There has been some interesting activity in the ebook sector lately that I have been following with great interest. For the time being, I think that e-readers are best suited for reading journalism (e.g. I often read the New York Times and the Globe & Mail on my iPhone), but less suited for longer form works. Perhaps my views would change if I used the Kindle, but Amazon has yet to make it available outside the United States but I think it unlikely.

Cory Doctorow, noted for providing his books for free through his website (as well as writing great columns on technology and blogging at BoingBoing), observed in a recent interview that he doesn’t think novels work in e-readers. He argues that the sort of sustained reading necessary in the case of novels doesn’t work well with ebook readers. I would tend to agree, but somehow, I still want e-readers (with print on demand publishing existing to give them competition) to succeed for pragmatic reasons. Packing 5-10 books into luggage for a trip is difficult and heavy.

Likewise, students at Princeton University have not embraced the Kindle enthusiastically. As the Daily Princetonian reports, Kindles yet to woo University users, students are not pleased with the device. One student summarized his experience by saying: “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.” One particularly interesting objection to use of the Kindle in the academic or research context is the lack of page numbers which makes it difficult to cite passages. I don’t know exactly which audience had in mind for developing the device, but research and academic users needs do not appear to be well served thus far. Despite the problems, I think Princeton is to be commended for its efforts to run a pilot test of the technology.

This September 20, 2009 article in the Toronto Star – A tale of two countries’ libraries – is a great read. It shows how successful Canada’s public libraries are and the quotes from Faculty of Information Senior Fellow Wendy Newman are not to be missed. I count it a blessing that no Canadian library I know of is in danger of being shut down.Here’s a quote to get you started on the article:

Contrary to what you might have heard, libraries are not in a terminal state of decline, “they’re not even sick,” says Wendy Newman, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information, formerly library sciences, now known as the “I School.”

“Libraries are back big-time, they’re having a renaissance.”

Circulation was up 27 per cent this summer across Ontario’s 330 systems and 1,000 branches. Toronto, already the largest system in the world with 99 branches, is expanding with two more.

“We’re not intimidated by the future at all,” laughs Shelagh Paterson, executive director of the Ontario Library Association.

This is good news by any measure and it is great to see these facts acknowledged in the Toronto Star.

This week witnessed a major development in open access as a number of major American universities agreed to support open access through the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. As I understand it, this move would mean more support for projects such as the Public Library Of Science journals where funding comes from author fees (according to an article referred to below, such fees are quite rare) or other types of support, rather than subscription fees to a conventional publisher.

Here is a quote from the Compact’s website:

Scholarly publishing is going through a transformation as a result of digital means of communication, coupled with the financial predicament of libraries. With the most recent economic downturn, access to scholarly articles, so important to research progress and public advancement, will no doubt suffer.

Open-access scholarly journals have arisen as an alternative to traditional subscription scholarly journals. Open-access journals make their articles available freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production, and distribution. Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources, including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to or publication in the journal.

You can also read an open access article that explains this development in further detail: Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing. I love the idea of open access and the potential it offers to support greater learning and scholarship. The article linked to above delves into the economics of open access, including the problem of moral hazard. Currently, five universities are signatories to the Compact: Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT and UC Berkeley.

Library and Archives Canada is consulting with the library community. To view the survey and participate, consult the website that the Ontario Library Association (OLA) has created for the consultation. The consultation document does not appear to require membership in the OLA specifically. It is good to see the organization consult as it charts new directions. Daniel J. Caron, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, has also written a letter describing the challenges the organization faces and some of its plans for the future.

I would like to see LAC (or some other organization in Canada) consider copying some of the great ideas implemented in the United States and UK. Let’s look at a few quick examples:

• The British Library created an excellent sound archive.

• The Library of Congress has a number of good projects underway including Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers and an interactive, game-like service called myLOC that the collections and the buildings of the Library.

Canada need not copy those projects specifically, but they are a good starting point if one is looking for inspiration.

This PBS interview with Dr. Kim Yong Kim made some very interesting points about the delivery of health services. Dr Kim has spent much of his career working on the health of the very poor (he has played a lead role in Partners For Health) and was recently appointed President of Dartmouth College.

Here is the part of the interview that stood out for me:

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean, complexity of [health care] delivery?

