From the ARMA International Policy Briefs, there was recently a Supreme Court of Canada case concerning libel may extend some legal recognition and protection to bloggers, treating them somewhat like journalists. You can read about it further in this CBC article: Libel landscape alters for bloggers, PR advisers. This small step toward recognizing bloggers strikes me as interesting. I wonder how long it will be before blog postings are cited as sources in a way similar to journalists. The continuign changes in the media and publishing environment fascinate me both as a writer and a reader.  It is my impression that American bloggers are currently protected to a greater degree but it is not a topic I have researched very deeply.

If you want to read more about the case, I’ll refer to judgement, Grant v. Torstar Corp, as published by the Canadian Legal Information Institute. There is also a discussion of the issue in greater detail over at the Wise Law Blog, Supreme Court of Canada to Bloggers: Act Responsibly.

Note: I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice. Ask a lawyer if you do want legal advice.

A few days ago, I registered for this year’s Ontario Library Association SuperConference 2010, just barely qualifying for the early bird discount. This event has a special place in my professional life since it was the first library conference I ever attended. It is also held in Toronto and thus easy for me to access. Here are ten reasons why I want to go to the OLA conference in no particular order:

10. Extraordinary Canadians! Adrienne Clarkson, Jane Urquhart, Nino Ricci and Mark Kingwell will be speaking on the biographies they wrote for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians biography series.

9. Our Job in 10 years. Learn about the future: John Dupuis and Janice Mutz will be speaking on: Our Job in 10 Years: The future of academic libraries. Predicting the future is tricky business but Dupuis has done some good work in trying to do this.

8. Library Service Meets Brain Research! presented by Julie Mandal (Research Specialist, Canadian Research Association) – I’ve blogged before about neuroscience and education, it is a subject I need to understand better.

7. Get your geography on! I’m serving as the convener for this Saturday morning session on, “Visualizing History: Google Earth as a Information Literacy tool.” You want to meet me? I’ll be here!

6. Where Toronto is public education going? Dr. Chris Spence  (he was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda if you’re curious to know more); he has proposed boys-only schools and other unconventional ideas to improve the city’s education.

5. Books & reading for better mental health? Yes, that’s here too! (Bibliotherapy: Stories, reading, and the brain that heals itself by Dr. Hoi Cheu, Laurentian University.

3. Leadership 2010: Ken Laycock will be presenting a session, Leadership 2010, summarizing the latest insights in 2009. I’ve seen him present before and I was impressed.

2. Awards: Recognize some seriously great librarians through the conference’s awards.

1. Meeting: librarians from all over the place.

I may not be able to do everything on this list but it is a good start.

Last week, I finished reading Daniel Pink’s latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” which was was released in December. Last year, I read one of Pink’s other books, A Whole New Mind, a stimulating read itself. I previously written about Pink’s observation that storytelling and narrative are important 21st century skills; he also discusses other skills such as empathy and symphony (i.e. synthesis of ideas and knowledge, but hey, symphony is a much more elegant way of describing) in the book. For those concerned about losing jobs due to computers or outsourcing, Pink’s books are recommended, highly accessible reading (with a detailed bibliography for those who want to look up and read all the studies he refers to – I appreciate that!).

Drive seeks to apply findings from psychological research to business. As Pink repeats at several points in the book, “when it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.” Pink discusses that modern tasks that require creative thinking to solve problems are best motivated by encouraging mastery, autonomy and purpose. However, many organizations are operating in ignorance of these insights. As Pink puts it:

Too many organizations – not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well – still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’t work and often do harm. (9)

In thinking through the book’s arguments, I tried to think how librarians could make sense of these insights about motivation. I think the greatest opportunity lies in support the mastery factor. Mastery, in Pink’s definition, is a complex concept that involves the concept of flow of proposed by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (here’s a TED video from 2004 of him explaining the concept of flow) of being totally absorbed in a task and losing track of everything else. In my view, mastery can only be achieved on a firm foundation of knowledge and education and this is where librarians come in. This is a delicate task that requires a deep understanding of what people do and what resources would best help them. This kind of deep support that enables mastery is a high touch kind of operation that simply can’t be done by a search engine.

