Wants a MASSIVE database with everything in it kthx

November 6, 2009 at 2:54 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

**DISCLAIMER**

Mindful of what happened last time I tried to comment that a non-librarian blogger might be a bit mistaken regarding access to information issues, I’d just like to point out that I am not having a go at Andrew! Just find users’ perspective on this stuff interesting. K?

***

Stumbled across this blog post recently, written by Andrew Taylor, a PhD student, reflecting on his lit review. He made the very good point that lack of access to prior research harms the scientific process – if everyone has easy access to discoveries others have made then they can work on and improve them that much sooner. He points out that “scientific knowledge is still trapped in PDF versions of paper journals, behind a myriad different paywalls and arbitrary institutional subscription lists. That’s a terrible system” – which I would have a very hard time disagreeing with (although I do take issue with the suggestion that institutional subscription lists are “arbitrary”!). It actually reminded me of a point that one of the speakers at UKSG this year made – that scholarly journals only look the way they do because they’re based on the communication methods of the 18th century. If we were inventing the scholarly journal today, wouldn’t it look less like a collection of letters and more like Facebook? And the “myriad different paywalls” issue is one I couldn’t agree with more – it’s frustrating for everyone that there isn’t just one way into all paid-for content.

However, Andrew follows up this very sensible and understandable comment with this: “It should be on a big database, searchable by any parameter you like. If I’ve got a question to which mankind has found an answer, I should be able to run a quick-and-dirty search and get a good idea what that answer is in about fifteen minutes”.

Hmmm.

Now, I totally see where he’s coming from. As a student (not long to go now though – should have my dissertation more or less finished by christmas!) I know it would be sooooooo useful to be able to search everything in one place. And even with my librarian hat on, I can still see the appeal – wouldn’t it be great if all published information was just there, in one enormous package (properly indexed, of course!)? Think how much quicker renewals would be!

Of course, this hypothetical mega-database simply wouldn’t work. It’s a wonderful, utopian idea – but there’s just too many issues around rights and cost and so on to actually build something like it (not to mention the technical issues – I actually can’t imagine how you could hope to get meaningful search results from something that huge, the precision would be terrible). I’m probably taking this a bit too seriously actually – I suspect that Andrew didn’t mean it as a serious suggestion! I just find it interesting, looking at how users think about these things. Because what it really boils down to is that nobody wants to spend hours wading through masses of abstracts in dozens of databases, looking for something which may not exist, but worried that if they don’t exhaust all possibilities then they may miss something relevant. It’d be nice if there was a quicker way to do literature reviews, but sadly there isn’t. Sorry!

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So long, and thanks for all the spinning GIFs

October 29, 2009 at 11:20 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

The sad demise of Geocities a few days ago has got me thinking about the problems with using free services to host your data. The first I’d heard of Geocities shutting down was xkcd’s commemorative redesign on Monday (screenshot), and I have to admit it did give me a twinge of nostalgia – I’m fairly sure my first attempt at web design was a geocities site (probably for the best that if it still existed, it is now gone forever!). I then started wondering how many people actually still maintained active sites there, and realised with horror that I had actually seen one recently – one of the local campaigning groups I’m looking at for my thesis had a geocities site.

I’m writing about local campaigning groups’ use of the web, and the first stage of my project was analysing the websites of 20 groups. Of course, now one of them has vanished (typing in their URL just leads you to the stark message: “Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available”) I’m down to 19 – although I should still be able to use my analysis of their page as it was when I looked at it, I’ll just need to point out in my write-up that the site no longer exists. I did email my contact in that group to find out if they knew that their site was about to be deleted, and if they had already set up a new site or had plans to, but I haven’t had a response yet.

It’s a shame for them that they happened to choose a platform for their site which turned out to be unsustainable, but it made me wonder how many of the other groups I’m looking at will end up having the same problem. Given that all of the groups in my study are volunteer-led, lack of time and resources means that most of them have gone for free, easy to customise web spaces very much like geocities (in fact, quite a few use wordpress.com blogs as a base for their websites, which I personally think works really well). It’s a good solution, for now: but as Geocities’ fate reminds us, it may not always be that simple. Just something to bear in mind really – and the same goes for personal use: I shudder sometimes at the thought of how much of my data I have entrusted to Google. They’re free and relatively secure for now, but what if that changes? Of course, I’m not so trusting as to leave everything in one place: anything important is usually backed up in a few places, including on my hard drive, and a USB stick and often printed out too – the belt and braces approach! But I wonder how many other people do that?

