Science Library Pad

Check your sources - The Battle of the Fly

Summary

A Wikipedia statement about the zipper versus the button fly has turned into a story repeated by authoritative sources that in the pivotal year of 1937 Esquire magazine had a "Battle of the Fly" contest where the zipper won, with the memorable statement that a button fly had the "possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray".  The Wikipedia statement has no supporting reference, and in fact this entire scenario is unsupported by available online evidence, turning out to probably be a conflation of a (possibly apocryphal) 1937 event or fashion trend in France with advertisements in Esquire in the early 1930s.

SIDEBAR: My analysis depends on an assumption that Esquire's online archive search delivers complete results.  The site does say "Every Article.  Every Page.  Every issue of Esquire ever published.  1933 to today."  END SIDEBAR

UPDATE 2022-09-18: It looks like the source for the phrase "Battle of the Fly" is the book Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty by Robert Friedel (1994).  END UPDATE (see next update)

UPDATE 2023-06-09: It seems highly likely that the "Battle of the Fly" story is a mythologized reuse of the phrase from Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty (1994) by Robert Friedel.  In the book the phrase is used in passing to refer to a marketing effort by Talon, it is definitely not about any sort of actual event where the zipper was compared with other fasteners.  END UPDATE

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty

The Independent reviewed Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty under the remarkably awkward headline "Hookless hookers: the battle of the fly".  This review was the only definitive source I could find specifically stating that this term is used in the book:

But he notices also, as he narrates what became known as "the battle of the fly" ... - The Independent, "Hookless hookers: the battle of the fly", book review by Robert Winder, 21 April 1995

It seems likely this book is the source but the information has gotten jumbled along the way.  END UPDATE

An Uncited Assertion

If you try to find out why jeans mostly have zippers rather than button fly, googling brings up endless variations of this Wikipedia paragraph:

The zipper beat the button in 1937 in the "Battle of the Fly", after French fashion designers raved over zippers in men's trousers. Esquire declared the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men" and among the zippered fly's many virtues was that it would exclude "The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray."^{[citation needed]} - Wikipedia: Zipper - History section

There are quite a few assertions sitting behind that "[citation needed]".

This raises the question of whether anyone actually checked that Esquire made that statement, and whether the statement was made in 1937 (as could be implied by the paragraph). The answer appears to be no.

Endless Variations

It's hard to know how much of the scrambled way this info has propagated is due to past Wikipedia edits and how much is due to current mis-reading of the Wikipedia entry, but this paragraph shows up in variations in lots of authoritative sources including the Smithsonian:

The upswing for the zipper came in 1937 when the zipper beat the button in the 1937 "Battle of the Fly" and french fashion designers began to rave over the zipper. Esquire magazine declared the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men" and of zipper's many virtues it would exclude the "possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray." - Smithsonian blog "Unbound", The Up and Down History of the Zipper, May 3, 2010

There is an interesting sequence issue, as this Smithsonian article predates the Wikipedia entry.  Is this the origin of the Battle of the Fly?  The Smithsonian cites two books:

UPDATE 2022-09-18:

1. Talon, inc. : a romance of achievement / / an abridgement of the original manuscript by James Gray to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the company ; [edited by Stanley H. Brown]. Chicago : Rand McNally, c1963.
2. Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty by Robert Friedel (1994, reprinted in 1996)

As a niche corporate history, the Talon book is basically unavailable to me, but I have ordered the Zipper book (it is not available in electronic form).  I could also try contacting the author but if he's around he may not be all that keen revisiting a book he wrote over 28 years ago.

I speculated whether Talon's corporate hagiography is the origin of the story, but it seems clear now it is the Zipper book.  You'll find out more about the Talon company below.

END UPDATE

There were also various 100th anniversary quick takes in 2013, from e.g. the CBC:

Esquire magazine raved in 1937 that the zipper would help men avoid "the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray." - CBC News - Science - Apr 29, 2013 - Zipper anniversary: 10 bits of trivia to impress the pants off you

Notice how it's now Esquire magazine in 1937, the date having apparently drifted due to a misreading of the Wikipedia paragraph.

