Science Library Pad

SLA2005 - post-a-palooza - 229 postings

Carolyne boggles my mind with...

After hunting around and finding and then losing SLA 2005 blog postings I decided to put them all here. Enjoy.

229 posts I have found and marked already

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/carolyne

SLA2005 - Establishing a Weblog on your Intranet

Establishing a Weblog On Your Organization's Intranet
Sabrina I. Pacifici and Dennis Hamilton's presentation (in PDF) from the SLA Annual Conference in Toronto is a ying and yang study of blogging enterprisewide behind the corporate firewall, with examples of blogs, and numerous references to a wide range of sources that serve as a pathfinder on the various avenues and options available to those interested in leveraging this application.

from LLRX.com

SLA2005 - Internet queueing theory - IMG_7235

  IMG_7235 
  Originally uploaded by rakerman.

(Part of) the line up to get to the Internet-connected computers at SLA 2005.  You can see a second photo up on Flickr under my sla2005 tag.  I think it's kind of unfortunate in this day and age to see people writing URLs down on paper and lining up to use the Internet.  (That was in part due to the venue's impossibly high price for wireless Internet.)

SLA2005 - docdel vendors - Sunday June 5

I wasn't at SLA on Sunday, so it's nice to find this report on Some Sunday Sessions from the PAM Division blog.

Another Sunday session was the SciTech Vendor update, featuring three presentations on document delivery by CISTI, The Linda Hall Library and The British Library. The presentations themselves were quite standard marketing pitches, outlining their various collections and ILL services. Each was done quite well -- it's hard to see how anyone could go wrong using any of the above services.

...

At the end of the session, someone in the audience basically asked the BL representative why someone should choose them instead of CISTI. I would like to commend both the BL and CISTI reps for handling the situation diplomatically. No blows were exchanged.

SLA2005 - Connie Crosby

In case you've missed it, I wanted to point out Connie Crosby's coverage of SLA 2005.  She did a great job of combining photos with lucid commentary.  I don't know how she managed to capture all those URLs from the LexisNexis blog talk, I don't think I have ever seen PowerPoint slides go up and down so fast.

SLA2005 - more bloggers

I don't know if anyone has created a list of all the people blogging the conference, this is really something I think better handled through listing yourself on a wiki, so I have gone ahead and made a list on seedwiki.  If there's another better one, please let me know.  You're welcome to edit the wiki list.  As they say, fill your boots.

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/scilib/sla2005bloggers.cfm

SLA2005 - Globe article

Read this in the paper this morning.  Incidentally, the Globe and Mail is one of only two national newspapers in Canada, so lots of Canadians will see this article.  The online title is good: "Librarians as tech-savvy sleuths" (alternate link).  The headline in the paper was something along the lines of "Marian the librarian doesn't work here any more" (accompanied by a large photo of a librarian getting a massage).  There's some good content in the middle:

Special librarians, as they're called, typically work for big corporations, private companies, government agencies, museums, hospitals, associations and consulting firms that manage information.

"The membership is as diverse as any group you're going to find," Ms. Freeman said in the overheated exhibit hall this week, where 260 firms in the information field had booths. ...

In an age where all kinds of information can be had all kinds of ways, it apparently takes all kinds of people to find it, package it and get it where it needs to go -- and fast.

Special librarians, Ms. Freeman said, used to be "gatekeepers" of information with near-exclusive access to reference volumes and files, but technology has changed all that, giving anyone with an Internet connection access to reams of data.

This, in turn, has forced librarians to evolve into tech-savvy sleuths, able to sift quickly through vast amounts of on-line material -- plenty of it questionable, if not useless -- to find what their companies or clients need.

"These folks are on the very cutting edge," Ms. Freeman said.

They also spend a lot more time showing their fellow employees how to conduct effective research on their own, rather than finding the answers for them.

"Information intelligence and information literacy is the answer," said Juanita Richardson, a consultant for an on-line news distributor in Toronto, who said she has become "more of an enabler" than a provider of facts.

The rest of the article is mostly about breaking librarian stereotypes.  I was going to blog this in the main conference blog, but Jane Dysart beat me to it.

SLA2005 - wrapup - my postings to the conference blog

I thought the official SLA 2005 conference blog went relatively well, given the challenges of not having wireless Internet and only having a small number of Internet-connected PCs.  I made 8 postings in all, mostly photos and a couple session summaries.  I kept all my raw session blogging here on SLP.  Here are my postings:

• Closing keynote - Wednesday 09:00
• Simcoe Park (photo)
• Open Access - Tuesday 13:30
• Food Emporium
• Open Access in Developing Countries - Monday 15:30 - cancelled
• At the INFO-EXPO (photo)
• blogging and RSS - Monday 11:30 (photo)
• Monday General Session 09:30 (photo)

I will do a posting soon with updated thoughts about conference blogging and wikis based on this experience.