But back to geocities: I think the most important question now is, where will people go for prime examples of what not to do with HTML?? Ah well, there’s still MySpace…

Bad-MySpace-Design-620

Gah!! MY EYES!!!

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Question on data protection and the 2011 census

October 26, 2009 at 2:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

I’ve been trying to find out about the gathering of data for the 2009 rehearsal for the 2011 census, and how much of it is covered by the Data Protection Act. It’s a little beyond my knowledge, and try as I might I can’t condense my query into 140 characters, so I thought I’d post my thoughts here on the off chance that anyone reading knows something about this.

The London borough I live in is one of the areas selected to take part in the rehearsal for the 2011 census. As such, we received through the door on the 15th October a census rehearsal form, with instructions to complete and return it either on or soon after the 15th. Between one thing and another we didn’t actually get it done until Monday 19th October, and I posted it back the following day.

Last Friday (23 Oct) my partner happened to be at home during the day, and had a visit from two representatives of the Office for National Statistics, wanting to know why we hadn’t returned the form yet. He explained to them that we had done so at the start of the week, and pointed out that there had been ongoing Royal Mail strikes in the area for the last couple of months. They grudgingly accepted this explanation and left.

My question is this: should they actually have had access to data identifying who had returned their forms so far and who hadn’t? We had actually had a note through the post from them earlier last week (Wednesday 21st, I think): a generic, bulk-mailed reminder saying something along the lines of “If you haven’t yet filled out your census form, there’s still time” and containing instructions on what to do if we had lost the form. This seemed totally reasonable to me, and I didn’t really expect to hear anything else from them. I was taken aback that they were actually (presumably) paying people to go out and knock on individual doors. I don’t really know an awful lot about data protection, and all I could find on the ONS website was this commitment to confidentiality, so I was hoping that someone who knows what they’re talking about could confirm whether or not using the data collected to target individual homes constituted a breach of that confidentiality. Any advice gratefully received – am I worrying over nothing?

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Am I a “Strategic Knowledge Professional”?

October 19, 2009 at 9:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

You may have already heard that the Special Libraries Association (SLA), as a result of their extensive research during the alignment project, have proposed a name change. The new name, to be voted on by SLA members next month, is the “Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals”, or “ASKPro“.

I’ve waited until now to blog my thoughts on this because I wanted to give the matter the consideration it deserves (and not at all because I am too easily distracted to blog on a regular basis…). I support the alignment project generally, and do see the need for a new name, but I’m not entirely sure that ASKPro should be it. However, I realise that my initial dislike of the name could have more to do with the fact that it’s New and Different and therefore Scary and Unnatural, so I have been giving it some serious thought over the last few days. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

For the change:

As was pointed out in the email announcing the proposed name, John Cotton Dana (founder of SLA, as if you didn’t know!) said in the first place that “The name Special Libraries was chosen with some hesitation, or rather in default of a better…”. The name doesn’t really mean much to me, and certainly means far less to non-librarians. When I first applied for the ECCA last year, on reading the stipulation that candidates “must have an interest in special libraries”, I had to do a fair amount of Googling to find out what constituted a special library. I wasn’t much the wiser after my Googling, either. Most people I told about the award didn’t know what it meant either – one library colleague said “Special libraries… Do they mean prison libraries?” It’s possible that the term is more widely understood in the States, but even so, I doubt the majority of SLA members actually consider themselves “special librarians”.

Add this to the fact that the alignment research has shown that the term “library” itself has low value to executives in charge of setting our budgets and making hiring decisions, and it’s clear that the name is not useful to us as a profession. SLA have also stated that the new name was chosen in part to “fulfil the desire frequently stated in member discussions for a name with a meaningful acronym or shortened form” – I can’t say that this is massively important to me, but it’s true that “SLA” is not a particularly memorable acronym.

