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Archive for June, 2007

WOW!

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

I’ve been rather intrigued by the fact that certain sessions in the SLA short program brochure have a big WOW! written beside them.  Between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. today there were four such WOW-ers indicated among the 18 sessions that were occurring simultaneously.  I planned to visit all four of them to find out if they had attracted a wow-able amount of audience share.  Unfortunately two of the four had dismissed early and before I got there, but the one pictured above certainly did appear to draw a crowd. 

Guess which one it was:

a)  Adapting DSpace for a Major Corporation
b)  Giving Meaning to Customer Engagement
c)  Knowledge Nexus:  The Special Library of the Future
d)  Speak as if Your Career Depended Upon It

Got your answer?

I can’t say which session was actually the largest. The one on DSpace had been held in a large room, but the room was empty by 12:15.  Giving Meaning to Customer Engagement had them standing in the aisles, but the room was small.  And the one on the Special Library of the Future had also been held in a smaller room.

So . . . WOW!  Did you guess it?   This bumper crowd showed up to learn how to be a better speaker, a basic skill I’m sure we can all use a few pointers on.  When I entered the room the instructor was reviewing tips on posture and stance. 

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content


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CCC’s Rightsphere Offers One-Click Permissions

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

Bill Cohn, Product Manager, Rightsphere, gave me a personal demo of the new service from CCC that is designed to provide instantaneous permission to users in a company or other enterprise to do what they need to do with articles protected by copyright. 

Once a user identifies an article of interest, they simply click the Rightsphere tab on their browser and review a short list of optional uses that can be granted immediately, including e-mailing a copy of an article to a colleague, making photocopies for a meeting, or even posting the article on the Web.

Enterprise content managers will also appreciate the back-office functions built into the service for tracking the terms of various content licenses they may have with aggregators.  Once the terms of the license are entered into the system, Rightsphere will govern who can see what and do what, under the terms of each deal.

ITI has featured the new service in the current issue of Information Today, in an exclusive article by editor-in-chief Barb Brynko, "Rightsphere–A Big Vote of Confidence."

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content


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Lunch with (the late) John Denver

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

I must confess that when I walked through the hall where SLA was serving lunch today, it REALLY did sound like John Denver singing. The song was even Rocky Mountain High, one of Denver’s biggest hits. 

I don’t know what I was expecting, but when I saw the SLA program listing for "Lunch with John Denver," I had thought it was a touch on the macabre side, given that Denver died in a plane crash nearly 10 years ago (October 1997), a fact notably omitted in the biography on the official Web site, linked above. 

Nonetheless, I thought it not inappropriate for SLA to honor the performer who took the name of this city—-real name:  Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr.  Still, I was a bit shocked to see that the young man on the platform singing in a crystal clear John Denver voice did not resemble him in the least.  

But, given that the room where lunch was being served was so large, few probably could see him anyway.  Who was it said, it’s the thought that counts?


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The Scoop From Hoover’s—Including a New President!

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

I stopped at the Hoover’s booth for a product update and demo and got the scoop on its just named but not yet announced president. David Mather was appointed as Hoover’s new president yesterday, June 4.  Paul Pellman, who has been serving as interim Hoover’s president since November, will resume his role as EVP of marketing.
 Before joining Hoover’s, Mather served as VP and General Manager of Global Business Operations for a $1.4 billion Global Systems and Technology division at Unisys. He joined Unisys from Hewlett-Packard. He previously held positions at Compaq and Unicom MicroAge. He also founded and sold several start-ups. We’ll look forward to meeting him at upcoming events.
 At the show, Hoover’s made two product announcements. First is the “phase one” integration between Hoover’s and First Research, a company acquired by D&B, Hoover’s parent. The company was only acquired in late March but the product teams worked furiously to provide an initial integration of the company’s products. It turns out to be a great match-up of content. First Research provides wonderfully detailed, analytical information on 230 industries and more than 600 industry segments. It serves as an excellent complement to Hoover’s company data.
 Here’s how it works for now—true integration will be coming, including a tricky mapping of Hoover’s industry codes to the First Research industries. First Research customers now have quick access to Hoover’s company data via a Hoover’s search box on the First Research site. In turn, Hoover’s subscribers have free access to a subset of First Research’s in-depth Industry Profiles. Additionally, those who purchase a bundled subscription can now access both Hoover’s and First Research content directly from within Hoover’s.
 Hoover’s also announced the new ConnectMail, billed as an email address discovery tool. It provides links next to the names of more than 19 million U.S. and Canadian executives, and lets users send an email directly to them. When I worried how execs would feel about this “prospecting,” I was assured that there are guidelines and limits on the number of email per month.
Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI
 


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Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

Ontologies are popular!  In fact,  they are very popular!  But there is still much confusion about the difference between an ontology, thesaurus, and taxonomy.  In her presentation entitled "Onto-What?", Brandy King, Librarian, Center on Media and Child Health at Harvard University, gave one of the most succinct and clear definitions of these terms that I have heard.

  • A thesaurus contains concepts and their synonomous (or opposite) relationships.
  • A taxonomy is concepts arranged in a hierarchical relationship.
  • An ontology contains defined concepts and the desirable relationships between them.
    • Example relationships are "Is_a", "Has_a", "Occurs_with", and "Result_of".

Pictorially, an ontology looks like this.

Why bother making relationships?  Because they match concepts rather than words, they allow building of a search engine that understands the core concepts of a query regardless of the way it was asked.  In fact the search term may not even appear in the document, but a semantic search engine will be able to find it provided the correct concepts have been identified.

King said that Boolean searching will retrieve every occurrence of the search term, but semantic searches provide quick and immediate relevant answers and can make up for errors in cataloging and searching.  Researchers should therefore use a combination of both methods.

Joe Tragert of EBSCO Information Services described how EBSCO is using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to enhance searching structured and unstructured content.  Benefits of LSI include:

  • Blind search.  You cannnot know all the terms in the database.  LSI allows queries to find overlooked information that may not be in the database.
  • Categorization.  Users can train the search engine using examples, and LSI can then automatically assign the terms to incoming documents.
  • Relationship discovery.  Subtle relationships that are deliberately or accidently obscured can be found.

Similar concepts can be found by automatic association, even when the word is not in the document.  Any type of text can be searched:  free form, documents, text that has been cut and pasted from a Web site, etc. Keyword searches do not have this capability.  LSI is an extremely powerful technique that will be included in future search engines.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information  Today


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Batter Up

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

It was October 14, 1882 when this picture of the Chicago baseball team posing as National League Champions was published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.  Kathie Gignac, Account Manager, Thomson Gale, was using the shot to demonstrate Gale’s 19th Century US Newspaper Collection, which offers the ability to search both text and images. 

Tonight in Denver, SLA is recognizing its 2007 awards recipients by taking them out to the ballgame at Coors Field, where the Colorado Rockies will take on the Houston Astros, starting at 7 (MT).  If you happen to be watching the game from home, see if you can spot your friends from SLA in the crowd.  We’ll all be sitting in the same  section.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content


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Quote of the Day

ITI Bloggers June 5th, 2007

This brochure from the H.W. Wilson Company, advertising their retrospective collection of the Readers’ Guide, IMHE, is good enough to frame.  The quote by George Santayana includes what is regarded to be the writer/poet/philosopher’s most famous sentence.   The book where the quote originally appeared was published by Scribner’s in 1905. 

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content


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