I did just notice that the conference blog has no search engine, I will ask them to add one.

SLA2005 - New Web Tools - Wednesday 11:30

... waiting for them to sort out the technology ...

Web Tools 2005

Gary Price (ResourceShelf and many others) and Genie Tyburski (Web Manager, The Virtual Chase)

Gary Price's part at
http://www.freepint.com/gary/2005/2005cooltools.html

(battery switch time)

Capturing the Web

Onfolio
- capture, RSS, etc.

Gary talking about 3 types of RSS feeds
- headline only
- snippet - title and first 20-40 words
- full-text

So if you have search engines using RSS, they may not be able to search the full text.

... switch to Gary

DocuTicker
- new high-quality full-text reports they have found

... switch back to Genie

NetSnippets
- capture screen shots
- assign keywords and bibliographic info
- create bibliography, index, report
- highlight info in a report
- create professional reports with your own logo

... switch to Gary

List of all specialized databases?
- Virtual Chase Directory
- SearchSystems.net (public records)

... switch to Genie

Scanning the News with RSS

Bloglines

... switch to Gary

Gary mentions the coming wave of RSS advertising.

Speakwire - listen to your RSS feeds

... switch to Genie

Live Bookmarks in Firefox

check out news.yahoo.com for news via RSS

... switch to Gary

a good web page editor
Nvu

... switch to Genie

RSS Search Engines

Daypop
Feedster
Fagan Finder Blogs and RSS Search Engines

... switch to Gary

RedLightGreen
- 120 million bibliographic records with a lot of added features
- was created for undergrads, but has many great features that are useful for anyone doing bibliographic searching

... switch to Genie

JiWire Hotspot Locator
- search for wireless access around the world
- variety of search criteria
- can show map with nearby hotspots

... switch to Gary

Who2 biography database

Gary discusses issues with Wikipedia, he added some fake info to his own Wikipedia entry and it hasn't been removed.

... switch to Genie

[US] Criminal Activity Research

pacer.uspci.uscourts.gov
Legal Dockets Online

... switch to Gary

Yahoo Local Download to Excel

... switch to Genie

more US legal stuff

... switch to Gary

Look at what Yahoo is doing.
http://next.yahoo.com/
- Yahoo MindSet
modify results using a slider

Yahoo Shopping SmartSort
sort results using sliders

Yahoo Industry Center
industry-specific pages

... switch to Genie

johnny.ihackstuff.com
- hacking Google

(there's more, but I'm taking a lunch break)

SLA2005 - closing keynote - Wednesday 09:00

... some SLA business ...

total attendance: 5273
2245 members
industry partner reps 1584
over 600 first-timers

SLA Mission: We are the global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners.

New Click University in addition to existing SLA Professional Development

Study on the role of librarians in the workforce.

... talking about money ...

... talking about other stuff accomplished this year ...

Board of Directors
New President - Pam Rollo

Integrated program to communicate SLA's value.

Infopromo about SLA 2006 in Baltimore (June 11-14, 2006).
"Horizon planning" sessions.

---

keynote speaker intro

Gary Hamel
Chairman of Strategos
Woodside Institute - how to help large organizations do continuous renewal

Facing up to the future: Helping your organization thrive in a world of accelerating change

A challenge for everyone.  Everyone needs to be resilient and change.
The big challenge for your organization may simply be that you become irrelevant.

The Goal: searchable, timely, relevant, accurant, unbiased etc. etc.

The goal hasn't changed, but the way you reach the goal has changed.

Closer than ever: Factiva, Wikipedia, Google, Podcasting, ...

Proposition #1: The future is less and less an extrapolation of the past.

"Change has gone hypercritical in our lifetimes"

The accelerating pace of evolution.

cultural change now happening generation by generation rather than over hundreds of years
different generations have different cognitive capabilities

Evolving fastest of all is information itself.

As an organization, are you changing as fast as the world around you?

"Accelerating change is the signal characteristic of the world we live in today."

Recalibrate priorities to learning and creating over executing.

"We are all become ignorant at an accelerating pace."

Proposition #2: Success has never been so fragile.

"We live in a world where incumbency is worth less and less"

Proposition #3: As change accelerates, so must the pace of strategic renewal.

List of industries striving for renewal.