DR. JIM YONG KIM: Well, just think about a single patient. So a patient comes into the hospital. There’s a judgment made the minute that patient walks into the emergency room about how sick that person is. And then there are relays of information from the triage nurse to the physician, from the physician to the other physician, who comes on the shift.

From them to the ward team, that takes over that patient. There’s so many just transfers of information. You know, we haven’t looked at that transfer of information the way that, for example, Southwest Airlines has. Apparently they do it better than any other company in the world.

BILL MOYERS: Computers?

DR. JIM YONG KIM: No, they have taken seriously the human science of how you transfer simple information from one person to the next. And in medical school, and in the hospitals that I’ve worked in, we’ve done it ad hoc. Sometimes we do it well. Sometimes we don’t do it well. But what we know is that transfer of information is critical. Now to me, again, that’s the rocket science. That’s the human rocket science of how you make health care systems work well.

Understanding, supporting and enhancing those transfers of information looks like a good opportunity for librarians to work on. Dr Kim also observes that simply adding more technology does not solve the problem. Careful observation of the information flows involved by knowledge management staff could be productive here. Marrying insights from psychology with our own knowledge of how people use information could produce some valuable insights. Better handling of information could also improve the quality of the experience (i.e. no more answering the same basic questions over and over again).

In last Saturday’s Globe & Mail (Septemer 12, 2009), Peter Nicholson wrote on the implications of how information rich our society has become. As President of the Council of Canadian Academies, Nicholas comes to the debate from an academic position. Unfortunately, there was not much in the way of examples or data from an educational or research context in the essay.

Much of the essay reuses familiar examples and confuses the significance of rise of amateur production on the Web. Several of the examples and points made in the pice have been covered elsewhere and in greater detail. The claim that the Web’s “cult of the amateur” is killing expertise strikes me as odd. ‘Amateur’ production on the Web is often of different category than professional production. I would very much disagree that the “market for depth is narrowing.” Indeed, one could argue that there are now many more depths – or niches – than before.  The market for depth is broadening and deepening by many measures. For example, how many types of medical research are there now compared to 1980? Further, given the costs of doing accurate, high quality, ethical research, I doubt that “amateurs” are likely to take that over soon.

Nicholson does make a good point on the economics of this information transformation. As he writes, “But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention.” Librarians and other information professionals are poised to take advantage of this scarcity. Navigating through information and managing the information we already have remains critical.

My first efforts to build websites around 2000 involved opening up Notepad and writing plain HTML. This approach does teach structure, but it is incredibly limiting. Writing out HTML by hand may work for a simple personal website, but it is not an option for any kind of organizational website. For any large or complex website, one must use Imagine the difference between building a deck with power tools versus traditional tools, only greater! Using a powerful CMS (content management system) also makes some of the work more rewarding. Rather than handcrafting tasks again and again, it can allow one to focus on high level design issues.

I choose Drupal because it was open source, free and has a strong community of users and developers beyond it. Many libraries also use it and so I have got started. My web host has the option to install Drupal in a matter of few clicks and away I went in starting to use it. Drupal is by no means the only game in town however; here is a good overview of 10 CMSes including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. Like WordPress (which powers this blog), Drupal supports many plugins to add additional features and I very much appreciate the option to customize like that.

What’s the nuts and bolts of teaching yourself Drupal? I like to combine experimentation with a guide. I am reading and working through the examples in Using Drupal book from O’Reilly. Then I have the Drupal installation on my webhost that I can test things on. To structure my experiments, I am recreating the structure (and some of the content) from a library website. I am still working my way through the learning curve, but it is going well.

The Philadelphia Free Library system is broke, and they’re shutting it down, including cancelling “all branch and regional library programs, programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults” and “all children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs” and “all library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers” and “all community meetings” and “all GED, ABE and ESL program.”

Just look at that list of all the things libraries do for our communities, all the ways they help the least among us, the vulnerable, the children, the elderly. Think of every wonderful thing that happened to you among the shelves of a library. Think of the millions of lifelong love-affairs with literacy sparked in the collections of those libraries. Think of every person whose life was forever changed for the better in those buildings.

Think of the nobility of libraries and librarianship, the great scar that the Burning of Alexandria gouged in human history. Think of the archivists who barricaded themselves in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad, slowly starving and freezing to death but refusing to desert their posts for fear that the collections they guarded would become firewood…

Read the whole entry by Cory Doctorow over at Boint Boing: Philadelphia Free Library System is shutting down. On further reading, I gather that the Library system may not actually shutdown, if the political brinkmanship gets resolved but it is highly possible.