If you want a further taste of what Pink’s arguments about the science of motivation, check out this great TED speech that he made in July 2009:

What do you think? How else can Pink’s synthesis of the science of motivation help you in the workplace and beyond?

In 2009, Ontario’s efforts to create an electronic medical records system continued to experience problems of mismanagement. Many in the local media focused on the misbehaviour of people that worked on the project. That said, I think there is still a great opportunity to build systems and standards for electronic medical records. Some case studies from other parts of the world are worth considering. As I see it, there are two types of benefits to such records; individual and social. The individual benefits are numerous including easy of transfer (i.e. a patient moves, transfer to a specialist etc) and persistence (i.e. many different professionals could update and add to a single records that would provide a unified picture of health at one moment). The social benefits include improved medical research and lowered transaction costs in transferring records and having to work through many different medical record formats. Without further ado, let’s look at some global trends in digital medical records

1. Madras Medical College introduces Diploma in Medical Records Science program

This one year program trains technicians to code diseases and report health information in a standardized fashion. The program has several objectives including effectively providing medical records in legal cases, satisfying Right to Information requests and improved epidemiological research. What surprised me in reading about this program is the fact that the program had existed prior to 1988 but closed down when it failed to meet regulatory requirements. I find it particularly interesting that access to information is cited as a reason to improve medical records. That’s a whole new and very much valid argument in favour of improving such records. Further, I find it interesting that India is placing greater emphasis on training staff rather than building IT systems, the latter being the preferred approach in the Western world.

2. Scotland and Wales outdo England in digitizing medical records

Wales has launched a system called My Health Online which is designed to, “let people order repeat prescriptions and book appointments with their GP. Other features of the site will include advice and information to help patients manage health conditions. It will link to the existing NHS Direct Wales website.” That’s quite impressive. I like the degree of centralization implied in this but I hope that other modes of access (e.g. phone access to a centre of some kind) continue to be provided for those that do not know how or wish to use a website. Scotland, meanwhile, has focused its medical records effort on standardizing emergency medical incidents: “In Scotland, however, the country’s independent NHS has shown it is possible to set up electronic records for all patients. Almost all of its 5.2 million ­population now have emergency care summary (ECS) records, which provide basic demographic data and information on patients’ prescribed medication to A&E wards, out-of-hours medical providers, and NHS24, Scotland’s version of NHS Direct,” reports the Guardian (“Online health records can save lives.“). The same article also discusses other efforts in the UK to build a record system that have not met with as much success. Scotland is onto something with its focus on emergency medical records.

3. U.S. Veterans Affairs Department seeks to share medical records with other organizations

I’m not deeply informed about the medical record situation in the United States, so this article was enlightening (this lengthy 20008 blog post at ArsTechnica offers a great introduction to US digital medical records though). After a decade of effort to share records between the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments of the federal government, some progress has been made in standardizing the records. The U.S. federal government has developed a system called the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). This month, the government announced its first effort to share its records with a private insurance company. Given the influence that the U.S. military has in developing technology and even records systems, the NHIN may end up being adapted all over the world.

Earlier tonight, I started a course to prepare me to take the Canadian Securities Course offered by the Canadian Securities Institute (this is the Canadian equivalent of the US Series 7 exam offered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). As I understand it, passing this exam is a professional/legal requirement for those that want to sell stocks and mutual funds in Canada. That is not why I am taking it though. As I am currently doing information management consulting for an investment management firm (and I’m deeply interested in economics and want to understand how “the market” works better), I’ve decided to take this course to deepen my understanding. Tonight, we covered some basics of the stock market very quickly such as an overview of derivatives, currency trading and the business cycle. I found the business cycle aspect of tonight’s session to be the most interesting and accessible section.

In conducting some background research into the course, I found it interesting (and frustrating) to see how tightly information about the course is controlled. None of the libraries I consulted in my area had any materials relating to the CSC; neither the official textbooks published by the Institute nor any study aids for those wishing to deepen their understanding. The closest I came to finding any information about it was some posts on the Red Flag Deals website of people offering to sell their old textbooks. I suspect this may be a broader Canadian trend. I recall walking through a British bookshop once and noticing a plethora of titles offering to explain how to pass or even garner excellent grades on the UK Civil Service exams; as far as I can tell, there is nothing like that for the equivalent exams in Canada.  Perhaps this post (and possibly some following it) will serve to address this lack of information on how financial services people are licensed and what they actually have to study before they can be unleashed on the markets.