Music industry challenged by Apple iTunes, HP (and others in the PC industry) challenged by Dell, etc.

"all the stories of deep change are stories of change driven by crisis, with a change in leadership"

That is "transformation tragically delayed".

"How do we make deep change continuous and intrinsic?"

Change should be: automatic, spontaneous, reflexive.

The real challenge is lowering the cost of strategic transformation and renewal.

Proposition #4: Every one of us has to become an enemy of entropy.

The problem is not knowledge, the problem is the way we look at knowledge.

Spend more time trying to understand the lenses through which people see knowledge.

Diagnosing inertia:
1) Perception - how people see the problem - blind to new possibilities
The future may not be unpredictable, but it may be unpalatable.

Seeking refuge in denial: Dismiss, Rationalize, Mitigate, Confront.

Comparison with the music industry.

2) Power
3) Principle

Have to be able to get new information to the leadership, bypass the filter layers.

You have to have a positive vision of where you're going.

Where does innovation come from?
1) Unexamined dogma
2) Unexploited trends
3) Unseen assets
4) Unvoiced needs

How do you help people develop the perceptual skills to see fundamentally new opportunities?

Challenge orthodoxy:
1) Surface the dogmas
Think about places where your views are indistinguishable from those of your competitors.

example from the food industry

2) Find the absurdities

3) Go to extremes

Rather than a 5% or 10% improvement, why not a 90% improvement?

"Think about offering an MBA program for $250"

"If you never ask the question, you never get the answer."

"Where aren't your competitors paying attention?"

Nokia example - took them to see young people so they would understand the youth market.

Leveraging discontinuites:
1) Find the fringe

Look in places where your competitors are not even paying attention.
See the small things that are already changing that have largely gone unnoticed.

Took Best Buy to visit Amish country.

2) Amplify the weak signals

What are those small signals that have enormous potential for my organization?

You could see video over Internet coming for years.

But the cable industry has... just discovered this.

"the specter of viewers going directly to content providers" - the distintermediation of television

3) Look for the big picture

Pattern recognition.

Leveraging embedded resources

e.g. Disney... on Broadway

Need to have an emotional sense of how it feels to be a customer of your services.

example: Magazines vs Television

TV should learn from magazines: it's always on, you can skip the ads, it will wait for you, there are dozens of specialty titles

operating model - on top of which is business model - on top of which is mental model - on top of which is the political model

political model - who has the power

The more concentrated is power, the less resilient the system will be.

Mental models decay quicker than political power.
A small number of people can hold the organization hostage to change.

if you have to wait for the top to give you permission, you have to wait a long time, because it has to be a huge thing to get their attention

Google model
- try to create new "googlettes" - new services
- 20% time working on whatever interests them
- small project teams (3 people)
- new services on Google Labs

"how do we become architects of decision-making processes?"

If it all depends on people on the top making decisions, it's going to go really slow.

Alternative decisionmaking...

Example: William Hill betting shop

pricing of uncertain events
betting shops use "collective wisdom"

What if top management had to publish probabilities of success for their actions, then they employees bet.

If no one is willing to take the bet, maybe it's not such a good idea.

Our practices are held in orbit around the ideology of efficiency.
1. Specialization
2. Standardization
3. Hierarchy
4. Planning and control
5. Extrinsic rewards

The above principles were built in a world of much slower change.

Where do we look to find new, resilient principles?

* Life is resilient
- comes from variety
huge number of ideas -> smaller number of experiments -> smaller number of projects -> smaller number of winners

Cemex (cement company) innovation days.
Hundreds of ideas are generated through successive rounds of innovation "ping-pong".

Innovators receive recognition and honors.

* Markets are resilient
- rapidly reallocate resources from yesterday's ideas to tomorrow's ideas

Shell Gamechanger Process
1. Idea
2. Peer review
3. Test and Mature ($25k)
4. Expert Review
5. First tollgate: Value proposition
6. Technical feasibility
7. Second tollgate: Business logic

Submission to experimental capital: 5 business days.

* Democracies are resilient

Example: W.L. Gore
- no titles
- every employee gets 10% dabbling time
- there's a market for talent
- no division can grow to more than 200 people

* Faith is resilient

Meaning -> Resilience

What is the meaning of your work.

* Cities are resilent
- they offer the possibility for serendipidity
- whereas in your organization you may have the same people talking to the same people, year after year

Principles:
- variety
- serendipity
- meaning
- activism
- flexibility

Proposition #5: You are not just librarians

New roles - raising your value added
1. Court jesters
2. Mindset engineers
3. Future-seeking radar
4. Decision architects

Move from being custodians of information to catalysts for renewal.

