Digital tools—to Cleveland and beyond!
Edward P. Salek, CAE, Executive Director | TLT Headquarters Report June 2009
STLE is implementing a variety of electronic strategies to enhance the value of your membership.
Members can use our online directory to search for contacts by name, company and geographic section.
STLE members in Cleveland might find this month’s column a bit familiar because it’s a variation on the theme of my talk to that local section earlier this spring. Based on their reaction, it’s clear to me that other STLE members and TLT readers will be surprised and pleased to hear that our organization is finding a variety of ways to harness the various forms of new media that everyone is talking about today.
New media, as I told the Cleveland audience, covers a wide range of digital tools. STLE efforts include a Facebook page, a YouTube video channel for our Web site and the digital edition of TLT magazine that debuts this month.
In addition, the 2009 Annual Meeting features the rollout of our Lubricants and Metalworking Fluids Cybrary, developed in partnership with a firm called Chemidex. The Cybrary is an online search engine that connects our formulator members with critical information from suppliers. The concept is already a hit in other related industries, such as paint, coatings and food technology. We expect similar results in the lubricants and metalworking fluids industry.
While the reaction to these new digital products was positive and encouraging, the strongest response during the Cleveland talk came when I described how STLE is using digital technology to enhance the value of two very traditional membership benefits.
Based on that, I want to make sure all members are aware and encourage TLT readers who are not members to consider the fact that a $125 per year membership investment is a cost-effective way to access this value—even in the midst of a deep recession.
Item No. 1, peer-to-peer networking, is always rated at the top of STLE benefits. Now members can use our online directory to search for contacts in a variety of ways: by name, company and geographic section. This is a service that goes to the heart of STLE’s mission of supporting the global network of individuals, institutions, societies and corporate entities with a common interest in advancing the science of tribology and the practice of lubrication engineering. The online directory has been active on STLE’s Web site since late last year. Later this year, we are adding the capability of searching by areas of expertise in order to further support networking and enable local sections to seek out expert speakers for technical talks and education courses.
The second function, also accessible through the Web site, is the capability to review the more than 50 years of work that’s been published in our
Tribology Transactions journal. The secret to using this benefit is to first log into the members-only portion of STLE’s Web site and then click on the
Transactions link. This will take you to a page where you can search every paper ever published in
Transactions by author, keyword or title.
As an added benefit, that same members-only page provides an access link to
Tribology Letters. Thanks to STLE’s alliance with Springer Science and Business Media, publisher of that and many other fine journals, you can review 34 volumes of quality journal articles from researchers around the world that have been published in
Letters.
As I told our members in Cleveland, STLE’s foray into the digital world puts us in good company in terms of strategy. The business media has been buzzing lately with stories of how Fortune 500 companies like Starbucks and Harley-Davidson are using these tools and others to serve customers and get their feedback.
Organizations like STLE often adapt this sort of service to our purposes. Your organization is in touch with these new tools and looking for ways to put them to serious business use for today’s STLE members and those in the future.
You can reach Certified Association Executive Ed Salek at esalek@stle.org.