From the Economist, we learn:

FOR decades Saudi Arabia’s religious police have enforced a rigid separation of the sexes in public places. Plain-clothes agents of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the religious police are known, patrol streets, parks and shopping centres, intervening to scold offenders, strike them with switches or haul them off to be disciplined by ordinary police. At last year’s annual book fair in Riyadh, the capital, they arrested two male visitors for the crime of ikhtilat, or “mixing”, after they asked a female novelist to sign her book. Other cases have ended more tragically, with the death of suspected lovers during high-speed car chases.

Such restrictions continue to amaze me. I wonder at all the Suadi authors and readers that are unable to connect to these archaic laws- their publishing industry must be suffering considerably. This whole incident makes me more curious about how Saudi libraries operate. I wonder if libraries in the country are equally restrictive? In any event, the country’s natural resources will run out at some point. Perhaps then the economic fallout from lack of women’s education will make itself felt. A modern society simply cannot be free and prosperous when half the population is denied education, mobility and other opportunities.

Seth Godin thinks that the future of the library is far from bright. His post from yesterday is short so I’ll quote it in full:

What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?

They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

This reminds me of a presentation I attended last year at the CLA conference in Montreal by Ken Haycock. He was speaking about the challenges of advocating for public libraries and the downside of advocating the view that libraries are solely about information. He pointed out that there are often several other public bodies that essentially exist to give information to the public, for example public health authorities educate the public about safer sex practices or the dangers of drug abuse. If memory serves Haycock suggested that public libraries would do well to focus on their community building function. Holding the focus on provision of resources is not going to work well.

As you might understand, the library blogosphere has been up in arms about this post. From my experience of using and working with libraries, Godin’s criticism misses a lot of what libraries offer. For one, he completely ignores (or doesn’t care about?) all the resources offered by academic libraries; manuscript books, archives, special collections and powerful research databases. If you’re doing serious humanities research, trying to do it without a library or archive is not going to work (i.e. your dissertation/book/article will be awful!). In the public library environment, Godin’s post ignores all the programming that libraries offer including assistance to immigrants, literacy tutoring and Internet access. Joyce Valenza asks, “Is Seth saying that we need librarians, but not traditional libraries?” Hmm, possibly.The Analog Divide blog agrees with Valenza in saying that libraries are in trouble when one of the world’s most popular business bloggers makes this kind of criticism. Alas, the critique also misses much of what the world’s with-it librarians have been up for the past +5 years.

After working with files and the Internet Archive interface for hours, I’m proud to tell you that the iSchool Podcast is reborn. As you may know, when I was a graduate student, I founded the iSchool Podcast project. The podcast reflects my interests and those of my fellow students; book history, Internet developments and other interests. If you’re into the history of books, library things, computing and the Internet, then you’ll like this. Sadly, the original iSchool Podcast website disappeared in the summer of 2009 when an IT change at the University killed the website. I don’t have a back up of all the material that was on the blog (man, I’m angry about that – it was lots of work!) but I do have the recordings still. I’ve uploaded all the recordings to the Internet Archive and will provide an overview of the recordings here. I’ve enjoyed podcasts on several different subjects (e.g. economics, Napoleon, current affairs, and more) for years now and I hope you enjoy this.

Oh, by the way, if you liked the podcasts, please share your views in a comment. Also, I haven’t edited the recordings so if you try to look up the website mentioned at the end of the recording, you probably will not find anything. However, you can comment here and let me know what you think. Enjoy! The episode list is mainly based on my memory of how the series unfolded, so it might be a bit different from how it was originally presented.