SLA2005 - Gary Price on The Newest and the Best Resources

http://www.freepint.com/gary/2005/newsdivision2005.html

SLA2005 - Open Access - Tuesday 13:30

Open Access: Evaluating Quality and Participation

Marie E. McVeigh
Citation Development Manager at Thompson Scientific
isiHighlyCited.com etc.

George Kendell?
National Academy of Sciences
will address publisher's business models

Peter Suber
Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge
Senior Researcher at SPARC
well-known Open Access News weblog

talks start

Marie E. McVeigh
Citation Analysis of Open Access Journals

how many open access journals are part of the Thomson citation database
- What is OA
- Thomson coverage of OA journals
- Measuring the effect of OA on a journal, and on an article

Nine flavours of OA
- unqualified
- partial
- delayed
- author-fee
- dual mode
- co-op
- OA abstracts
- per-capital OA
- article-level archiving

Thomson normally selects 10% of journals for coverage, they are covering roughly 20% of OA journals.

Lists of OA journals
www.doaj.org
www.scielo.br
www.jstage.jst.go.jp

Total 1638 journals listed.  270 journals covered in Web of Science.

"an incredibly vibrant, changing population of journals"

* Effect of Open Access at the journal level

quick definitions on immediacy index, impact factor, cited half-life

chart on citation performance
- open access journals do appear in top 10% by impact factor and immediacy
- more higher rated by immediacy

focus on medicine - 83 OA journals
- there is a suggestion that a higher percentage of these journals are being cited more in the first year (immediacy)

many journals only have partial OA content online - medicine journals on average 37 years in print, but only 7.4 years of OA content available (I may be mangling this point)

Summary
- net increase in # of journals using OA
- OA journals appear at all impact factor levels, most subjects have at least one OA journal in top impact factor ranking
- some point I missed

chart showing different combinations of OA, partial OA, delayed OA etc.

examined 174 journals in clinical and research medicine
approx 60% of articles 1992-2003 are avail electronic, approx 20% is OA

count increases if you consider additional OA models

chart showing distribution of journals across different OA models

* Effect of OA at the article level

Lawrence's work on increased citations for freely available articles.
However, limited to conference papers in computer science field.
This result may not be representative.

study by Kristin Antelman?
found an effect across several disciplines, for traditional journal articles

articles freely available have a higher number of citations

* Which articles are OA

Jonathen Wren (2005)
- Probability of finding an article freely available correlated with how recently the article was published and with the impact factor of the original source journal

Brief Mention of Access Issue

---

next speaker

Open Access and PNAS

PNAS overview
website 1.5 million hits per week
11.4 million PDFs downloaded

graph of usage decay
most popular in first few months

at six months, content becomes freely available

PNAS Open Access Survey
willing to pay 50/50
max amount $500 (80%), $1000 (15%)

they chose $1000 surcharge

experiment began May 2004
immediate access at PNAS and PubMed Central vs after 6 months

In 2005: if your institution subscribes, they charge you $750

uptake roughly 16-17%

uptake per classification: genetics 21%, neuroscience 19%, down from there

Are OA papers read more and sooner than subscription access papers?
- Preliminary data indicate OA papers are read by almost 50% more in the first month

Are OA papers cited more and sooner?
- Preliminary data indicate no

Does OA cause subscription cancellation?
- don't know

In first month, OA articles have about 900 hits, subscription articles just under 600 hits.

Chart showing no citation impact difference.

they have made a clear distinction on their site (visually) between OA and non-OA articles
have also marketed OA

eligible authors were not using discount, so they are now manually checking

* Conclusions and further steps

- survey author community
- weigh risk and opportunity
- a couple more I missed

---

next presenter
Peter Suber
Faculty Interest in Open Access

Vehicles of OA
- archives or repositories
- journals
- other (e.g. personal websites)

Faculty
- wider access (more stuff to read)
Library
- save money
- make research more accessible

Awkward background facts

Librarians understand the problem better than faculty.
Faculty have more control over the solution than librarians.

Faculty control

- they decide whether to submit to OA journal
- they decide whether to deposit in repository
- they decide whether to transfer copyright

More awkward facts

Faculty are slow to act.  They are focused on their research.
- Only about 6% journals are fully OA
- Only about 20% of faculty have self-archived to an institutional repository

Why are faculty slow to act?

- don't understand it
- fear that it will take too much time

Need to convince faculty that this is a career-building activity.

Providing OA to their own work: Why?

