ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
Some interesting points in the outsourcing talk during the session on globalisation and the concluding remarks from all the panelists. Don’t be afraid of outsourcing. Carefully analyse the costs (A project that takes 1 hour at £100 or 4 hours by a less experienced person in India at £35 doesn’t save you any money). It’s all about relationships. Don’t let technology be the deciding element. Problem solving should come before technology.
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
It was ironic to hear Peter Morville’s keynote in Track 3 this morning and his emphasis on findability, since the track name was “Where Next for Information Architecture?” And as the author of the “polar bear” book, Peter is one of the icons of the IA.
Listening to Peter you could hear IA morphing into findability. Of course, his new book, perhaps to become known as the “laughing lemur” book, is Ambient Findability, so it was no surprise that he cast things in that light.
If the results aren’t in the first or second page of a Google search, they are practically unfindable, said Peter. No matter how usable or well-designed the site is, it comes down to search engine rankings and findability. (This sounds like SEO by a different name, right?) Findability is “pull,” the ability to get information when and however you need it. Even people can become findable objects, suggested Peter, if they embed an RFID chip under their skin, as a few avid geeks have done.
Peter’s remarks were a good balance to David Weinberger’s opening keynote , suggesting that instead of throwing out (cutting down?) the trees of content structure, that we define the leaves and enhance the structure with tags and social networks.
That balance was what the questioners in Weinberger’s audience were looking for yesterday. Perhaps in a few years we’ll know whose ideas came closer to the future reality.
Nancy Garman
Information Today, Inc.
ngarman@infotoday.com
Technorati Tag: oi05
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
Barbara Quint reminisces about attending conference exhibit halls, advises the vendors how to attract her into their stands, and mentions some of today’s innovative new products.
Click here to listen.
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
London’s Natural History Museum was the setting last night for a tastefully lavish reception by Ovid–A Wolters Kluwer business.
As a possible sign that at least some parts of the industry are enjoying financial health, some of us were conservatively estimating that the total cost of this customer appreciation event, in pounds sterling, was in the (000 omitted) category.
Well, as my grey-haired mother always says, it’s the thought that counts. A good time was certainly had by the throngs of happy customers (and a good number of vendors) in attendance.
Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
FreePint’s Will Hahn (left) entertained members of the FreePint community last night in a convivial atmosphere, featuring what else?, but free pints.
Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content
oi05
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
The cover of our EContent December issue features a 3-D revivalist effect. [For those who don't remember, 3-D movies, which require these cool glasses to view, were big in the '50s. But good news, 3-D has popped back into Vogue.]
Taking a gander at the neato-o, pop-up effect on the cover of the EC100 issue is Information Today’s Editor-in-Chief Barb Brynko, still smiling after a busy day on the show floor yesterday.
You can get your own copy of the magazine, as well as a pair of 3-D / sunglasses, at ITI’s stand (#233a). But act fast. Quantities are Ltd. Get ‘em while they last.
Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content
oi05
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
Just when we thought we had enough acronyms to contend with, enter SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative). And this doesn’t have anything to do with a California roll.
EBSCO Information Services, with members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), has developed a Web service that allows easy machine-to-machine transfer of journal-level usage. According to Oliver Pesch, EBSCO’s chief strategist of E-Resources, SUSHI will be released as a draft standard for trial use in early 2006 to help libraries harvest and analyze data from Project COUNTER Code of Practice (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources). In a nutshell, libraries were looking for a way to consolidate normalized data for use in collection development decisions. The new Web service can be used with the library’s usage consolidation application to retrieve essential data automatically when needed.
Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
The latest London Tube map seems to have taken a lesson from yesterday’s keynote speaker, who declared that information was messy. Contrast the “messiness” of the graphic on the cover with the rationality of the map itself. The cover is Weinbergian, the contents Gormanian.
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals
oi05
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
Whether you spell “license” with “se” or “ce” at the end of the word, copyright licensing is a growing concern for publishers and users on either side of the pond. Just take a look at the buzz around Google Print’s digitization efforts lately.
The U.S.-based Copyright Clearance Center now represents more than 9,600 publishers and manages rights to more than 1.75 million works. CCC’s Bill O’Brien and Jake Kelleher introduced me to RightsLink, a newly revamped point-of-content licensing solution that takes the mystery out of the permissions process. The quick (and painless) demo offered “seamless access” to permissions and reprints (as well as price quotes and shipping info) without leaving the original site.
Likewise, the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. represents 120,000 authors and 1,500 publishers in the U.K. In August, CLA set up a trial licence with the Universities UK/SCOP that allows member universities and colleges to copy and scan excerpts from books, journals, and magazines. The new scanning rights are geared to helping institutions of higher learning “meet the demand for electronic-based learning and teaching materials.”
Barbara Brynko, Editor in Chief
Information Today
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ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005
I mentioned in a previous post that several companies were back on the exhibit floor. One is conspicuously absent — Factiva . Several people have mentioned how surprised they are that there’s no Factiva presence. In earlier days, Factiva had a prime spot in the front of the exhibition hall. The last two years the company had a smaller stand and moved to the Content Management portion of the hall. A Factiva representative told me last week that they’d decided not to exhibit this year because they had other ways of reaching customers that they felt were more cost-effective.
Although Factiva is not here, the Wall Street Journal is, in its new tabloid-style format. Subscribers to the European edition of the Wall Street Journal are also automatically subscribed to wsj.com and many stories in the printed paper indicate that a fuller version is available online. Subscribers to wsj.com from outside Europe have the same access.
As, of course, do Factiva subscribers.
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals
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