Here's the Chicago Tribune:

It is said that Esquire magazine put the zipper in every other intimate place. In 1937, the magazine hosted a "Battle of the Fly" contest pitting the zipper against the button fly, according to the Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions. Game, set, match, Sundback's secure zipper. It helped avoid "the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray," the magazine concluded. - Chicago Tribune - Oct 16, 2013 - The Zipper (1893)

So now, wait, Esquire hosted a "Battle of the Fly" contest in 1937, according to the Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions (circa 2003), and Esquire concluded that contest with the memorable "unintentional and embarrassing disarray" phrase. But that's just not true.  That's not even what the Encyclopedia says, at least in the 2003 version available to search online.  The Encyclopedia says

In 1937, men's clothing designers began to experiment with zippers in trousers.  The zipper fly was praised by Esquire magazine as helping prevent "the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing display". - Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions, Fasteners section, page 121 "The Zipper", from Google Books, search inside this book

The Wikipedia entry was only created on August 22, 2003 (without this information).  Either Wikipedia ends up getting this story from the Encyclopedia or elsewhere, or I'm looking at a post-2003 revised version of the Encyclopedia text in Google Books.

Incidentally zippers in trousers are actually from 1933 or earlier.

So the Chicago Tribune, an authority, is citing an Encyclopedia as an authority and a magazine as an authority, but the Encyclopedia text isn't true.  (It's not clear what the source of the Encyclopedia's statements might have been.) Basically the Tribune managed to invent an entire Esquire event based on misread sources that are in turn based on an unsupported Wikipedia source. The ultimate is when in 2014 Esquire online repeats this story about itself, creating an apparently authoritative citation to a statement it never actually made.

fashionistos and functionalists alike saw the auto-clasp's allure and initiated the Battle of the Fly… which was swiftly and definitively won by the zipper in the 1930s. Even this illustrious publication in 1937 declared (and still does declare) it the superior idea in men's fashion, both for style and for its potential to avoid, "the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray." - Esquire, The Battle of the Button Fly, June 9, 2014

A Very Different Story Pre-Wikipedia

In Esquire's defense, they do have a good article about the zipper from 1989, with rather surprising references to Brave New World, and less surprising ones to the royals as trendsetters

Men didn’t have zippered trousers when the book was written. They had buttons. Zippers were still a novelty in 1932, and in Huxley’s view they were symbolic of the mechanical and dehumanized future that lay in store for all of us. ... Custom tailors disdained zippered flies as vulgar, and mass manufacturers claimed they were too expensive—a zipper added a dollar to the cost of a pair of trousers; buttons cost only two cents. That’s where matters stood until 1934, when the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and their second cousin “Dickie” Mountbatten suddenly started wearing zippered flies. - Esquire, The Zipper, by John Berendt, May 1, 1989

It's interesting how in 1989, pre-google and pre-Wikipedia, this entire "Battle of the Fly" narrative doesn't exist.

Getting to the Truth - Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray

Actually searching the Esquire archive for the phrase "unintentional and embarrassing disarray" returns zero articles, but two advertisements from the Talon Hookless Fastener Company, from September 1933 and February 1934.  If I change to search just "embarrassing disarray" I get a total of twelve Talon ads running to November 1936.

The September 1933 advertisement extols the virtues of Talon's "slide fastener" (they couldn't say zipper, because it's actually ZIPPER® trademark B.F. Goodrich, and Goodrich was assertive in defending its trademark at the time).

Here's just the first two of the ten-point list in the Talon ad.

Why TALON means new distinction in trousers

1. Talon eliminates ugliness of the button fly.  Side wrinkles, gaps between buttons, and bulkiness are gone.
2. Talon excludes the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray.

This text displayed beside a man wearing flat-fronted trousers that would be ridiculously high-waisted today.

Getting to the Truth - The Newest Tailoring Idea for Men

The BBC News says:

Esquire magazine hailed the zipper's use on trousers in the late 1930s and declared it the “Newest Tailoring Idea for Men”. - BBC News, The ingenious invention to better the button, 23rd March 2017

A link, an actual link to a source.  Except the source is wrong.  The source is the rather imposingly-titled The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History, Volume 3 (circa 2010) and on page 922 it says:

In 1937 a French fashion magazine declared that there were more trousers being made with zippers on their flies than buttons, and Esquire magazine in the United States proclaimed the zipper as the "newest tailoring idea for men," ... - The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History, Volume 3 - Google Books, search inside this book

But this is just the same rabbit hole all over again. In any case, it demonstrates again a second phrase attributed to Esquire is that the zipper is "the newest tailoring idea for men", but searching the Esquire archive reveals the sole mention of this phrase is in the self-same Talon advertisement from September 1933.  In starting its list of benefits, it has a header reading:

TALON
Slide Fastener for Trousers
Newest Tailoring Idea for Men

So both phrases that are attributed to an Esquire article are actually a few lines in a September 1933 advertisement, a segment which surely must be fair use for me to reproduce.