Reading this post by one of my favourite science fiction authors (and major proponents of Creative Commons) was a great inspiration. Sometimes we focus so much on our tools and methods that we lose sight of the broader picture. Thanks for reminding us, Cory!

Today, I took a course on information management fundamentals and decided to blog about some of my observations. With about a dozen students, there was plenty of interesting discussions that supplemented the course content. Advocating for information management and the range of occupations that make up the field were two of the topics that struck me as particularly interesting. We also had an interesting exercise in the taxonomy of grocery stores which pointed out how taxonomy can be used for commercial gain and how it is tailored to serve the needs of a given audience (e.g. a grocery near a university campus is likely to make fast food items easy to find).

Most classic and compelling justifications of information management (and its relative, knowledge management) focus on risk and disaster. Failure to manage archives resulted in NASA losing some of its 1969 Moon tapes, for example. In a corruption trial in British Columbia, the destruction of email records (which should have been put on hold due to legal proceedings) caused a world of grief. These cases are compelling and dramatic, but I would surmise that they are also rare. Another piece of the argument needs to be the positive benefits of managing information such as more efficient use of staff time or the potential to make new connections with other staff who have valuable knowledge. Then again, I have come across some economic research that claims that people are more motivated by the fear of loss (loss adversion) than the prospect of gains (endowment effect – people value what they currently have over potential gains), so perhaps focusing on the loss does make sense.

People working in information management come to the field with a number of different job titles: information architect, taxonomist, metadata specialist, privacy officer and more. Taxonomy – a system of naming and organizing things into groups that share similar characteristics – has recently been booming, but this field may be in decline with better technology. Business analysts, on the other hand, is a new and growing field. However, some brief research into the business analysis field shows that it is dominated by those with expertise in either finance or information technology. If one already has deep knowledge of those fields, then business analysis could be a good way to develop one’s career. I think the next frontier is privacy work. That sub-field is still very new, but as privacy related scandals continue to pile up and threaten the credibility of governments and companies, addressing this need can only become more important.

Web analytics is the practice of analyzing data on how websites are used in order to improve how the resource performs. After studying this topic in a two day course, I am much better informed about the tools, methods and resources that make analytics worthwhile. The course was oriented mainly toward commercial needs, but the ideas presented can be applied to a variety of contexts. Computers can automatically track a great deal of information which can be a mixed blessing. The course helped me to think through the right questions to ask so that that mass of data can be analyzed and then put to use to improve operations. To sort through the data, it is best to clarify what one’s goals are.

Let’s say you want users to use a resource that you have designed (an internal website, a catalogue or something similar). You can use analytic tools to measure what proportion of your visitors use the feature (this would be your “conversion rate” – conventionally, conversion refers to the portion of website visitors who continue on to make a purchase, but I am using it to mean “portion of users who take a desired action”). Further, you can also see how many times the function is used and if people are turning up empty search results. What is the value of doing this? You can learn learn some sense of how much time people spend using a tool, how much it fails and identify areas for improvement. Much of this can be accomplished through skillful use of a free tool like Google Analytics, but it is not the only (nor necessarily most powerful) game in town.

Web analytics can also be used to determine how people come to your information service. Do users entering the website through a URL (i.e. typing it in or through a bookmark) behave differently from those arriving from a search engine? If the library is embedded in a larger organization (e.g. KM unit in a firm’s intranet, public library in the city’s website, academic library in the university’s website), that usage can be tracked as well. Analysis of these kinds of data can assist in refining the website design, eliminate problems and evaluate marketing campaigns. If users arriving from the Internet are “bouncing” (i.e. leaving after accessing a single page), then this may indicate a need to better explain the services.

For those looking to learn more about web analytics, there is a wealth of information available to help you get started. There are a number of good books out there including: Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success by Jim Sterne, Competing on Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris (I gather that is a more general work; not focused on web analytics only) and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. And here are two blogs to consider: Web Analytics Demystified and Occam’s Razer (OR is written by Avinash Kaushik). Most of these resources come to web analytics from a marketing and/or business perspective. These insights can be applied to other contexts with some effort and care.