Infotoday Blog Archive

Until next June, this is the SLA Information Today blog signing off! But we’ll be covering other conferences in between, so do check back.

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

There’s a very old joke that goes something like this: "What does the DC in Washington DC stand for? Oh, that’s easy, it stands for Da Capital." OK, not all that funny and you very likely know that DC really stands for District of Columbia. 

Next year SLA will capitalize on being in Washington for its centennial. Although at the closing annual business meeting, SLA Treasurer Sylvia James assured us that the association was in reasonably good financial shape, while acknowledging "difficult financial times," some officers of individual units told me privately they were concerned about financing their activities for the 2009 conference.

After this year’s theme of "Breaking Rules, Building Bridges," will the 2009 theme be about building bank accounts?

I’m looking forward to next year’s conference, whatever it’s theme may be!  And George Washington, who decided to join the farewell party at the last minute as you can see above, is looking forward to it as well.

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

Here are the official numbers from SLA’s 2008 annual conference in Seattle: There were 5,011 total registrants, 845 first time attendees, 1,681 exhibitor registrants, 464 booths, 283 companies, and 50 new exhibitors. This compares with last year’s numbers of 5,047 total registrants, 801 first timers, 1,702 exhibitors, 445 booths, 275 companies, and 38 new exhibitors.

Next year in Washington DC, I’d expect the numbers to go higher in all categories, since it’s the Centennial of the association.

Thinking back on this year’s conference, I noted an upbeat tone. Attendees were enthusiastic, not just about the conference, but also about the profession and their jobs. The conference seemed less chaotic than in previous years. The timing of sessions worked well. I liked the hour and a half sessions, with some sprinkles of two hour sessions. A few odd glitches were build into the schedule. For example, on Monday, sessions ended at 10:30 but the exhibits didn’t open until 11, leaving a half hour with nothing planned. Then on Wednesday, the exhibit hall closed at noon, the afternoon sessions ended at 1:45, but the closing general session didn’t start until 2:30. Again, some unexplained dead time.

Overall, however, an extremely successful conference. Congratulations to all the conference planners.

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

New this year was a farewell reception following the final session and business meeting.  Attendees enjoyed food and drink in a beautiful atmosphere.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

Seth Godin met some fans and signed copies of his books before his presentation in the closing session. As he later said, Digital stuff needs to spread–the souvenir stuff we need to keep and treasure.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI

Some of us may have had doubts about hearing a keynote address by someone who wrote a marketing book titled Meatball Sundae. What does this have to do with librarians? But, any reservations changed quickly to anticipation when I checked him out before the event. Seth Godin is a best selling author, entrepreneur, and agent of change. His last 6 books have been best sellers around the globe and have been translated into 15 languages. And he has a very powerful message for librarians.

He said, “It’s hard for me to find smart audiences. I wanted to talk to this group because you get it—you understand opportunities. Every person in this room is a marketer. Librarians spread ideas—truth is meaningless if it doesn’t spread—we need to figure out how to do that.”

According to Godin, marketing can change what librarians do all day and the issues we wrestle with. The era of mass marketing led to average stuff for average people—large numbers of people want to buy. But there’s clutter. Clutter on the store shelves—and clutter from the information providers—more books, journals, etc. We deal with clutter with more clutter. We’re in a real industrial revolution.

Bring this message to your organization, he said—yelling and hoping to make enough money doesn’t work. People won’t be forced. When people know the story we want them to know, we’ve done a good job. He said, “Either keep pushing against the wind or change what you’re doing and have the wind at your back.” Tell a story.

He highlighted a number of interesting trends—and we need to pay attention to these.
• Direct communication – the internet lets us do this
• Amplification of individual consumers – consumers can put up comment or videos or complaints. It can be really bad news or good news.
• Authentic stories – we need to have stories to spread and sell
• The Long Tail – it’s an era of unlimited shelf space … people will get what they want because they can
• The dicing of everything – this gives users information out of context.
• Infinite channels for communication
• Consumer to consumer – we can connect directly to each other
• Who vs. how many – what we should care about is who
• It’s not about controlling eyeballs anymore, it’s about leading…and people will choose to follow you
• Scarcity vs. ubiquity – you can’t make a living selling something that’s ubiquitous

Here are some questions to ask our CEOs. Are we in the business of finding customers for our products or are we ready to find products for our customers? Is it success before commitment? No, it’s commitment before success.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI

The magician at the Inmagic booth was really good—he had attendees’ rapt attention as he made dollar bills reappear inside lemons and did some amazing card tricks. It was a great draw to the booth, but those who took the time to talk to the Inmagic reps found out about the magic the company has been working of late. The 25-year old company is transforming from a vendor of software in a box to a provider of solutions and services, thanks to an infusion of $5 million in funding from Edison Ventures.