And here, for possibly the first time on the Internet, is the actual primary source link:

Esquire magazine, "Hookless Fastener Company" (Talon advertisement), September 1, 1933.

It is kind of ridiculous than an endlessly-recirculated set of phrases trace down to a single advertisement.

Getting to the Truth - The Battle of the Fly

NOTE: The investigation below was before I had strong signals indicating that the Zipper book is the source for this phrase.  It's still a useful investigation.

One data point is there are zero search results in the Esquire archive for "battle of the fly".  It seems unlikely the magazine has any association with this phrase, let alone hosting some kind of contest in 1937. Googling has the problem that all the results are just rephrases of the Wikipedia paragraph with no primary sources.  Even when the sources seem primary they're not. Basically all I have to go on is something in France in 1937 "Battle of the Fly".

If this was a thing in France, I would hope it would show up in the French Wikipedia article Fermeture éclair, but it doesn't. Setting aside Google translate's fanciful notion that "pants fly" translates as "pantalon voler" (which means literally pants flying in the air) the actual translation of trouser fly is "la braguette".  So if this "Battle of the Fly" is a real thing, it should be something like "Bataille de la braguette".

This being France, one hit is on the history of seins nus, which asserts in passing that there has never been a battle of the fly, although they mean this more in the sense of a battle to have men expose below the waist in the same way that women expose above the waist.

Cette mode scandaleuse d'une virilité exhibée dans des étuis rigides inspire aussi les sarcasmes d'Etienne Pasquier, la braguette " représentant par l'extérieur chose grosse et grande, combien que le plus de temps, il n'y ait rien ou bien peu dedans ". Mais, malgré les railleries, il n'y a point eu dans l'Histoire de " bataille de la braguette " comme il y eut une " bataille des seins nus "... - Le blog de Philippe Poisson (not safe for work), Gabrielle d'Estrées lance la mode des seins nus, 30 Août 2009 (not safe for work)

Searching Google France in French this is the one and only result. If I broaden my search, using "braguette" I unsurprisingly mostly get histories of the pants fly, with assertions that in France at least, it's the 1960s that mark the transition to the zipper, not 1937.

Dans les années 1960, lorsque les boutons cédèrent leur place à la fermeture éclair puisque ces derniers se décousaient régulièrement. | "In the 1960s, when the buttons gave way to the zipper" - On sait pourquoi la braguette est inversée sur les jeans et des hommes et des femmes, 11 juillet 2021

Let's try the history of the zipper, fermeture éclair histoire.

• franceinfo - 22/04/2017 - La fermeture à glissière a 100 ans
• Europe 1 - Historiquement vôtre - Les origines - 31/08/2020 - Aux origines de la fermeture éclair par David Castello-Lopes

The two French sources above cite the use of the zipper by American army in their boots in the first world war.  They also enjoy mentions of the zipper as scandalising puritan sensibilities.  But there is no mention of the 1937 Battle of the Fly.

At this point I think the 1937 Battle of the Fly may be an invention out of whole cloth.

I checked every table of contents for Esquire in 1937.  "And Fly with Safety" in June 1937 looked promising but it turned out to be about seaplanes.  There are lots of Talon ads, including prominently placed e.g. a full page ad on the left page next to the table of contents on the right page in the July 1937 issue.  "Knights in Armor" was a last hope in the December 1937 episode, but it is about actual suits of armor.

So on a scan, there is zero mention of zippers or this probably-imaginary "Battle of the Fly" in any 1937 Esquire. I would be happy to be corrected.

The most likely scenario now seems to be that pro-zipper, anti-buttonfly Talon's corporate hagiography book conjures up some "Battle of the Fly" that they won, and that's what is cited by the Smithsonian, and then in turn that's what got picked up in Wikipedia.

UPDATE 2022-09-18: The most likely scenario is that the term is in the Zipper book but may not have been widely used, and certainly wasn't used in Esquire.  END UPDATE

To wrap up, let's get the sequencing of changes from the Wikipedia entry history.

