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.

Due to some recent terrorist activity, there were security measures announced on December 28 by Tranport Canada that further restricted what airline passengers could bring on flights. Somebody didn’t think through the restrictions very well and it appeared, briefly, that books and magazines might be barred from flights. As Carolyn Wood, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, commented about these measures in a Globe & Mail article:  “We’re used to governments fearing books for their content. But what is it here? Is it their explosive capability?” Quite right. Indeed, it reminds me of a certain haunting quote by one of the 20th century’s most brutual dictators, Joseph Stalin, “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”  Happily, the inadvertent ban was reported on January 5 but it was reversed by January 6; Books permitted on U.S, bound planes.

These kind of poorly thought out security measures really annoy me. I’m doubly irritated in this instance because this has happened before. In 2006, there were security measures introduced in the UK that restricted carry on luggage and that included books. Based on some quick research with the Google News Archive, this really came to a head in August 2006. However, the restrictions have since been done away with. It puzzles me why these restrictions are put in place only to be done away with shortly afterwards. It would appear that history, even very recent history, is not learned in air security circles. Books are not a security threat, leave them alone already!

Some of the other reactions to the December 2009 air travel restrictions take a different approach. A Canadian author, Mary Soderstrom, protested the measures which restricted books but allowed all manner of IT devices by starting a Facebook protest group. The group is called: Stop Dumbing Down: Allow Books on Airplanes. In the US, there has been intense criticism about the measures on Twitter. Here are three particularly good reactions: No books in flight; Reading is dangerous to national security; Protecting you so much you never want to travel ever again and; TSA: Theatrical Security Association. The last quote hits on the idea that these security measures create the illusion of security but likely do little but waste money and time.

In the spirit of getting 2010 off to a good start,* I drafted up an article on net neutrality today for the magazine of the Canadian Library Association. Down the road, I am also going to be putting together a presentation for the Canadian Library Association conference in Edmonton this year. Last year, I did a poster session at the conference and doing a poster session is a lonely place but in 2010, I get to deliver a full hour long talk on the topic this year. If you attend the conference, come over and say hi.

In an effort to boost productivity and adopt a J.J. Jacobs (I read his new book The Guinea Pig Diaries last week and really enjoyed it) style experimentation attitude to life, I used the JDarkRoom application to do some writing. It is a stripped down word processor that eliminates everything from the screen – it reminds me of writing assignments using Word Perfect 5.1 on a DOS computer. It is a bit clunky, or rather there is a a learning curve to it if you are used to Open Office Writer or Microsoft Word. It would be difficult to use the application to do writing where you need to refer to the Internet for research, but it works well for other things.

* I kicked off 2010 in Montreal this year and there is something special, for me anyway, of starting a new year in a different place. It aids reflection. It is also nice when you get to walk past a large library and archives on your way to the Metro every morning.

Some researchers, analysts and writers prefer to collect their own data, design surveys and create brillant experiments to collect data. There is much to be learned in taking that road, to be sure. However, sometimes, you just need some datasets to get the ball rolling and try out some research ideas. After discussing this issue of finding datasets with a friend who does economic research, I thought it might be useful to share some of the resources I looked up. Before I get into the list, you may be wondering why datasets matter or why the broader movement that has made this possible – open data – matters. Partly, I view it as an extension of that famous open source programming adage attributed to Eric Raymonds, “Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow.” Many perspectives on a dataset can yield different values and it is much better than the alternative; a researcher creates a dataset for one purpose and then puts it away somewhere where nobody else can ever make use of it. Further, in the case of public authorities, the quality and openness of data can indicate the attitude of that organization toward using data. Without further ado, here is the list of ten places to get datasets:

1. Google’s H1N1 Flu Trends This tool tracks how people searched for the illness and breaks it down by geography and other factors. This would be of interest to those in the public health field and others, for example.
2. City of San Francisco Data: This is a treasuretrove of data for advocates, researchers, bureaucrats and others. There is data on public transit, housing, crime and more.
3. City of Toronto Data: I was excited to blog about the city’s efforts to build this last year and now it is finally up. The breadth of coverage looks broader than San Francisco; you can get data on licensed child care centres, parks and other areas. While transit data is here, there does not appear to be crime or policing data, alas.
4. Google Transit Feed: Google has created a standard for the world’s public transit authorities to share their data and the results can be found here. Data is available from: Washington DC, Vancouver, Cleaveland, Perth (Australia) and other places besides.
5. Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network  (CKAN): This is a general purpose archive with data on many different topics including Afghanistan election data and data from the British Antarctic Survey.
6. Infochimps: Find Any Dataset in the World: (Note: not all data here is free). All kinds of data here including; data on Twitter, population statistics for US states, and 65 datasets about income.
7. DBpedia: This project seeks to process the content of Wikipedia into database format where people can run queries and do other things like that.
8. Freebase: Offers datasets on a variety of topics including recreational / pop culture subjects
9. National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS): Created by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is the place to go to learn about the US workforce.
10. European Social Survey: Created by several universities across Europe, the ESS has data on income, population and other typical qualities of interest to researchers

Did I miss some important datasets? If so, please feel free to share your ideas in a comment. I am particularly curious to know what experience people have had with these tools and how easy or difficult they are to work with.

