Legal Professionals and Web 2.0 - ALLA presentation

I have loaded a copy of my conference presentation up to Slideshare - there are notes for relevant slides too.

Professionals and Web 2.0: Findings from the CCH whitepaper

View more presentations from Linda Moore.

You can also read the full paper (yes I actually submitted an article - it was like being back at uni!) on the ALLA conference site. A number of the papers and presentations are now available - I'll let you know my favourites over the next week or so.

Information alone is not valuable - targeted information is

Don't you love how patterns form from random things? A sample of four or so blogs and articles I read over the last week lead to this epiphany for me.

Item 1:
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 blogged on "The declining value of redundant news content on the web". He takes an example of a news story about Google that currently has 2000 separate articles tracked on Google News - and how for most of those 2000 journalists the cost of commenting and reproducing the news will not be matched by return readership, simply because there are so many other versions to read.

Item 1.5:
Sean from House of Butter observes in the context of the legal industry that while excessively duplicated news has little value, "Human editors specialising in a segment(s) of the legal industry will we think still find favour with time poor readers".

Item 2:
Hal Varian of Google was recently interviewed by the McKinsey Quarterly. There are heaps of interesting insights in the interview, but here are two that stood out for me:

We have to look at today’s economy and say, “What is it that’s really
scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention. [Psychologist]
Herb Simon recognized this many years ago. He said, “A wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.” So being able to capture someone’s attention at
the right time is a very valuable asset.....

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be
statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer
engineers would’ve
been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to
understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to
communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades...

Sensing a theme here? Information hasn't got much value when it's just floating around out there. In fact it can have negative value -the cost of "publishing" it may outweigh the return (even on the internet!). But information that reaches the right person at the exact time they need it, thus capturing their attention - that's where the money is.

Dave Weinberger recognised this in Item 3, "Everything is Miscellaneous" (p223-4):

Miscellanized information is informaiton without borders. That means we've
been misleading CEOs for the past fifteen years by drumming into their heads
that every business is an information business. Of course information is central
to businesses, but business's reflex action has been to wall off what they know
as if it were gold. Now that information is being commoditized, it has more
value if it's set free into the miscellaneous. For example, airlines do better
when their prorietary scheduling and pricing information is made available to
travel sites...It gains even more value when innovators can combine it with
other data..."

Statisticians, innovators, librarians, publishers - whatever title you want to use, these are the people who can collect and present information in a meaningful way, at the right time, to the right people. And it is that skill that will be valuable, and valued, in the information economy of the future.

More from Information Online 2009

I'll be posting more of my thoughts from Information Online 2009 over the next week, but some people have already done such a good job summarising and commenting on some of the keynotes that I encourage you to read their posts as well.

Anticipating the Future of Libraries (and many other things!): Andy Hines, futurist, adjunct professor of Future Studies at University of Houston
Andy gave a fantastic presentation on the following trends/challenges:
1. Values
2. Demography
3. Lifestyle
4. Technology
5. Work
6. Education
Strawberries of Integrity posted an excellent summary here, please read it!

Libraries as Happiness Engines - Liz Lawley, director of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Liz had some very interesting thoughts on how taking a gaming/fun approach to libraries, work and more can increase happiness AND productivity (shock!). She identified the elements of happiness as:

• satisfying work to do
• the experience of being good at something
• time spent with people we like
• the chance to be part of something bigger than yourself

And points out that many of these are more accessible in the online gaming world than real life - no wonder people like games! More on how this applies to libraries etc here.

Liz also pointed out Ravelry as an example of an object-oriented network - where the network is not based just around people but a particular object (in this case yarn and knitting patterns etc). She suggests that the next step for libraries is to turn catalogues into this kind of social network. I think we (publishers) should turn our online research collections into them too! More on that from my previous post.

Anna Pearson has also been writing up some of her thoughts on Information Online...have a look at those too!

io2009
#io2009

Information Online - Day 1 program

This week I'm attending the Information Online conference hosted by the Australian Library and Information Association. It's going to be a pretty jam packed few days - here's the plan for tomorrow.

The Stuff Beyond Google: Information Literacy in a Corporate Setting
Engaging Students Online at the State Library of Victoria
Beyond the Search Box: different ways of exploring connections
Enhancing e-resourcefulness
One Search Many Options
Collaborative Spaces in Law Firms

I think Enhancing e-resourcefulness will be very interesting - it's about how UWS librarians worked with academics and vendors to increase the profile of online resources. I've been on both sides of the librarian and vendor fence so it will be interesting to see how they worked together to improve awareness and use of resources.

I'm also intrigued by "One Search Many Options", on the State Library of QLD enriching content with input from patrons using social media and the guidelines they put in place. I believe this is the future for our content as well, so I'll be very interested in what they've done.

#io2009

Thing 5 - Exploring Flickr

UBC Library book retrieval system
Originally uploaded by stodmyk

The future of libraries! Twice as many books in half the space (or less!). This photo by stodmyk is of the UBC Library book retrieval system in the States - it's all automated. Macquarie University Library, my former home, will look similar by 2010. It's a great space-saving solution (ALWAYS an issue for libraries - I should know!). But I will miss wandering through the shelves and browsing by DDC number. And boy do I hope theyhave all the bugs worked out in programing etc. Going offline would not be pretty....or you could ask for economics and get english lit!

Sourcing this photo
Gotta say I cheated. This was posted on Slaw, a law library blog I read. But I have been poking around flikr (could get lost in there for days!) The communities are very inspiring - cheaper than joining the local photography club! As a librarian I love how the folksonomy tagging system has still been given some structure via the recommended tags...we will not be defeated! Although I guess you can argue that they were still developed from the grassroots...hmmm.

Blogging the pic was incredibly easy - there's a little button above the picture in flickr saying "blog this". It was a matter of stepping through some set-up screens, and hey presto! I'm blogging through flickr. That said, I can't seem to add links or anything (maybe if I used the actual coding?) so I will have to edit it in blogger anyway....oh well!