Getting to the Truth - Wikipedia History

The Wikipedia Zipper article was created on August 22, 2003, without the Battle of the Fly story. For almost seven years, the relevant paragraph was an almost unaltered and (as far as I know) historically accurate set of statements, here's the last example from 03:49, August 10, 2010:

The zipper slowly became popular for children's clothing and men's trousers in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1930s the haute couture designer Elsa Schiaparelli featured zippers in her avant-garde gowns, helping it to become acceptable in women's clothing. In 1934, Tadao Yoshida founded a company called San-S Shokai in downtown Tokyo. Later, this company would change its name to YKK and become the world's largest manufacturer of zippers and fastening products. By World War II, the zipper had become widely used in Europe and North America, and after the war quickly spread through the rest of the world. - Wikipedia - Zipper (03:49, August 10, 2010)

Then all of a sudden on August 17, 2010 the Battle of the Fly appears out of nowhere, courtesy of "Gagakong":

In the 1930's, a sales campaign began for children's clothing featuring zippers. The campaign praised zippers for promoting self-reliance in young children by making it possible for them to dress in self-help clothing. The zipper beat the button in the 1937 in the "Battle of the Fly," when French fashion designers raved over zippers in men's trousers. Esquire magazine declared the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men" and among the zippered fly's many virtues was that it would exclude "The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray." - Wikipedia - Zipper (22:06, August 17, 2010)

This unreferenced paragraph is never corrected for the next 12 years, other than getting a [citation needed] tag.

Gagakong made seven edits to Wikipedia (including two to Zipper) from August 1, 2010 to August 18, 2010 and then according to their contributions log https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Gagakong has never made an edit since.

Given the sequencing of events, it looks like Gagakong may have taken the "Battle of the Fly" in good faith from the Smithsonian source.  Otherwise, they may have just made it up, and if they remember this moment's editing at all, are delighted that it has survived and propagated to authoritative sources.

NOTE: The above reposted from my personal blog, with minor modifications.

NRC jobs - Senior Project Manager

At the National Research Council

... Reporting to the Manager, Client Access and Partnership Services, the Senior Project Manager manages the portfolio of Knowledge Management projects, including inter-project coordination, resource allocation, preparation of project proposals, as well as scheduling, risk analysis, and project prioritization.

Classification: RCO (Research Council Officer, pay scale according to qualifications)

Language: bilingual imperative BBB

Type: Continuing position

apply at http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/careers/jobpost.nsf/EnglishAll/E5624813EE56C91485257CAC00735DCF

deadline is May 9, 2014

NRC jobs - Strategic Information Analysts

... you will contribute to client success by performing R&D trend analysis using advanced data and text analytics tools and methodologies. You will expose research fronts and model the business and technical environments through deep-dive analyses of patenting and scientific publishing activity, within the context of industry and market activity. Using state-of-the-art visualization tools, the SIA identifies key clusters of expert networks and discovers new areas of application for emerging technologies. The SIA is responsible for the promotion, and delivery of scientific, technical and industry analysis projects.

Classification: LS-4

Type: continuing positions

apply at http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/careers/jobpost.nsf/EnglishAll/A97F1DBE7CD2168685257C63006388E8

deadline March 24, 2014

Google Scholar Library

Nine years ago and a few days, I was on the taxi to the airport from Internet Librarian 2004 and in chatting with the driver he said something like "have you heard Google is doing something for academics?".

I hadn't.  It was Google Scholar.

So it seems appropriate that nine years ago to the day when I first created my blog and posted about the launch of Scholar, I'm writing about a new feature: Google Scholar Library.

Today we’re launching Scholar Library, your personal collection of articles in Scholar. You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar's full-text search to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere. You decide what goes into your library and we’ll provide all the goodies that come with Scholar search results - up to date article links, citing articles, related articles, formatted citations, links to your university’s subscriptions, and more.

Google Scholar blog - Google Scholar Library - November 19, 2013

Basically it lets you save citations, and label them.  Google Scholar results get a new "Save" button.

You can apply labels e.g. "Library Future"

and view your library by label

if you have a Google Scholar profile ("Google Scholar Citations") then you can get recommendations based on your citations

You also get automatic "My Citations" and "Cited by me" sections in the library.

Previously:
October 17, 2012  ORCID: a unifying identifier for authors
July 21, 2011  Google Scholar adds personal profiles displaying citations
November 20, 2004  Google Scholar

Information Management term positions at NRC

Jobs at the National Research Council Canada.

