Library Profiles: Highsmith, Inc. Library
Seven years ago, Inc. magazine, a leading publication in the small business industry, named the Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin-based Highsmith, Inc. “The Smartest Little Company in America.” The company earned this recognition in large part due to its use of a corporate library to make a day’s work at its corporate headquarters more efficient and productive. Today, the library continues to help Highsmith remain a leader in its field.
Highsmith Inc. was founded in 1956 by Hugh Highsmith. His goal was to become a “single source” for all the supplies and equipment libraries need. Today, the $55 million company has realized its founder’s plans by becoming the country's leading distributor of equipment, supplies, furniture, books and library promotion materials for schools and libraries.
With the Internet providing ever-expanding amounts of information that is easily accessible but often inaccurate, confusing and irrelevant, businesses are increasingly turning to corporate libraries and librarians. Then-CEO and current Chairman Duncan Highsmith, Hugh’s son, was one of the first to see the need. He founded the Highsmith Corporate Library in 1986, and in two years later he hired a professional librarian to make sense of all the external information available.
Highsmith’s library is as important as departments like marketing, human resources, accounting and finance, and information technology—it occupies the same rank on the company’s organizational chart, and the Highsmith corporate headquarters are designed so that the library resides in the middle of the building.
The library contains about 2,300 books and 400 current magazine subscriptions, helping the company’s employees save time and money by eliminating the need to go to outside consultants for information to resolve issues both large and small. Other resources include access to thousands of databases, a presence on Highsmith’s Intranet, and an archive of Highsmith’s catalogs and promotional literature.
In addition to maintaining the library’s collections, subscriptions and resources, Corporate Librarian Genevieve Foskett tracks a wide range of subjects for her colleagues at Highsmith, providing information as simple as a phone number or statistic, or as complex as a research project that requires her to search online, consult experts, read and analyze, and create a summary report.
Some examples of Foskett’s recent tasks included finding a low-cholesterol cookbook from the library’s Wellness Resource Collection for an employee trying to eat heart-healthy; reading up on what California fire codes say about upholstery and stuffing in furniture in public buildings such as schools and libraries; and giving product designers ideas on what types of events library promotion materials should commemorate, like the 100th anniversary of flight, or the recent Lewis and Clark celebrations. These are just a handful of the daily disparate activities in addition to her normal library duties that make every day a unique challenge for Foskett, especially considering she works with more than 200 employees throughout the company.
As Highsmith was receiving its accolades from Inc., Duncan Highsmith was promoting outside-the-box thinking. Calling his concept “Life, the Universe, and Everything,”—a crib from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which seeks to discover the “ultimate answer” to that phrase—Highsmith believed the continued success of the company relied on the creative thinking prowess of his employees. Seven years later, the company may not have quite discovered the meaning of life, the universe, or everything yet, but the Highsmith Corporate Library is still helping it get a little bit closer each day.