- OA increases impact
- further studies opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

- article research Harnad and Brody D-Lib 2004 (for Physics)
- 250% to 550% impact ratio increase

faculty options:
- submit to OA journal or submit to non-OA journal allowing postprint archive
- you may need to retain specific rights

discussion of OA journals

OA archives or repositories

- preprints (no permission needed) - but some journals still disagree, consider it prior publication
- postprints - need permission from rights-holder, but most already give permission in advance
- institutional repositories
- disciplinary repositories
- should be OAI-compliant

He has a list www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm

Retain key rights

For the cases where the journal does not permit OA, the author needs to retain key rights.
- grant the right of first print and electronic publication, and retain the rest
- retain the right of postprint archiving and grant everything else
- many journals will negotiate if asked
- they need to know what authors want
- use retained rights to consent to OA

What about prestige?

- OA journals can have prestige, but many of them don't
- Faculty can help make OA journals prestigious
- enlighten hiring, tenure, promotion committees

Real excellence will bring reputed excellence with it, after a time lag.

Why remove permission barriers?

- or why open access and not just free access?  why permit usage beyond "fair use"?
- interest of authors
-- free users from the delay of asking permission
-- free users from fair-use judgment calls
-- free archivists to migrate content to new media and formats
-- unleash readers, researchers, teachers, translators, archivists

How librarians can help

- Launch an OA institutional repository
- support OA journals
- encourage faculty

Launch an IR
Fill the IR
- help faculty deposit their work
-- examples
--- MIT (wandering 3 FTEs)
--- St. Andrews (just email us, we will do the rest)

- administrators should adopt a policy to encourage or require deposit

Support OA journals: (1) Publish them

- like Philosophers' Imprint from U Michigan
- like J of Insect Science from U Arizona
- Cornell hosts Project Euclid

Support OA journals: (2) recognize them

Educate faculty

- copyright issues
- trying is risk-free
- experts can help
www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.html

Faculty may not know...

- which OA journals exist in their field
- that there are OA archives, not just OA journals
- OA archiving is compatible with publsihing in a non-OA journal
- 80% of surveyed non-OA journals permit postprint deposit in an OA repository
- may have to retain rights to provide OA
- that OA significantly increases citation impact

---

Q for Peter Suber: Has anyone actually convinced admin committees to change their evaluation criteria for promotion etc.?
A: No.

Comment from ATT Labs person: Google Scholar people (Steve Lawrence?) may be interested in impact factor info.  Mention that in corporate context, the corporation owns the copyright.
Peter Suber says: Why is ATT transferring copyright to publications, if they want to retain their intellectual property?

Guy from Caltech: published conference papers Open Access, hugely successful.
Discussion with PNAS guy about author charges.

Eliizabeth Knight, science libriarian: Q: Creative Commons?  Does that play a role?
A (Peter Suber): Yes.  Creative Commons removes permission barriers and makes it clear that those barriers have been removed.  They provide human-readable, lawyer-readable, and machine-readable versions of the permissions.

SLA2005 aggregated news

I thought I would mention again that I have made a Blogdigger Group SLA2005-moderated.
It combines:

Information  Today, Inc. Blog

NewsliBlog

SLA 2005 Conference Blog

SLA PAM Division Blog

If you're not familiar with RSS aggregators, this will give you a little taste of reading combined headlines in one place.  Of course be aware of the bane of conference blogging: sometimes the aggregators are slow and inconsistent in the updates they pull from different sites.

I have asked BlogDigger to make more sophisticated, search- and filter-based groups, that way one could pick out specific postings rather than just adding entire blogs.

If you want to be added to this BlogDigger Group, or if you want the password to moderate the group, I would be happy to add you/email you.

SLA2005 - CISTI booth at INFO-EXPO

SLA2005 - blogging about blogging - Monday 11:30

I'm in "Blogging/RSSing the Librarian Way".

It is packed with people.  I'm next to a seat with a bag on it, I have been asked multiple times if the seat is available.  People are sitting in the aisles, on the floor.

Blogging: History

Marie Kaddell
Information Professional Consultant, LexisNexis

Catherine R. Lavallée-Welch
University of South Florida - Lakeland
Englib http://www.englib.info/

UPDATE: Jenny Levine of The Shifted Librarian was also supposed to speak, but she was unable to attend due to personal reasons.

Marie

Trends in Blogging and RSS
31.6 million hosted blogs, 53.4 million by end 2005
66% not updated in 2 months
about a million are abandoned blogs

92.4% of blogs are created by people under 30
bloggers account for less than 2% of the adult population

By blogging, you can belong to a virtual community.

