ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

Let me be the first to introduce you to Thomson Innovation, billed as "the new standard in intellectual property research and analysis." In an age when information is power, this new tool’s ease of use lets avid researchers or occasional users alike discover and retrieve patent information and drill down deeply into the data that keeps corporations in-the-know and on the cutting-edge of competitive innovation in the marketplace. David Brown, executive vice president of corporate markets at Thomson Scientific and his team including Cindy Poulos, vice president of product management of corporate markets at Thomson Scientific, spent 18 months working with clients through the alpha and beta phases in developing, designing, and refining the tool’s extensive capabilities.

"We spent a lot of time pulling together client-driven feedback from more than 1,500 customers who have been involved throughout the process," says Brown. The end result offers detailed analysis at a click of a button, providing access to full-text patents (including diagrams and illustrations) and published applications from the U.S., Europe, WIPO, Japan, and Korea; patent life histories; INPADOC bibliographic data; and the Derwent World Patent Index, as well as scientific literature, and business and news. Search results can be refined quickly to get just the information the user wants when he or she wants it. The patent search functionality includes plenty of enhancements to make discovery and retrieval as productive as it is easy. "Alerts" can keep researchers informed of movement in the field, visualization tools can simplify citation mapping to trace forward and backward references, and work-file sharing (with annotation capabilities) can help researchers collaborate from desk to desk or from country to country. Thomson Innovation was designed for the user, from attorneys and engineers to information professionals and scientists.

"We really designed it essentially to be the new global standard for research and analysis in the IP space. So Thomson Innovation gained a lot of value by looking at the speed of IP solutions that we already had in place, using them as examples to build a foundation for a best-of-breed solution," says Brown.

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

• Online Information 2007

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

Great speakers gave wonderful examples of Web 2.0 in action in their organizations.  Christian Schatzinger, Global Technology/Global Operations, Vodafone Group Services talked about his organization’s new wiki.  Bonnie Cheuk, Head of Knowledge & Information, Global Knowledge Sharing Program at ERM (Environmental Resources Management), talked about the initiatives in her organization and how Web 2.0 is changing the culture.  She talked about encouraging employee profiles, wikis for shared documents, online collaboration spaces, ways to get urgent requests answered from around the globe, and the CEO’s blog which introduced the organization’s Web 2.0 platform and highlighted how management needed to be prepared for the consquences — yes, employees do sometimes disagree with your acitons!   But the blog comments did lead to the creation of a new blog and discussion about the environmental footprint of ERM.  When asked about her definition of Web 2.0, Bonnie referred to LANES:

• Lateral commnication
• All staff participation
• Network building
• Expertise visualization
• Selfishness, yet add value to others

She emphasized how organizations have to be employee centric and ready to be surprised!

The final speaker, Anne Welsh, was an informaiton officer with DrugScope but has recently become Chambers Librarian.  Her top 5 tips for finding time for Web 2.0:

1. Make time for development ideas — step back and make a wishlist

2. Think big — then scale to suit your resources

3. Keep up with new technology

4. Make friends feeds, and get close to your users

5. Reuse and repurpose

Jane Dysart

• Online Information 2007

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

Great title for a session!  Euan Semple, described as an "organizational anarchist" and an unconventional manager, was the keynote speaker in this session.  He talked about:

• efficiency, using a wiki for oil safety as an example
• collaboration, a surgeon in a hospital in Finland using a wiki to share info with other surgeons
• innovation, "ideas arise out of the large melting pot of people" who use space to discuss and dissent from the status quo –  and love his quote "tiny ship of order vs vast sea of chaos"
• communication, influening & leading rather than broadcasting; tips — ask good questions to steer the conversation & lob ideas via blogs to compel conversation
• ROI, accountability
• knowledge extration & retention
• customer engagement, an example being an oil (BP) company creating a wiki for motor addicts
• the bigger picture

Jane Dysart

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

Trexy, the search engine company with the mountain goat mascot, continues to blaze trails in 2007, pushing its search database over the 1-million mark in just over a year in operation. Search trailblazers have been gathered from more than 35 countries. CEO and inventor Nigel Hamilton just introduced a new widget to Trexy.com’s repertoire that is debuting at London Online. “The new widget lets publishers display search trails that can harness the collective wisdom of their visitors,” according to Hamilton. Plus, publishers can reach new users by creating a community and improving the user experience by sharing their visitors’ search discoveries. With the easy-to-install widget, "Publishers can see where your site visitors are coming from, what they’re looking for, and what they’re finding on your site," he says. The search trails may be remembered but the identity of the trailblazer remains strictly private.

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

It seems that for the past few years we’ve seen a shift away from a focus on good quality content. Anyone and everyone can publish whatever they like without peer review, censorship or any regard as to whether anyone else is likely to pay good money to view it. I have no problem with that. If, as Jimmy Wales pointed out in his keynote, there is a whole community that finds value in a wiki devoted to the Muppets, and is happy to produce 15,000 articles devoted to the subject, who am I to criticise. But, will anyone part with any hard-earned cash to look at it?

Much of this conference is devoted to looking at how Web 2.0 is changing not only the delivery, but also who controls what is made available. A few sessions are also looking into whether any of it is financially sustainable.

A conference session titled ‘New Business Models: Show Me The Money’ may have promised rather too much in these early days, but there were some signs that not all content is just for giving away.

Macmillan English Campus is a site that specialises in English language teaching resources. A few years ago Macmillan developed a marketing website that gave free advice, tips and resources for English language teachers. It was successful enough that users demanded more content and more frequent updates. Among its most popular feaures was a forum that allowed teachers to exchange ideas and advice.

Macmillan’s Emma Shercliff described how onestopenglish.com was developed out of this website. Premium content, better search facilities and weekly updates made it a service that Macmillan decided to offer for an annual subscription fee of £30 or $50. While charging for a service that was previously free may seem brave these days, some 7,000 individual subscribers were sufficiently happy to pay within its first year. In fact, those most likely to pay were those with no previous experience of the free service.

Perhaps we are starting to leave behind the generation that believes everything on the net should be free. Is the generation, that has grown up with that attitude as the prevailling one, finally discovering for itself that valuable information is worth paying for?

Jim Ashling

Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

Adrian Dale (L) with Jimmy Wales

Marydee has given you some great quotes from Jimmy Wales’ fascinating keynote address.  Here is my summary along with some audio clips. 

Wikipedia, a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages, is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization and, according to Alexa, is the 8^th most popular site on the Web.  Wales characterized it as the “Red Cross for information”.  The foundation is supported by small donations from people all over the world and will spend $2 to 3 million this year.  Amazingly, Wikipedia has only 10 full time employees; all the rest of the labor is done by the users and volunteers.  Wikipedia operates under the free GNU Documentation License, which means that anyone is free to copy, modify, and redistribute the database, and if modifications were made, to redistribute the modified versions.

Wales is working on a number of new projects through Wikia, a completely separate organization.  Wikia will house the rest of the library—every other kind of book, work, or community that people might want to build.  It is extending the Wikipedia model beyond just nonprofit educational and research communities and is really creating a new type of reference work which will not compete with traditional reference.

Wales is even building a new search engine, Search Wikia, in which, in contrast to today’s major search engines, will use open source algorithms.  Everything will be out in the open, especially details of how the search engine operates.  Wales expects that Search Wikia will improve the relevancy and accuracy of the results and will result in an enhanced user experience.

 I was impressed with the question and answer period, which was one of the best I have heard.  If you would like to hear some of Wales’ thoughts:

• Click here to hear about educators who forbid their students to use or cite Wikipedia.
• Click here to hear about the current and future role of the library.
• Click here for thoughts on capturing the world’s knowledge.
• Click here for a discussion of the quality of information in Wikipedia.

 Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

It’s official: the LexisNexis Ala Carte service, which allowed you to buy information using your credit card rather than having a subscription to the service, ceased operation on Monday. Many independent researchers relied on this for their occasional needs for LexisNexis data. Apparently, not enough of them relied on it, however, because the revenue stream was not sufficient to keep it afloat.

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007

In his keynote speech yesterday, Jimmy Wales talked briefly about the history of Wikipedia, noting that it is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation (a non-profit charity). The Foundation is moving from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco. Wales didn’t mention that the Foundation had just (the press release is dated December 3rd) hired Sue Gardner as its new Executive Director.

He believes very much in free culture (that’s "free as in speech, not free as in beer") and called Wikipedia the "Red Cross for information," which is why Wikipedia would never be sold to Google. It’s the 8th most popular site on the Web, according to Alexa. He is dedicated to expanding the language base of Wikipedia and wants to extend the languages represented there particularly to African ones. The future of licensing is the Free Documentation License (FDL), which is how Wikipedia is now licensed. At the conference he announced that the new version of FDL will contain a mechanism that will allow Wikipedia content to be relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. A press release I received late yesterday, however, phrased it as "The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has resolved to formally request the Free Software Software Foundation (FSF) modify the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) so that mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia can use and license existing GFDL content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license."

Wikia is a different animal, allowing people to create wikis using the collaboration model. Many of these, such as the one devoted to the Muppets, are created by avid fans. In creating its search engine, Wikia strives for transparency, community, quality, and privacy. He contrasted his open source approach with those of major Web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Ask, which do not reveal how they work. On social philosophy, Wales asked "What kind of society do we want to live in?" His answer was giving people maximum freedom but if they do harm, there must be a mechanism in place to deal with it.

Here are some of my other takeaways from the talk and the question and answer session:

There’s a wiki for Star Wars fans called Wookipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is working closely with Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive although they have different objectives in preserving information from the Web

Libraries can’t be warehouses, they must be living, breathing entities to survive

Translation from one language to another is a nontrivial problem

Students should be encouraged to write a Wikipedia entry as part of course projects but should not vandalize pages to see how fast they’re corrected

Wikipedia is not original research, it’s a summary of knowledge

Wikipedia is not paper, there’s room for an infinite amount of information

Two motivations for participating in Wikipedia: It’s humanitarian and it’s fun

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

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ITI Bloggers December 4th, 2007

Since 27 November I have received no less than 50 e-mail messages from Stevan Harnad’s American Scientist mail list on the topic of "Open Access Suffers a Set-Back in Europe."

Alas, I wasn’t able to keep up with the flow of messages, so I invited David Prosser, director of Sparc Europe to sit for an interview and bring me up-to-date on what’s been happening with Open Access in Europe.  He graciously accepted my invitation.

Click the image below to listen in on our discussion (audio file).

Click anywhere on the play box image, above, to hear the audio file from a separate window.

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content

P.S.  Thanks to Chris Sherman, whom I ran into at the FreePint 10th Anniversary party tonight, for helping me learn how to make this audio file shareable. 

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ITI Bloggers December 4th, 2007

The Online  Information Meeting is where several industry awards are presented.  Here are two of them presented today. 

Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute (R) receives he Jason Farradane award from a Sage Publications representative (Sage is the sponsor of the award).

Brian Kelly UK Web Focus at UKOLN (a national center of expertise in digital information management) receives the Information  Professional of the  Year award from the (L) Editor of Information World Review and a representative from the American Psychological Association, the award Sponsor.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

• Online Information 2007

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