Project Lead, IM Transformation

Knowledge Management
Ottawa - Ontario

Job classification: RCO

This is a term position until June 2016.

Bilingual imperative CBC/CBC

Posted until filled

Apply here: http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/careers/jobpost.nsf/EnglishAll/7CC85A7A4C451F2D85257C0C0062CB49

---

Business Analyst, Information Management Project

Knowledge Management
Ottawa - Ontario

Job classification: LS-3

This is a term position until March 2016.

Language: English

Closing date: November 8, 2013

Apply here: http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/careers/jobpost.nsf/EnglishAll/9A77F49502056B9085257BE9004667ED

NRC jobs - Project Lead, IM Transformation

Organisation: Knowledge Management

Location: Ottawa , Ontario

Classification: RCO

Duration: This is a term position until June 2016.

Language: Bilingual imperative CBC/CBC

Closing Date: September 23, 2013

You will:
• Lead the three-year strategic NRC Electronic Working Environment (NEWE) Investment Project consisting of multiple work packages and teams to deliver transformative change;
• Implement key IM [Information Management] strategies and plans;
• Implement SharePoint to manage documents and records and support collaboration among 4,000 employees
• Link SharePoint with a Government-approved electronic document and records management system (EDRMS).

More information and link to apply at: http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/careers/jobpost.nsf/EnglishAll/DD79D3171D761B2085257BC1006C8B1E

LinkedIn maps my connections - I analyse the meaning

A surprisingly stark clustering into three very thinly linked groups, as generated by LinkedIn Labs Maps:

See the source of this image at LinkedIn Labs.

While LinkedIn can tell you the interconnectedness of my connections, it doesn't (yet) tell you how strong the connections are - although presumably this could be derived at least for online by analysing Twitter traffic, blog links etc. to see how often you @ message people, retweet them, link to their blog posts, comment on their blog posts... Then thicker lines could indicate stronger online connections (an interesting research project).  And you might want to use brightness to indicate a fading over time of connections, if they are not maintained.

(I should mention before I launch into the rest of this that I am fairly stingy with my LinkedIn connections - in general it's limited to people I have worked with or communicated with extensively.  I know some people use LinkedIn as an online rolodex of everyone they encounter in a work context, but I don't use it that way.)

In the absence of LinkedIn explaining the connections for me, here's my analysis: the story this tells is that I have three groups of LinkedIn connections: people from my workplace where I hold my substantive position, NRC-CISTI (green, lower left); people from elsewhere in the Government of Canada (blue, upper right); and a library / science / scholarly communication group (various orangey-purple colours, upper left).  Most of the last group are not in Ottawa, and many are not even in Canada, instead being in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

What I think is interesting is the online and offline story this tells.  In terms of maintaining social connections, when I'm working at CISTI, the green connections are maintained by face-to-face contact daily.  The government contacts I see face-to-face weekly, mostly at after-hours events related to social media, collaboration and public service renewal.  And the scholarly comms / library connections I see usually at most once or twice a year, at conferences.

So in an interpersonal sense, the lines to workplace colleagues would be very thick.  But if you were to be able to apply an "awareness of work activities and interests" filter, the picture actually changes dramatically.  In that case, the connections are strongest, the amount of information transferred largest, for people with a sustained online presence.  Communication within an organisation is a classic problem.  But it's interesting that it now is possible in some cases for me to have a much better understanding of what is happening outside my organisation, what people are working on and investigating, than to understand what's happening internally. 

Twitter in this case can be thought of as a vibration of the connection, a continuous thrumming of quick notes of activity - a thought shared, a link retweeted.  In network terms we would call this a "keep alive", a ping.  "I'm here, I'm working on things," Twitter says.  But for real information density, you need to have blog posts - a blog post is a thick solid line, a rich informational link, particularly if it has a lot of out-links and comments.  And of course, this starts to look like synapses - frequently used connections get stronger.

This can lead to an odd dichotomy, where your social connections at work, which traditionally would have been the richest sources of information about what's going on, may actually serve only a tribal purpose, whereas "virtual" connections link you much more strongly into the information you need to do you work, and provide a sense of ambient awareness about important developments in your fields of interest.

The change - the fact that when people narrate their work, regardless of where they are, you can understand better what is going on - this change I think is part of what drives the gap in understanding, between the people who say they must be connected in order to do their work, and the people who see online activities are purely social, the "why do employees need Facebook" question.  This is a result of a confusion between networking for social connections, and networking for information connections.