Episode 1: “Was there a Reading Revolution in the New American Republic?” by Professor Robert Gross (originally recorded October 3, 2008)

Episode 2: “From Capell to Tanselle: Bibliography and Humanities Scholarship” by Richard Landon (originally recorded October 29, 2009)

Episode 3: “The Virtues of Vice; Or, Resuscitating Early Black Atlantic Gallows Literature” by Professor Jeannine DeLombard (originally recorded November 18, 2009)

Episode 4: Knowledge at the End of the Information Age by David Weinberger (November 2009)

Episode 5: Dalhousie University’s New Bachelor of Informatics Program by Professor Ernest Grunke

Episode 6: Books, Communication and Exchange: The Frankfurt Book Fair and Early Modern Print Culture by Professor Paul Nelles (originally recorded February 27, 2009)

Episode 7: The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold

Episode 8: Memory Practices And The Imagined Future Self by Dr. Geoffrey Bowker (originally recorded March 2009 at the Housing Memory Conference)

Episode 9: Why Copyright: The Fight for Canada’s Digital Future by Professor Michael Geist (originally recorded April 14, 2009)

Episode 10: “Letter Perfect: A Brief History of Letter Forms and Their Uses in the Period of Transition from Manuscript to Print” by Professor Martha Driver (originally recorded March 19, 2009)

Episode 11: Open Education Around the World by Professor Jim Slotta and Stian Haklev

….

That’s it!

My friend Monica Rettig has written an interesting article examining how users of wedding websites such as Indiebride share information and build community. One of the questions raised in this research is how information sharing and seeking behaviour is closely related to emotional support. Indeed, I got the sense that the two activities are intertwined to some degree; information is sought for practical purposes sure but there is also a desire to make a connection. It is interesting to see the ways in which the community members define themselves and fragment; for example those planning destination weddings are considered to be a distinct society from regular Indiebrides. Monica points out that part of the community further subdivides by time; e.g. those with a wedding date in June tend to congregate and those with similar time horizons will come together. This begs the question; do brides continue to participate in this information community after the big day? Would they then be regarded as sages due to the experience?

One question kept nagging me as I read this article though; where are the men and grooms? Have they no views on weddings? Or perhaps there are websites for men interested in weddings but they are separate? I can accept that it is something of a cultural convention in North America that weddings are still largely regarded as a woman’s area of interest but I wonder if that has always been true or if it is true in other contexts. As Rebecca Mead has pointed out in her excellent 2007 book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, much of contemporary wedding practice is either manufactured by those seeking to growing the multi billion dollar wedding industry and the tendenacy of some couples to mix and match from tradition to produce an event that pleases them. Given that, why not create a bigger space for groom participation in the wedding scene?

Recently a friend commented on the blog about the British charity Book Aid International and I decided to look into it a bit further. It is similar in some ways to Room To Read which I blogged about last month. The main differences I can see is that BAI focuses on Africa while Room To Read operates all over the world. I like BAI’s concept of the ‘reverse book club’ where the donor pays a few pounds a month and a book gets sent out. That strikes me as a bit more accessible than the model Room To Read has adopted. I finished reading a book about Room To Read  (Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Woods) today and I was struck by the emphasis placed on fundraising from the rich, venture capitalists and investment bankers.BAI, on the other hand, is something that strikes me as more accessible financially speaking. I also wonder if BAI gains something through its focus on Africa specifically. I haven’t examined these organizations in great detail but I find them interesting.

It appears that these organizations both do better marketing and operations than library foundations in the developed world. Many public and academic libraries engage in fundraising activities but I wonder what happens to the funds. One of my alma maters, Trinity College at the University of Toronto, routinely raises $100,000 in its annual book sale but where does it go? I gather that some of it goes to collections and various other projects. But, as a donor, I struggle to connect the dots and outcomes. I don’t mean to pick on Trinity – the same could be said for many other organizations around North America, Europe and elsewhere. Based on reading John Wood’s book, I suspect the problem may lie in having an excessively lean overhead. Without staff to plan the programs and communicate  how a donation purchases a concrete change or improvement, it appears that it just doesn’t happen. Another possibility is that library organizations in developed countries don’t seem to have the same potential to make dramatic strides in improving literacy and implementing radical socio-economic improvements. Maybe fundraising organizations for libraries in developed countries DO make that kind of impact but I don’t know about it.

What do you think? Do you know of any library/literacy organizations that are making a major impact in Canada? The United States? The UK? And, for bonus points, does that organization clearly communicate its impact to donors? If so, please share it in the comments.