Mention of various types of blogs: CEOs, businesses, newspapers e.g. Le Monde provides blog space for subscribers, professional researchers e.g. Jupiter Research, teachers and students, librarians, etc.

List of sites providing blog hosting.

Discussion of new developments: mobile blogs, phone text/photo, photoblogs, videoblogs, dashlogs linkblogs http://www.dashlog.com/ , knowledge management blogs (klogs), password-protected project logs (plogs).

Podcasts.
Listen to text blogs on your iPod http://www.talkr.com/ .
Social podcasting  http://www.sparkcasting.com/

more about podcasting

going very fast

Blogging Directions
- Tagging, taxonomy, folksonomy
Newsgator is experimenting with folksonomy
LexisNexis is releasing its own taxonomy
Airtight flickr related tag browser
- Social Bookmarking
- Regional and Localized Blogs
- Bridging cultures
- Blog ads
- Blog Search Engines
- Wiki
- Internal Business Blogs and Wikis

Discussion of Blogging Problems

(a brief pause while I change my battery)

talking about RSS now

going very, very fast
many lists upon lists of sites

RSS Trends
- Ecommerce
Amazon's A9
Zoundry
- LexisNexis Publisher
integrated content management blah blah
topics based on LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology taxonomy
- Feeds on phone
- Feeds on PDA
- Feeds in email
- RSS calendars
- shopping with RSS
www.dealcatcher.com

What's Next
- continual monitoring and delivery
www.knownow.com
- add RSS feeds to your site
- make your own feed
- internal RSS feeds
- meta-feeds

the end

Catherine Lavallée-Welch (she is blogging for the PAM blog)
Blogs and Professional Development [I need to get this handout]

Discussion of accepted professional development activities, then connecting each one to blogging.

Reading Blogs
- helps you keep current - pinpoint the important news in a domain
- information has been pre-processed

Criteria - how do you find good blogs to use for professional development?  much examination of this topic.

Article upcoming about criteria in ?Journal of Library Administration?

There is a book Weblogs and Libraries, L. Clyde, 2004.

Discussion now of publishing your own blog.

Motivations:
- keep up with changes
- keep with with professional reading
- desire to share info
- create a discussion place
- notoriety / professional portfolio

List of examples of good professional development blogs.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm

List of resources for finding blogs
- directories
- search engines
- "evaluation blog": Library Stuff

Conclusion:
- can you get information overload with blogs?
A: Yes.
You cannot read it all - find the right level to answer your needs.
- can blogs be considered reference tools?
A: In some ways yes.
There is a sort of peer-review.
The blog will refer you to other information as well.
- do they have authority?
A: Blogs can build reputation, or a blogger might bring a reputation from other contexts.
With an established blogger, you can consider citing the blog.

there is an article in ?college and research libraries journal?
that says face-to-face and listserv are the most used for getting ideas
secondarily journals and website

- interactivity?
A: blogs are very interactive, led by the blogger

SLA2005 - live, semi-awake blogging of opening session - Monday 9:30 AM

I will be doing raw blogging here and summaries on the main SLA blog.

... session starts in 15 minutes ...

... some Toronto promo video ...

"over 4000 participants are here, including over 600 first-timers"

... promo video continues... you know, we're already in Toronto, you don't have to convince us to come here...

freaky purple lightshow

we're in a large, wide conference room packed with people

Chair of Conference Planning Committee

Mayor has proclaimed June 3-5 (?) to be Special Librarians Week in Toronto.

President of SLA
"we will, we will rock you"

Exhibit Hall more than 260 exhibitors, more than 400 booths.

Click University is coming.  (SLA online training.)

Bill Buxton keynote tomorrow.

President's Showcase Dan Ping June 7 11:30 AM room 104c

Gary Hamel closing June 8 @ 9:30 AM

some LexisNexis person is introducing...

Don Tapscott opening keynote...

story about working at Bell-Northern Research (BNR)
1978
Gordon Thompson genius inspiration, trying to explain to Bell Canada how the telephone networks would become digital, a transformation
"the trouble with you guys is you think you're in the telephone business"

Tapscott talking to Canadian Librarian Association (first keynote, years ago)
"trouble with librarians is you think you're in the library business"

"you're in the information, content, collaboration business"

"you're in the transparency business"

Tapscott's latest book - The Naked Corporation

transparency is about providing unprecedented access to information about your organization to everyone internal and external

transparency - access by stakeholders to pertinent information

Conclusions:
- if you're going to be naked, fitness is no longer an option
- you need to have integrity as part of your corporate DNA, otherwise people will find out
- transparency is something to be embraced, enables many wonderful things
- "undress for success"