I also think people apply an odd scepticism to these online connections, as if they're somehow not "real", as if only face-to-face is real interaction.  To which I say, is calling someone to tell them you love them not "real" because you're not both in the same physical space?  Is writing someone a heart-felt handwritten letter of thanks not "real"?  It's a very odd concept of real if that's the case.

All this to say, we have to be careful about analogies from the physical world to the digital world.  People hear the "social" in social media and think employees are going into purely entertaining spaces, to take a break.  Whereas what has actually emerged for some is a professional knowledge network that gives them more information and more context more rapidly from external sources than is available within their own organisation.

So be aware: if your organisation is a tight cluster of interconnections, with few links reaching outside the organisation, and with very thin amounts of information exchanged across the connections, you're going to be outperformed both by employees within your organisation who are better at making professional connections online and contributing to the online ecosystem of information, as well as by organisations that as a whole are able to learn this communications lesson.

If you want a classic example of an organisation failure in this area, there's no better one than the organisation intranet, an inward facing mirror that reflects only your own images and ideas back at you, typically outdated ones frozen in the web of intranet approvals and process.  There's a reason it's called the World Wide Web, not the organisation internal network.  The power came with open worldwide connections, not with organisations talking to themselves.  Open allows serendipitous connections, unanticipated discoveries.  Choose open.

two tech positions available at OpenWetware

Jason Kelly contacted me and informed me that there are two technical positions open for your wetware at OpenWetware, one's called senior tech developer, the other senior knowledge developer

http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Hiring

Perhaps of interest to those of you who bridge the boundary between librarianship and developer.

Previously:
December 20, 2005  OpenWetWare, biological research sharing wiki

Tapscott: turn your organization inside-out

Ok, the way he puts it is

Part 5: Platforms for Innovation

This is a very important, key concept.
In fact, let me say it again, with colour and size:

This is a very important, key concept.

This is absolutely foundational, in fact, to understand a lot of the issues that I talk about.

The core is as simple as simple can be: you get more from sharing than from secrecy.
But you have to understand the context of "secrecy".  In many cases, anything that is not published on the public Internet, might as well be in a locked box on a high shelf.  In fact, you might as well print it out, send it to the new Library of Alexandria, and burn down the new library.

The benefits of sharing are so enormous, and the extra overhead so tiny, that I have never quite understood why people don't post more information publically on the net.  My thinking has always been "if I do this for myself, maybe there is someone else out there it might be useful for".  Considering that a page I did for myself as a firewall sysadmin gets over a million hits per year, it appears this concept is valid.

During the time of the Clinton Administration, as reported (in passing) in The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester, they turned classification inside out.  Instead of saying "prove this should be declassified", they said "prove this should be secret".  That led to the author of the book getting a map of China that, I suspect, he would no longer be able to get today.

This is the challenge for your organization.  Don't ask yourself "what's the justification for sharing this information on the net".  Ask "can anyone strongly justify NOT sharing this on the net".

I see the most ridiculous stuff go on.  Librarians (and many others) take written notes at conferences, then labouriously transcribe them to a written report, which is then emailed to like two other people and immediately forgotten/lost.

People don't have crystal balls to see within your organization or within your mind.  If you don't share your information, you might as well be invisible.  How's that for a slogan?  "Share transparently or be Internet invisible".  Additionally, these are not the days of late-1994, early-1995 when I first put up a website.  Then an interesting effort was highly visible, because there were so few pages.

There are now billions of pages.  The good news is, you can still rise out of those "foothills".  The bad news is, if you have a search surface, an acreage (hectarage?) if you will, that is tiny, you have very little chance of being noticed.  If your land isn't continually being expanded and improved, in fact, it will probably get little (search engine) notice.  So here's another concept: "Sharing increases your search surface".  In security, we talk about making your "attack surface" or "vulnerability surface" as small as possible.  Internet presence is the opposite: you want to make your Internet surface as big as possible.

I know this is true, because my website and my blog bring me incredible contacts and opportunities that I could never have imagined, despite the fact that both Internet surfaces are often little more than "stuff that I wanted to research and think about anyway, which I'm sharing because there's no reason not to, and someone else may have similar interests".