Against the change

Perhaps this will vary depending on the speaker’s accent, but “ASKPro” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue! The K and P sounds together make it, in my opinion, slightly difficult to say – and drop the K and you have either “ass pro” or “arse pro”, depending on accent – not an improvement on the innuendo-free SLA! (Someone who shall remain nameless also pointed out that “ASKPro” reminded her of “Reference services from -ahem- ‘ladies of the night’”. I hadn’t thought of that before she mentioned it but am finding it hard to get past that image!).

I’m also not entirely sure what a “strategic knowledge professional” is. SLA have been very keen to emphasis that changing the name of the organisation does not mean changing the name of our profession – individual members are still free to call themselves librarians, information professionals, knowledge warriors, or whatever they like really – but that the new name has been chosen because it “ties special librarians and information professionals to the strategic goals of their organizations, increases the perceived value of their services, and stresses their professionalism”. I’m not really convinced though – if someone asks what I do and I say I’m a strategic knowledge professional, are they any the wiser than if I’d said “librarian” or even “information professional”? Then again, would it leave them any less informed? My fictional conversationalist would be just as baffled by “information professional” as “strategic knowledge professional”; and would probably be misled by “librarian”.

I’m not really sure what the purpose of adding “strategic” into the name is, other than to make a meaningful acronym: my immediate reaction on hearing the new name was that it sounded incredibly American. “Strategic” always strikes me as one of those management-speak nothing-words – it’s filler, added in to make things sound more important than they are. According to the SLA alignment research, it’s one of the words that tested well when added in to a job description, as a way of helping non-librarians understand what we do; but I wonder if that applies more to American audiences than elsewhere.

So overall, basically, I’m still undecided. I do think we need a new name, but I still wish that it could have been something better than ASKPro. I don’t actually have any better ideas, of course! I honestly don’t know which way I’ll vote next month, so am looking forward to continuing the debate. If anyone has any compelling arguments either way, feel free to share!

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‘The Google-isation of [Re]search’

October 10, 2009 at 3:10 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

Went to a discussion on Wednesday (organised by SLA Europe and kindly sponsored by EBSCO) on “The Google-isation of [Re]search”. Really interesting talk – I don’t think I came away with anything particularly new, but it was good to hear a few people’s perspectives on the Google effect.

David Nicholas of UCL started by giving a brief overview of the Google generation research project. He admitted right at the start that he’d never tried to talk about it in just 15 minutes before, and it was indeed a very brief skate over some of the project findings. Interesting, but I would have liked to hear about it in more depth. He discussed the information seeking and use habits of the Google generation (which he pointed out is not limited to any particular age group – we are all the Google generation now). Deep log analysis had revealed that information users are pragmatic and direct – they will find what they need and then leave, without “hanging around” in any particular online space – and tend to browse “horizontally”, skim-reading a very wide range of materials but not going into any particular depth. He noted that people assume this is new behaviour, but that we actually have no way of knowing how people use(d) non-digital information: we assume that, for example, when someone checks out a book they read the whole thing in depth; but can’t actually verify this the way we can with digital materials. It’s entirely possible that horizontal browsing has always been the norm.

One of David’s points that I found interesting (which Sara at Uncooked Data also picked up on – incidentally I’d highly recommend reading her summary of Wednesday’s event, it’s a lot more considered than mine!) was that students he had interviewed had described academic databases as a bit unwelcoming – as if no one else had been there before. It transpired that they meant that there was no way for users to communicate with each other, comment on what was there and share recommendations. He mentioned by way of analogy a book returns trolley – the books on the trolley are rarely shelved because people like to pick up what other people have already read. People will trust recommendations from their peers. I actually find that quite an interesting idea (it made me think of some of the interesting things Huddersfield University have done with their OPAC) – although I don’t know how integrating that sort of thing into, say, Science Direct would work for anyone past undergraduate level. There is probably a risk that simply following recommendations would lead to people ignoring potentially useful information because they were focusing on what was popular, as Sara also suggests in the blog post linked to above. I don’t see that as an insurmountable problem though – following recommendations is a good starting point for most people, and surely it’s the objective of information literacy training to make sure that people don’t think it’s anything more than a starting point.

