also periodically check existing links to make sure they are still active. I am working on tutorials for some of the sites that are less intuitive and more difficult to use. We also have a glossary page of terms we use in our lessons, and I hope to eventually link the resources not only to the lessons, but to the specific glossary terms that they relate to.
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