Implications for librarians:

1. Part of transparency movement
2. You're part of your company's new opportunity to communicate

Drivers of Transparency:
- Technological
- Socio-Political
- Economic
- Demographic

web, blogs, wikis - new tools for access to info

"The Internet is becoming the Hypernet - pervasive, ubiquitous, mobile computing"

1. Technology

The Hypernet: Devices
gadget talk

the popular Treo 650 show and tell

the usual (Ken Nickerson) "everything that has electral power has an IP address, everything talks to everything"

the ridiculous LG Internet Fridge

Dexit digital cash (RF)
cash is opaque

shirts with chips in the collar

sounds like a nightmare to me

The Hypernet: Bandwidth

Explosion in Bandwidth
hello OC3, OC48...

Hypernet: Wireless
and wireless

NakedWireless.ca (incorrect URL, or site is down)
RFID ?
WiMax

Hypernet: Integration
Hypernet: Services
XML, SOAP...

The Grid

Hypernet: Virtualization

2. Economic

The New Competitive Space

first: giant integrated Industrial Age Corp, because costs of transactions, search, coordination too high

then: Extended Enterprise - start to focus on expertise, and collaborate

finally: Business Webs

Offshoring

this is driving transparency
you need to be open with all of these business web partners just for the model to work

3. Demographic

Growing Up Digital

Boom, Bust and Echo

The N-Generation

"the first generation to be bathed in bits"

time on the net is mainly taken away from television

when they're watching TV, it's on the background, they're on the computer and doing other things

kids know more about new tech than their parents

Discussion of N-Gen in the Workforce, as Consumers

4. Socio-Political

Global interdependence

rise of the Civil foundation

Science and the knowable

The Corporate Trust Crisis

However, there are many Obstacles to Transparency.

Planning for Transparency: most companies don't have a strategy or plan.

research: Knowledge Management as we know it has not been very successful
maybe the whole metaphor is wrong: putting knowledge into containers

"maybe we should start to think about content collaboration tools" instead

TakingITGlobal

running out of time

Transparent Corporate Values
- Honesty
- Consideration
- Accountability
- Openness

at SLA 2005 conference

Hi, I'm at the SLA conference in Toronto.
I have reached the conference centre through the power of Zen navigation.

I devised a not-so-brillant plan of vacationing for 4 days in New York, flying back to Ottawa and arriving at 11 PM yesterday (Sunday), and then flying to Toronto at 6 AM today (Monday).
So if you see a dazed, sleepy-looking guy wandering around with a yellow SLA Blogger ribbon, that's probably me.  I didn't actually manage to coordinate my packing and repacking well enough to bring any of my geeky bloggerwear.

So far I have managed to take some very bad photos on the way in.
A giant windmill in Toronto?  Who knew?  (Presumably power generating.)

I got wireless Internet so I will be online most of the day.
(I paid separately for it, it's not available generally to conference attendees or even to conference bloggers.)

See previous posting Finding Me at SLA 2005 for some info on locating me.

building blogdigger groups?

Does anyone know how to build blogdigger groups that include searches?

I made a group SLA2005-moderated to try to capture blogs beyond just the main SLA conference blog.
I wanted to try to filter or incorporate tagged postings, but there are two problems:
1) BlogDigger only sees true, RSS-level categories.  So if it's e.g. a Blogger blog using Technorati pseudotagging, you can't do a subject search.
2) You can't build BlogDigger groups from other BD searches (at least, it wouldn't work for me)

I tried to add the RSS feed
http://www.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?q=subject%3Asla2005&sortby=date

but BD just ignored the addition.

If anyone wants the moderator password, just email me.  I just passworded to protect against random additions.  You're welcome to create an SLA2005-unmoderated as well.

So far I just added the two division blogs: PAM and News Division.

The more I try searching or grouping based on tags, the more I find things that don't work,
or search engines that are indexing way too slow and way too little.

finding me at SLA 2005

As indicated on my conference plan, I will be at SLA 2005 from June 6-8.
I have never actually been to an SLA conference before.
I may possibly show up at various venues, since CISTI is a member of many divisions.

Currently I am planning on going to the IT Division Science Fiction thing Monday June 6 at 8 PM, but it's possible instead that I will sleep.

I would have gone to a Tafelmusik concert but they're not playing in June :(

I will be unreachable June 2-5, after which I will try to be very reachable at the conference.

I will be blogging (and probably flickring) the conference under the SLA2005 tag.
I will be contributing to the main conference blog as well as blogging here.