Kathy Jacob had the next fifteen-minute slot, to talk about the recent implementation of a federated search engine at Pinsent Masons. She talked about the demand for a single search interface for all of their products, which would search multiple sources quickly, be intuitive to use and have a clean, uncluttered initial search screen – in other words, something that looked and worked just like Google. I can certainly see the appeal of this – most specialist legal databases are not intuitive to use, and all have their individual quirks that you have to learn your way around, something most lawyers don’t have the time or the patience to do. The implementation has apparently been a success: Kathy reported that use of all of their paid-for databases has gone up by 15-20% on average, with the biggest increases in use for the databases which were most difficult to search. She also pointed out that the group which makes the most use of the tool is in fact the information services team – so even experienced searchers find the federated search easier to use.

Kathy did point out that the tool is only really useful for “quick and dirty” searches – for anything in-depth you still need to go to individual sources. I wondered if this in itself might cause problems: if the users get used to this easy interface, they’ll may be inclined to assume that the results returned are all there is to find (similar to the “first page of Google hits” approach). Kathy mentioned that the info services team don’t offer training on the federated search engine (she expressed the opinion that people should know how to search. If your product is aimed at average users but you need to train people on how to search it then your search screen is too complicated. I’m not totally sure I agree with this, but I see her point); but they do give extensive information literacy training. She explained the necessity of ensuring that new trainees understand that using poor-quality information can have career-limiting results, usually by relating a few scare stories of what’s happened when past trainees have tried to do all their research on Google.

The final speaker was Roger James, Director of Information Systems at the University of Westminster. I have to say I didn’t really think much of his talk – he made some very sensible points, such as the need to educate users about when to use Google and when not to; and the fact that Google allows for serendipity, where most paid-for databases don’t – but he said all this with the air of one imparting pearls of wisdom to Luddites who thought Google was the devil’s work. I think he badly misjudged his audience. For example, he started off by asking how many of us had our own custom databases in our workplaces – nearly all of us raised our hands; then asking how many of us had used those databases that day. He then looked shocked – and seemed a bit thrown off course – when nearly all of us raised our hands again. All of this made me wonder if he actually realised he was talking to librarians, or if he’d ever spent much time talking to librarians.

I had no problem with his central argument – that it’s not an either/or situation, Google is a useful tool alongside other information sources – but I thought it was a little obvious and frankly, a little patronising. I don’t believe many librarians actually see Google as the enemy. The key issue to most librarians is not, as Roger seemed to think, how to stop users from searching Google; its how to make sure they know when it’s appropriate to, and what other information sources may be better suited to their needs.

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The Library Routes Project wiki is now live!

October 1, 2009 at 11:58 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

A post I wrote last week about how on earth people figure out that they want to be librarians, provoked a surprising (for me) amount of comments. It seems a lot of people have an interest in the subject! This prompted a suggestion from Jennie Law that we should all blog our library roots/routes (a few people already have: see here, here and here – apologies if I’ve missed any others!). Ned (aka thewikiman) then suggested that we should try and collect these posts, to create a resource for new and potential new professionals.

While I was twiddling my thumbs and thinking what a good idea that was, Ned went off and set up a wiki to do exactly that. And here it is: The Library Routes Project Wiki. Obviously, it needs a few more entries to start with! So, if you’ve already blogged something along these lines, head over to the wiki and add in a link. If not, why not write something now? You don’t have to be a blogger to contribute: if you don’t have a blog, just create a new page on the wiki and write your entry there! Ned’s put some instructions on how to do so on the wiki, but if you have any trouble just let us know.

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Reading habits

September 26, 2009 at 12:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

Just for fun! Hat tip to Emma at Digitalist for bringing this meme to my attention:

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

I don’t generally snack while reading – there’s nothing worse than getting crumbs in your book!

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

I will occasionally make margin notes on books I’m reading for my studies. Only if they’re copies I own though (I hate getting out library books that someone has scribbled all over) and only in pencil – no highlighters!