This blog is over six months old and I want to take it in some new directions. Specifically, I’m thinking of starting some new features on different topics. There are a few ideas I have in mind. One is to do some profiles of people in the profession that are doing interesting things that deserve to be heard more widely. Another idea is to chronicle my learning strategies now that I’m out of university. For example, I’ve been reading books on economics since mid 2008 with great interest and I’d like to share a little bit of what I’ve learned here. My plans for the blog continue to evolve over time but I think I am still driven by two connected ideas; sharing what I learn and digging deeper into the world of information and the people that make it up.

Several months ago, I submitted an article to Access, the magazine of the Ontario Library Association. My article – Becoming an Internet Librarian – is a blend of autobiography and my reflections on different aspects of librarianship. As time goes on, I find more and more ways that librarians contribute to their organizations and to society generally. Enjoy the article and I’d love if you have any comments to share.

When I approach a cashier to make a purchase, I hope to conclude the transaction smoothly and quickly. Few things irritate me more in that context than trying to get the cashier’s attention during the process. I have had several experiences where I am poised to pay for an item, only to find the cashier engaged in an apparently irrelevant conversation with a co-worker. I feel like saying, “I’m a paying customer, so can you please focus on me so I can pay?” I find that a frustrating experience. Maybe retail staff are simply not motivated enough to deliver quality service? I think part of the problem is proper customer service skills are simply handed down as orders, rather than explained. I, for one, think it is better to explain rules and show how they make a positive contribution. [Conversely, if a rule cannot be explained or does not make a positive contribution, then maybe it should be reconsidered!]

I am happy to report that librarians know both the how and why of customer service. In preparation for my training at AskON tomorrow, I was asked to read an article called, “The effects of librarians’ behavioral performance on user satisfaction in chat reference services,” by Nahyun Kwon and Vicki L. Gregory published in Reference & User Services Quarterly (RUSQ). In brief, the authors analyzed transcripts from Internet chat reference sessions to determine whether or not compliance with reference librarian guidelines increased user satisfaction. The answer is yes. What makes users satisfied? The authors found six behaviours to be particularly important:

• used the patron’s name during the reference interview;
• communicated more receptively and listened more carefully;
• searched with or for the patron;
• provided pointers;
• asked the patron whether the question was completely answered; and
• asked the patron to come back if they needed further assistance.

Those all sound like good practices. The third item reminds me of research I heard about in grad school on approachability which claimed that patrons in libraries think librarians are more approachable when they are up and about helping somebody, rather than seated at a desk. I have encountered some of these behaviours when on the phone with various companies and generally find they strike a good note.

At the end of October 2009, GeoCities will cease to exist when Yahoo! pulls the plug on the service that helped wanted many personal websites back in the 1990s. All is not lost however: the Internet Archive is undertaking an effort to store as much of this material as they can, but it is unclear how they are doing that or if they should. In many ways, GeoCities is past its prime but there is still plenty of interesting content there and it shows how the early days of the Web operated. Comparing Web usage from 1997 to 2007 could make for an interesting research project, I imagine.

The Internet Archive’s efforts to ‘archive’ GeoCities, however impressive, cannot be considered “archiving” in the professional or classic sense. The relatively low cost of data storage (low is not the same as zero or free though) seduces some to think that simply everything produced should be stored – it would appear that is how the IA is ‘archiving’ GeoCities content. Simply making copies of as much content as possible is not what I would call an archive. Imagine an organization is moving out of a building and setting up elsewhere, would it make sense to “archive” every single piece of paper and data in the office? Such an archive would be both large and difficult to use. What criteria are being used to determine what should be kept? What about the people who created the GeoCities content?

The article linked to above raises some interesting questions about the durability of data on the Internet. Institutions such as universities and libraries have, in many cases, existed for decades or centuries. It is unlikely that a dissertation or other valuable item at Harvard or Oxford will be in danger of loss (though fire, flooding and other disasters are always a possibility), but is that the case for free Web services? If the example of the sudden death of GeoCities is any indication, then one has some reason to be skeptical about the longevity of data in cloud applications such as Gmail. Maybe there will be a move, at some point, to introduce “data longevity” standards into user agreements? Maybe such guarantees will serve to differentiate free services from paid ones? In the final analysis, it may only be traditional archives that can be counted on to archive content professionally and retain it for the long term.