Infotoday Blog Archive

According to Nic Newman, project leader for BBC Search Futures, 50 percent of UK web users go to the BBC website every week. However, 80 percent of people who download the podcast of BBC Radio 4’s morning news ‘Today’ broadcast discovered it by searching a non-BBC site.

The lesson learned by the BBC is that there is a huge untapped audience for BBC content who could access broadcasts, not just on the first and only opportunity, but at any time, way into the future.

The challenge for the BBC is to devise appropriate tagging schemes and novel search interfaces that will expose BBC content to the widest possible audience.

Jim Ashling
International Columnist
Information Today

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Adrian Dale of Creatifica Associates was persuaded by conference chair, Martin White to stand in for an absent panellist with only five minutes notice this afternoon. Adrian is slated to be the conference chair for online information 2007, so Martin kindly decided to let him get his feet wet early.

The panel debated ‘The Information Agenda in 2010’ and managed to solicit enthusiastic participation from the session attendees. Futurology extends beyond three years, so the panellists were able to stretch the time to 2012 and beyond, not least because 2012 will see the first fully digital coverage of the Olympic Games.

A few trends to watch out for:

• Growing influence of Korea and China. Excellent information science research is going on in the east.

• Google bombing to become a growing problem as intentionally false stories get posted and proliferate.

• Better data visualisation techniques will be developed including non-screen manifestations of data.

• Traditional information providers such as professional institutions need to pick up on the social networking trends developed and adopted by the young.

• Digital material will be created with intelligent metadata already attached – intelligent information objects.

Jim Ashling
International Columnist
Information Today

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Phil Bradley’s talk was entitled “The Death of Search”, but he started out by emphasizing that we won’t really see the death of search, but rather its evolution. Search will move to a new level as its functionality improves. And not much has progressed in the last several years: search engine size is not important any more; results are maybe better (but maybe not), and there has been a lack of innovation in basic areas.

To look at the market leader which is, of course, Google, most of its enhancements have not been in search, but in other areas, like Google Maps, Google Suggest, Google Book Search, Google Checkout, and so on. This is not search! Bradley pointed out that Google’s movement forward generally comes from the ideas of other companies.

So where is search going? It’s moving into personalization and mobile search. Now it’s possible to create your own search engine, and have what you want delivered to you. Bradley said, “RSS is your best friend—don’t search, have information delivered to you!” This may involve a loss of privacy, but Google knows what we are doing anyway. The tradeoff is that we can have much more personalization and customization in our information activities.

In the mobile search area, we are being freed from the tyranny of the PC. In a few years, almost all new cell phones will be Internet-enabled, so we can have search results delivered to us anytime, anywhere.

So search is not dead—long live search!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

A new feature for this year’s conference is that some of the winners of the International Information Industry Awards are announced and presented just before a session and not all of them during the gala dinner.

The Jason Farradane Award was awarded today to a team at the University of Warwick for its work on the Learning Grid. The Grid is a facility located within the university library which provides equipment from scanners and document visualisers to electronic whiteboards, video-editing facilities, networked pcs and video cameras to assist student learning as individuals and in groups.

The Farradane award is named after one of the pioneers of information science, who founded one of the first information science programs at what is today, City University, London.

Jim Ashling
International Columnist
Information Today

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How fortunate we were to get three search gurus on the same program to tell us what’s new in search! Chris Sherman, Amelia Kassel, and Steve Arnold agreed that search is going through a radical upheaval, but they took different viewpoints of the current situation.

Chris Sherman reviewed the position of the “Big 4” in search and came to the conclusion that search will become a combination of algorithmic and people-mediated search, with trust networks and increased personalization and user control over result filtering. He sees more personalization and more specialized sites coming out of the current emphasis on social networking.

Amelia Kassel thinks that searchers need to be more aware of search engine marketing strategies and incorporate them into marketing plans for their information centers. She said that we need to recognize that the search engine business is not at all about search, but about advertising because advertising brings nearly all the revenue in to the search companies.

And Steve Arnold told us that enterprise searching is very sick and on the verge of failure, but he thinks that text mining will come to its rescue. He sees a major shakeout with some intense infighting among the challengers for the enterprise search market. According to Steve, today’s enterprise search engine platforms do not scale well for larger audiences or the advanced searching of images and other forms of information that today’s sophisticated users want. Text searching is the most complex problem in computer science, and we need to understand that it involves significant technical, cost, and indexing issues.

The next session has a presentation on “The Death of Search”. It will be very interesting to see how that will fit with this one on the Future of Search.

Stay tuned…..

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

Carla Borsotti, Director, Content Operations, Ovid, gave me a demo of the new legacy archive that Ovid has recently released.

Consisting of 4 million pages, 35,000 journal issues, and 900,000 articles from journals previously published by Lippincott Williams and Wilkins (a fellow Wolters Kluwer company), the digital collection, she said, “replaces a mile of shelf space.”

“The biggest challenge in putting the collection together,” she said, “was getting hold of the materials.” Many of the images now in digital form were retrieved from old UMI microfilm reels now held by National Archives Publishing. Leading academic libraries also played a role in filling in the collection.

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content

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The Knovel Corp. has more bells and whistles to add to its lush array of research tools for science and technology techies: Chemical Structure Search. (For a hands-on demonstration, stop by the booth and prepare to be wowed.) This is just another one of the ways Knovel is listening to its customers and fine-tuning the Knovel Library accordingly. Barbara Dixee, manager of international sales at Knovel, reported that Knovel is also gearing up to launch its certification program to ensure that clients everywhere receive the same level of service and depth of training as Knovel extends its reach into the global marketplace.

So why is setting up a booth at Online Information important? “All our partners attend Online, so it’s an excellent opportunity to have face-to-face time with partners and clients while finding out what’s going on in the market,” said Dixee. “Plus, London Online is a great mix of academic and corporate that offers opportunities to meet new prospects too.”

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

Now there’s an answer for those suffering mild visual impairment, dyslexia, and reading difficulties. With Browsealoud, Web pages can be read to you.

Raj Kher gave me a demo, using Information Today’s own Web site as the source. The speech software even recognized abbreviations for State names, translating them on the fly into whole spoken words.

The service has an interesting financial model. Web site owners pay to be included so users can access their sites for free. Depending on the type of company, the price for inclusion starts at 495 pounds sterling. Local authorities, said Raj Kher, Business Development Manager (pictured above), pay 2495 pounds, and companies start at 1995 pounds, based on the number of employees in their shops.

The service, said Raj, is available for Web sites in any of nine European languages (it reads the language the page is written in).

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content

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I had a very impressive demo of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 at the UK-based Gold Certified Microsoft Partner Content and Code stand. In this picture, Account Manager Amar Patel walked me through the new built-in options for content management, business processes, and business intelligence. He also showed me some very nice collaboration features. SharePoint Server 2007, he said, will be on the market later this week.

Tired of exchanging spreadsheets as e-mail attachments? In this demo, Amar showed me how reports can be shared on SharePoint 2007 without having to download anything. The data in graphical form is simply stored on the server, permitting access by those users authorized to see it.

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content

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Though long-time Dialog public figure Pete Rusch (left, now a consultant working in Mountain View, CA) and Jay Van Eman, CEO Access Innovations, could not claim to have been to all the London Online shows, together they claim to have been to more than 30. In their minds, there was some confusion about when the event actually began. "Roger (Bilboul) would know," said Rusch. (See Roger’s take on it further down this blog.)

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P. Content

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