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Bookmark. My sister always leaves books flat open, face down, which is the reason I don’t lend her my books any more – doesn’t she realise it destroys them?? I have a couple of bookmarks I use, both of which were presents. If I don’t have a bookmark to hand I’ll use whatever I can find, like a receipt or a piece of scrap paper.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Both, but more fiction. Partly because I can read fiction faster – it takes me a long time to get through a non-fiction book.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Hard copy. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an audiobook.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I will avoid stopping halfway through a chapter at any cost!

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

Only if what I’ve just read really doesn’t make sense without knowing that one word. I find you can usually figure these things out from the context, but I will look up a word I don’t know if I particularly like the shape of it.

What are you currently reading?

“Smoke and Mirrors“, a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman; and “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky, which I’ve almost finished.

What is the last book you bought?

“Their eyes were watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Impulse buy – I found myself in a bookshop last weekend, and decided I should look at books I’d never heard of. I have a tendency when browsing to pick up books where I already know of the book, or have read other books by the same author, which probably leads me to read a lot of the same type of thing. This was the first book I picked up where the title and the author meant nothing to me, and looked like a good read.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

I can’t read more than one fiction at a time, but recently I’ve been having one fiction and one non-fiction book on the go at the same time. I tend to read the fiction when I’m at home, and the non-fiction when I’m on the tube on the way to and from work.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

On the tube, as I mentioned above – anything beats the Metro! Also before I go to bed. I tend to read in bed when I’m at home.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

No real preference – I do have a few series I’ve got really into, and when I’ve started on a good series I like to read them all, but I enjoy stand alone works too.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

Probably Margaret Atwood – I find it difficult to name a favourite author (and impossible to name a favourite book) but she’s certainly among my favourites. I actually recommended one of her books to a guy in a bookshop who came and asked me what he should get his (female) friend for her birthday a couple of weeks ago – he said he didn’t know what women liked to read! I asked him if he knew what other books she liked and he said Dan Brown… I was tempted to suggest he just close his eyes, spin in a circle and then buy the first book he put his hands on, as she obviously wasn’t very discriminating, but I decided I’d try and get the poor deprived girl a decent book instead. I recommended Oryx and Crake.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

Fiction is by genre and then author – it goes general fiction, sci fi and fantasy, graphic novels, mystery/crime, horror, young adult (they’re pretty loose categories though). Non-fiction is by subject – very loosely based on the main Dewey categories, but modified to be more useful to me.

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Careers advice

September 24, 2009 at 9:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

Several months ago, inspired by a talk at the CILIP CDG New Professionals Conference, I started writing a post about how I got into librarianship. Between one thing and another I never finished writing it, but was reminded of it today by the lovely @SmilyLibrarian, who asked on Twitter: “Wondering how/why people got into librarianship, would like to hear”. From the replies I saw, it seemed like most people stumbled upon librarianship as a career by accident (with the notable exception of @ostephens, who apparently has several librarians in the family and may genuinely have been “born to it”!).

It seems like most of the librarians I know became librarians by accident. I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head who’s ever told me that they’ve always wanted to be a librarian. A friend once told me that they wouldn’t trust someone who said anything like that – I wouldn’t go that far, but I have to admit that I find the idea of deciding, straight out of school, that you were going into librarianship (thinking about it, I do know someone who’s doing an undergrad in library and information science, so she must have decided fairly early on that that was what she wanted to do) slightly baffling. It’s almost a hidden career: not many people who aren’t librarians themselves or are related to librarians have any idea of what we actually do, so how do people actually know that’s what they want to be?

I didn’t know I wanted to be a librarian until about two years ago. I’d wanted to be various things when I was little – a writer, a teacher, an Egyptologist… By the time I was a teenager, I’d fallen in love with photography and decided I was going to be a photojournalist. I did my undergrad degree in photography, and worked as a freelancer for about two years after I graduated. To cut a long story short, I wasn’t very successful at it: finding myself fed up with the career, starting to hate photography, and in a fair amount of debt, I started thinking about what else I could do with my life. I’d started working as an admin assistant in a completely unimportant branch of the MoD, and didn’t really know what else I wanted to do – just that I really, really didn’t want to stay in the civil service.