I talked with CTO Phil Green (on left in photo) and VP of marketing and business development Mike Cassettari (on right) about the company’s new strategic direction and product lineup—Social Knowledge Networks. The company works closely with its customers, such as NASA, and was hearing requests for tight integration between content and social tools—with the goal of enhancing the content, adding value, and driving content use. By this fall, a new version of Inmagic Presto will be available that will integrate social tools, such as tagging, ratings, discussions, collaboration, blogs, and wikis. There’s a white paper available on the Inmagic site if you want to learn more (www.inmagic.com).

Inmagic launched the company’s first blog, at http://blog.inmagic.com/. The blog is designed to be a resource for organizations looking for expert insight, opinion, and commentary on the trends and issues facing corporate information knowledge managers today. The company also has a newly expanded management team, new board of directors, a new customer advisory board, and a redesigned website. We’ll be watching to see some more new tricks from this company.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI
 

(L-R) Harry Markopolos, Kevin Desouza, Victor Camlek (moderator)

• Humans and their expertise (back up your data!)
• Technology devices (especially laptops)
• Knowledge-based alliances
• Physical security and physical assets
• Partnerships (you are legally responsible for their actions)

• Contracts only keep honest companies honest.
• Be especially cautious with laptops and guard them closely when you travel.
• Don’t put anything on social networking sites that you do not want to be publicly available. Allowing company employees to participate in LinkedIn is a good way to provide your competitors with proprietary information.
• Be careful about tradeshows—it’s astonishing what you can learn, but there is also a lot of vague or misleading info passed around. So take it with a grain of salt. The social receptions are very fruitful!
• You have no online confidentiality!
• Many companies do not take care of their people adequately, so their employees are not motivated to protect the organization.
• Every culture has its own weakness; America’s is that we’re too open.
• CEOs don’t get any training in security!!
• If you are concerned about information leaks, periodically sweep offices, conference rooms, and executive cars (don’t forget their golf bags!) for bugs.
• Keep critical information off laptops, and encrypt hard drives.
• Use e-mail encryption for sensitive communications.
• Don’t trust public Wi-Fi sites.
• Subscribe to an anonymizing service for Web surfing.
• To catch internal corporate spies, offer rewards for information.

That’s all excellent advice.  Some of it may be well known, but there were some things presented in this session that I had not considered.  I sure you will have the same experience.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

(L-R) Gary Price, Chief Editor, Resource Shelf;
Jessica Baumgart, Quality Assurance Engineer, Renesys;
Mike Crandall, Chair, MSIM, The Information School, University of Washington;
Gloria Zamora, Field Representative to Sen. Jeff Bingaman and SLA President-Elect;
Stephen Abram, VP, Innovation, SirsiDynix and SLA President;
Jane Dysart (moderator); Principal, Dysart & Jones Associates

What a great session this was!  I hope it’s repeated at a number of other conferences because I think that people who have been in the profession for a long time have amassed a wealth of experience that can be transferred to future generations.  We can ill afford to lose this.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

Librarians are trained to question sources, look for experts, check facts, and crosscheck. So a session on finding facts in a world of disinformation seemed a bit like preaching to the choir. However, Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, gave a fascinating look at how the organization monitors political debate discourse and political ads, pointing out the exaggerations and inaccuracies. He also revealed some deceptive advertising consumers have been hit with—products built on deception and misleading health claims. We might assume that consumers are protected by “truth in advertising” but the reality is that our protections are quite limited and we’re bombarded daily with false ads. He says the Federal Trade Commission is small and underfunded and bound by legal due process—it’s simply outmatched

There’s no government agency that has oversight over political ads—and he showed some outrageous and manipulative examples. Falsehoods are also spread by viral email—these can be especially potent and insidious and usually can’t be traced.

The bottom line—unfortunately, disinformation works. People believe what they see and hear. And brain scans reveal physical evidence that people cling to their biases and beliefs.

So, what’s the remedy? The internet, which is a place for spreading misinformation, is also a place to access open and good information, when used properly. He advises these ways to stay “unSpun:”
• Look for expert agreement
• Check primary sources
• Know what counts (with statistics)
• Know who is talking (consider the source)
• Cross check everything that matters

He mentioned some other fact check initiatives by media organizations, including the The Fact Checker from the Washington Post. In fact, one of the most read articles posted in the Information Today NewsBreaks/NewsLinks was on Political Fact-Check Web Sites, which discusses many of these: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=39759.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI