Quantum² : InfoStars : Featured InfoStar

Featured InfoStar:
Lee Pharis

Lee Pharis manages information resources at Exponent, a leading, international engineering and scientific consulting firm dedicated to providing clients with the critical information required for both day-to-day and strategic decisions. Pharis has worked out of the company's Menlo Park, Calif. office for 13 years.

In providing information services, Pharis believes that opening a dialogue with her customers is the most important thing.

“Only about 25 percent of the firm is located in Menlo Park, so most of our inquiries are received either by e-mail or through our intranet request forms. This requires a lot of constant outreach and education,” Pharis said. “All of these efforts lead to questions such as 'can you also do this?' or 'do you have access to that?' which opens a dialogue.”

The Information Resources team at Exponent's Menlo Park office, which consists of four-and-a-half full time employees, assists customers in understanding the scientific puzzles they face by providing a focused survey of peer-reviewed and authoritative technical literature indexed by leading commercial publishers, most of which is not easily searchable or available for free on the web.

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