I went to talk to a careers adviser at the job centre (who was spectacularly helpful, contrary to everything I’d heard about job centre careers advisers!) who talked to me about my interests and transferrable skills. Among several suggestions she made was librarianship (I actually can’t remember what the others were). She told me I’d probably need to do a graduate traineeship if I wanted to be a librarian, and suggested I look for job adverts/descriptions to see if the roles sounded interesting.

And the rest, as they say, is history! From talking to other librarians, I think my story is fairly typical (I even know a few other photographers-turned-librarians). What I find interesting is that it took me so long to realise that librarianship was actually a career option. Libraries were always important to me: I organised all my own and my sisters’ books into a lending library (complete with catalogue cards) for the other kids on our street when I was about 8; I volunteered in my school library in both primary and secondary school; I did two weeks of work experience in my local library when I was 14; my grandma was a librarian for ICI (before she had children and had to stop working). And yet it never occurred to me that this was something I could do for a living. The fact that it was a careers adviser who suggested it to me strikes me as significant: I had careers advice at school, and while I can remember being told that I should consider museum curating, the opportunities in libraries were never mentioned. There was a coment from Katie Hill at the New Professionals Conference that she’d asked her school careers adviser about librarianship, only to be told “you don’t want to do that, you only need 5 GCSEs!”.

I don’t really know what the answer is to this – although, I don’t really know if it’s actually a problem. I love the idea of kids announcing “when I grow up, I want to be a librarian!” – but does it actually matter if most people only arrive at librarianship later in life, after trying other things? Arguably, it results in a more rounded workforce: having experience of other careers/sectors is no bad thing. But then, you do have to wonder how many more people were “born to be librarians”, but may never realise it…

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CLSIG Seminar: Web 2.0 – the truth behind the hype

September 18, 2009 at 9:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

I went to a seminar last night, hosted by CLSIG, which followed a kind of “web 2.0: pros and cons” format. Now, the fact that the first thing I did on leaving the seminar was tweet about it, then head home and start blogging about it, should tell you which side of the fence I fall on! There were some pretty interesting points made – although I didn’t agree with many of the “cons”, I do think there are some points worth discussing.

Phil Duffy went first with the anti-web 2.0 argument. He began by insisting that he is not a Luddite – he understands technology and is comfortable using it; but admitted that he perhaps does not understand the social side. His first point was that he’s not convinced that “web 2.0″ is actually anything other than marketing hype. He argued that the web was always about users generating and sharing content, e.g. Usenet groups, so it doesn’t make sense to distinguish between web 1.0 and web 2.0 (my immediate reaction is to disagree with this, but it occurs to me that I don’t have much experience of web 1.0 – I only have the haziest notion of what a Usenet group is/was – so I’m going to give Phil the benefit of the doubt here).

Phil went on to point out that as the effort, skill, cost and time required to publish has gone down, the amount of material published has, obviously, gone up. This has led to the well-documented problems of information overload and filtering – the overall quality of what is published has not risen, so it is much harder to actually sort through what is out there to find out what is worth your attention. He also noted that one of the stated advantages of web 2.0 – collaboration – is not always a good thing, quoting the maxim that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”.

Now, this was my first major point of disagreement with Phil. I completely accept that it can be much harder to accomplish anything in a group than it often is if you’re just working on your own. However, if that were the only point to the argument then no work would ever be done by committee. Sometimes, collaboration is necessary – there are projects that couldn’t be completed any other way. I wasn’t quite sure which comparison Phil was trying to make: between collaboration and solo working, or between online collaboration and offline? If the former, that’s a pointless comparison – both are necessary for different projects. If the latter, that’s also a pointless comparison – surely the same problems will occur in offline collaboration, but without the benefits of not everyone needing to be in the same place at the same time? I get that face-to-face meetings are still necessary, but I cannot seriously believe that the ability to collaborate online, in real time or asynchronously, is anything but a benefit to collaborative projects.

Phil continued by emphasising the need for information literacy teaching (something I thoroughly agree with) when dealing with the current generation who have grown up with the web, expect everything to be available online, and do not know how to differentiate between authoritative and dubious content.