Keep in mind that my background is physics and computer science, so please forgive if I blog sometimes along the lines of "some famous librarian that I have never heard of is talking about some widely-known library principles that I have never heard of".
I will be paying for wireless if it isn't otherwise available.

You can reach me via email (see the sidebar on the right), and read a tiny bit about me in the "ABOUT" thing on the right as well (it's not obvious that it's a link, but it is).

I am not normally on IM, but I will have it on at the conference.
I'll be using the Fire multi-IM client on the Mac.
Jabber: rakerman
AIM / iChat-AIM: richardakerman
(others available on request)

As you can see, I am not so much for the clever IM nicknames.
I am not actually of the IM generation, the only time I ever use it is to chat with one co-worker when I'm working at home, so it's entirely possible I will violate some sacred IM etiquette, or have no idea what I'm doing.

As for recognizing me, I may be wearing some or all of:
- the stylish and much sought-after Science Library Pad tshirt
- the classic ORA "I'm Blogging This" tee
- a Blogger hoodie
UPDATE 2005-06-07: I didn't actually manage to bring any of the above clothes.  Feel free to click through and admire/purchase an SLP tee tho :)

- a yellow SLA 2005 BLOGGER ribbon

I will also probablly be carrying around an MEC bag, in typical Canadian fashion.

If for some reason you're wondering what divisions and groups CISTI is in:

UNIT
Organizational Member
Information Technology Div
Pharmaceutical Division
Petro & Energy Resource Div
Eastern Canada Chapter
Toronto Chapter
Biomedical & Life Sci Division
Chemistry Division
Education Division
Competitive Intelligence Div
Engineering Division
Physics Astronomy Math Div
Transportation Division
Aerospace Section of Engineer
Materials Research & Manufact
Environment & Resource Mgt Div

slow technorati indexing considered harmful

The theory behind the Technorati taggregation is great: see all posts with a tag on one page, aggregated from the blogosphere, Flickr, Furl and delicious.

The reality is that it is subject to the whims of Technorati indexing, which means that if Technorati indexes your site a lot, you end up looking like a taghog, while if Technorati doesn't pick up your site, it looks like you're excluded.

For example right now Technorati tag sla2005 shows loads of my posts, but none of the good new posts from the SLA PAM Division blog.  There are similar problems with BlogDigger, which does not appear to have the DPAM blog in its index.

I guess this is one of the risks you're always stuck with when relying on third-party tools outside of your control.

In theory, if you ping Technorati, it's supposed to pick up your new postings in its next indexing sweep.

Until there's some more reliable way of getting tagged postings indexed quickly and reliably, I can see there's going to be a bit of taggravation.

Apple Store in Toronto

For those of you attending SLA 2005 or otherwise in Toronto, Apple is opening their first store in Canada on May 21st.  it's about 13km from the convention centre.

Google Map

via Slashdot /.

SLA 2005 blog is up

Via diy librarian, I find that the SLA 2005 Conference Blog is up.
There are 27 bloggers approved for posting.

It also appears that the wireless situation is a no-go (I plan to pay for my own)
and that the post tagging message has not caught on.

I will be at SLA 2005.  I'll put up a post with more info on June 1.

SLA 2005 mailing list and... wiki?

I hope SLQ won't mind too much if I copy scitech library question - Discussion List for SLA Conference in Toronto.

David Hook, on a number of SLA discussion groups, posted the following:

For those of you planning on attending the Toronto conference: it appears that there isn't a conference attendees discussion list set up for this year.

So, as an alternative many people are subscribing to the Toronto Chapter discussion list and posting their questions/requests for recommendations there. There have been some questions posted already about recommendations for live music venues, upcoming plays/musicals, etc.

If you are planning on attending the conference, I'd recommend joining the discussion list (for which you can sign up at http://lists.sla.org).

I don't know why, in 2005, SLA didn't set up a discussion list for their conference this year, but David offers a good alternative. More information on subscribing is available on the Toronto Chapter web site.

Once you subscribe, you can use the subscribed email address to log in to lists.sla and read the archives.

I've also been asked about a wiki.  Does anyone want a wiki?  I'm happy to set one up, but I feel a bit presumptuous doing so, SLA is a multi-thousand member organization and I am only one eccentric blogger who has never even been to an SLA conference before.

hotel Internet at SLA2005

j's scratchpad has a detailed posting on the hotel Internet situation for the SLA2005 conference coming up in Toronto

Internet Access at SLA Annual Conference Hotels

SLA News Division blogging SLA2005

Newsliblog: News Division Activities during the SLA 2005 Annual Conference