Anyway, this posting has grown very long, but that is because it is of such critical importance.  Think beyond container to content.  Think beyond content to sharing content.  That is where everything is going to be happening.  That is going to be the new expectation.  If you've seen the controversy in Toronto and Ottawa about private municipal contracts and secret city meetings, that thinking is mired in the past.  Citizens, young and old, are going to be demanding the end to ridiculous, needless secrecy, from their governments and from all other organizations that they deal with.

So what is library Service-Oriented Architecture about?  It is about no more (and no less) than helping libraries collectively to build an open, shared platform, that enables sharing of containers (e.g. books) as well as sharing of content (e.g. articles).

Here's how Tapscott puts it

A growing number of smart companies are learning that openness is a force for growth and competitiveness. As long as you're smart about how and when, you can blow open the windows and unlock the doors to build vast business ecosystems on top of what we call "platforms for innovation."

Because I am a prideful creature, I must say I wrote this entire posting after having read only the first few sentences of Tapscott's article today, it is therefore heartening synchronicity to read

Jeff Barr, who runs Amazon's Web services program says developers and marketplace sellers are "increasing the surface area of Amazon." They add more and more things to sell, in more and more places on the Web. All of this happens in a completely self-organizing fashion, which makes Amazon's already low overhead even lower.

So let's wrap it up with a final combination: library SOA will increase the Internet surface of all participating libraries.

ICSTI winter 2006 workshop - information and data in e-science

ICSTI: 2006 Winter Meeting Workshop
Information and Data in e-Science: Making Seamless Access a Reality

February 3, 2006
Paris, France

The agenda includes CISTI's Director-General Bernard Dumouchel speaking on Knowledge Discovery

Knowledge discovery can enhance digital library services by providing richer, more interactive methods of accessing the collection. Although a new field, knowledge discovery complements the role of the library bringing in structure to information, and making that information useful. Knowledge discovery is a natural extension of the library’s traditional role of organizing documents. In this instance, however, documents are organized dynamically according to the relationship of their contents. Knowledge discovery is also an inherently participatory process. While knowledge discovery techniques can uncover hidden relationships in the data, only the user’s expertise can give those relationships meaning. CISTI is developing two knowledge discovery applications. ...

Note:
ICSTI = International Council for Scientific and Technical Information
CISTI = Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information

human reference - various answers

I'm not sure really what to make of these answers sites.  Isn't every discussion forum basically the same thing?  What does it tell us that people keep reinventing "generic answers" sites?  Is it just part of the ongoing battle to create communities?  Need answers = need enough people answering...  In the post-USENET world, with specialized discussions scattered on thousands of sites, is it even realistic to try?

Anyway:

• Google Answers (selected experts, and you have to pay)
• Yahoo Answers (anyone can ask, anyone can answer, AFAIK)
• Wondir (any to any)

Have libraries missed an opportunity?
Could the Wikipedia community be leveraged?  (I guess Answers.com is doing that in a way.)
Do enough eyeballs make any question answerable?

It will be interesting to see how the tension between new and established, between decentralized and centralized, continue to play out.  It seems to me that many organizations that have moved to the Internet world have lost sight of their audience.  Most libraries are surely intensely local organizations.  Are they making that connection?

After having pondered these things and written my posting, I see Gary Price has lots of info from earlier in the month along similar lines: Other Q&A Services, Most Available For Free.

social networking at the BBC

Or the Beeb, as Canadian anglophiles might insist.

Euan Semple from the BBC keynoted the track on social networking. The BBC has created a gateway allowing its employees to use a number of social networking tools. The first is a forum with 11 different discussion groups, including Editorial, Production, What’s Going On, etc. Over 11,000 people use the forum to ask questions and get answers. One result of this platform is that trivial questions can turn into interesting issues; misinformation gets corrected, and lurkers (people who read but do not participate in the discussion) get the benefit of the discussion. Euan stressed that these types of systems must be sociable places where people will want to go to get their information, and it can be a challenge to get conversations started. Once the conversations begin, the statistics show that thousands of people may read posts, but only a few contribute comments or replies.

Other social networking tools that have been added to the BBC’s gateway are:
• Connect.gateway—used to identify and find other people in the organization. A search tool allows employees to find others with specific expertise (foreign language speakers, etc.)
• An internal blog has had a large impact on journalism processes. Over 250 people within the BBC are blogging, even senior managers. Blogs have started to replace “all hands” broadcast e-mail announcements from upper management.
• Wikis are used by over 1,500 people and have become a rich resource for all kinds of information. With their freely available editing capabilities, wikis are very different from traditional documents. For example, when new policies are proposed, employees are encouraged to comment and change the initial documents, and then they are considered for incorporation into the final policy.
• RSS software that runs and syndicates content for those interested.

as reported in InfoToday Blog - Social Networking at the BBC.
There is also an audio interview (WAV) with him.

He spoke on Day 3 of Online Information 2005.  The presentation doesn't seem to be available, err, online.

I've never seen a blog report that a link came from someone's bookmarks, so anyway... via Darlene Fichter's Furl bookmarks.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations symposium Australia 2005 and Laval 2006

The 8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations - ETD2005: evolution through discovery was September 28-30, 2005 in Australia.

Mostly papers in PDF format are available.  However for Stevan Harnad's opening keynote, both his paper Maximising research impact by mandating institutional self-archiving (PDF) and his presentation (PowerPoint) are online.

ETD2006 will be at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada.  In June 2006 I think.

Laval has lots of cool electronic developments.  The page for the Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval is certainly an interesting starting point.  They have been working on their electronic theses project for years, see

ETD Implementation at Université Laval (PowerPoint) from 2002
E-Theses Project at Université Laval (PowerPoint) from Access 2003
R&D @ Laval University Library -- Archimede and ETD's (PDF) from IATUL 2005

The repository itself is searchable at http://www.theses.ulaval.ca/

Knowledge Management 2.0

Dave Pollard has some very insightful writing about tech watch and other knowledge management challenges.  He contacted me to point out his summary of a talk he's presented to the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and C2: Connect and Collaborate meetings recently.

how to save the world: Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration 2015

I particularly liked the following quote, which is something I encounter again and again - it's not the technology, it's the people and the culture that are the challenges, and we have to be realistic: adapt to the way people work, don't try to get them to adapt to the technology.

The challenges we face today in getting people to share what they know and to collaborate effectively are not caused or cured by technologies, they are cultural impediments. It's extremely difficult to change people's behaviours (they usually exist for a reason), so the solutions we find have to accommodate these behaviours, and these cultures, rather than trying to 'fix' them.

Atlantic Scholarly Information Network blog and info

I don't know much about the Canadian ASIN (Atlantic Scholarly Information Network) project, but they do have a blog with some info.  (Prepare for acronym fever.)

The CAUL [Council of Atlantic University Libraries] have begun implementing the ASIN Portal which includes single-signon authenticated access to the combined licensed and public resources of the CAUL libraries. The [Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA) conference] session will cover the individual components of the Portal including federated/broadcast searching, OpenURL resolution, Relais document delivery and Subject Rooms which are all maintained by the Sirsi’s Rooms context management system.

Via Stephen on CISTI Architecture internal bliki.

LoC series on managing knowledge in digital environment

It was a bit of a breadcrumb trail for me to follow, but anyway.
Library of Congress lecture series

Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context

a series of lectures including Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who spoke yesterday, and upcoming speakers including Lawrence Lessig.  The series is available on CSPAN.

C-SPAN: Library of Congress - The Digital Future

Collaboration for Knowledge Management and Campus Informatics

Collaboration for Knowledge Management and Campus Informatics By Sarah M. Pritchard,  August 23, 2004

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/informatics/informatics/documents/UCSB_Campus_Informatics_Project_Report.pdf 

Project home page:

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/informatics/

seen on Rocky Northern Shepherd, a blog by Peter Levesque of the SSHRC.

Particularly relevant channels from that blog are Knowledge Mobilization and Community Research.
(The rest of it is pretty cool too.)

IL2004 - Tuesday - 11:30 Developing an Enterprise-wide Knowledge Management System

Originally posted 2004-11-16.

Barbara Silcox
Jo Ann Remshard
NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology
isd?

NIKE - NIST Integrated Knowledge EditorialNet

Project Vision: To capture, organize, and make available NIST’s knowledge assets in the form of documents and digital objects.

(system doesn’t exist yet)

they looked at Application Service Providers (ASPs)
decision is being made

unique piece: CrossWalk - migrate data from NIKE to online catalog
just maps MARC to online catalog (MARC to OPAC)

Digital Library and Institutional Repository

copyright issues

Search Component

maintain online catalog from Sirsi

Next Steps

- migration of legacy data to new database, doing much cleaning
- continue exploring options for building digital library
- continue to acquire needed skill sets through training and recruitment
- expand digital library to include museum objects
- assessment

US GPO (Government Printing Office) doing a lot of scanning.