He then expressed his fears about the current generation of new information professionals (hi there!), and how to find new hires who were actually capable of the job. He said (paraphrased) that he doesn’t want to hire bloggers or social media “experts” – he wants people who know how to “shelve books, understand a query however is it presented to them, do primary and secondary research”. I really don’t understand why he thinks those skills are incompatible – I am a blogger, I use social media (although I wouldn’t describe myself as an “expert”), and having been born in 1984 makes me Gen Y – that’s the one that expects everything to be online, and doesn’t realise that Wikipedia isn’t an authoritative source. However, I also know what those papery things with all the words in are, and am well aware that I can’t do all the research I need to at work online. I do tend to go for the online sources first, because it’s quicker to figure out that what you’re looking for isn’t there with online searching – I don’t see a problem with that approach. I think he’s missing the point – it’s not an either/or situation. If he’s not hiring people on the basis of their engagement with social media, he’s probably missing out on some talented candidates with a broad knowledge of alternative communication platforms and information sources.

Phil wrapped up his section with some familiar warnings about the security of your personal information on social networking sites – this gets brought up in every talk I’ve ever been to on web 2.0 and social media, are there really any information professionals out there who aren’t aware of those issues? Part of me thinks it should really go without saying, rather than spending your limited time pointing it out. I did enjoy the anecdote about an exercise he does with new trainees, where he searches for MySpace profiles containing the phrase “Hammonds trainee” (although was I the only one that thought: MySpace? Seriously?? Just how young are these trainees! Surely a Facebook search would make more sense…). He also showed some rough calculations, working out the amount of money that was lost by employees Facebooking during work hours (came to about £21m, although I didn’t note down how he’d worked that out and I don’t think he’s put his slides online). That also struck me as a pointless thing to say – as someone in the audience pointed out, employees will always find something to waste their time on, regardless of whether or not they use social media. Nobody spends 100% of their work time on work-related activities, and I’m sure that was the case long before the Internet.

Karen Blakeman was up next, discussing the positive side of web 2.0. She began by pointing out that the oft-repeated warnings about the potential for misinformation on the Internet were perhaps exaggerated – people have circulated, knowingly or otherwise, false information for hundreds of years (I would add that the Internet – access to lots of sources at once, coupled with enough judgement to decide which are authoritative – can actually make it easier to fact check).

Having asked the audience for their suggestions of what web 2.0 actually meant (suggestions included collaborating, sharing and serendipity) Karen suggested that a good way to think about web 2.0 was in terms of what you actually wanted to achieve, rather than focusing on the specific tools. Thinking about tasks like sharing knowledge with colleagues, keeping up-to-date, providing information effectively and on multiple platforms, and monitoring your (or your company’s) reputation, can give you a better idea of what can be accomplished using web 2.0 than just talking about blogs, wikis and RSS feeds.

The point about using web 2.0 to monitor what people are saying about your company was one that kept coming up – definitely a good use of the technology, especially if you’re in any kind of customer service role. I won’t go over all the advice that Karen had, as there is plenty of detail on her slides, but she had lots of practical tips on what different web 2.0 services can be used for. She also pointed out that useful technologies aren’t always the newest – her personal favourite professional network is the email discussion lists she subscribes to.

All in all, an interesting session. I’ll be keeping an eye on the blogs for the next few days to see what others thought of the debate – I’d be interested to see if anyone shares my opinions on Phil’s talk in particular, or if I’m just being an over sensitive gen Y-er.

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Designing an HTML newsletter in Outlook 2003

September 16, 2009 at 1:40 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

For the last month or so at work, we’ve been doing an information audit – basically gathering together key people from each of the firm’s practice areas and asking them, in a roundabout way, if we’re meeting their information needs. One of the more surprising comments to come out of it so far concerned the design of our daily current awareness bulletin, the Legal News Updater (LNU).

We’d been asking everyone what they thought of the content of the LNU, and the response had been overwhelmingly positive (happily for me – I took over putting it together about a month ago, so good to know I’m apparently doing it right!) until one person just casually mentioned: “Yeah, the content’s great… it looks a bit crap though”. When we asked her to elaborate, she said it was “boring” and ”dated”. I have to say I could not agree more – I’d thought as soon as I started that the layout could do with jazzing up; but with a million and one things to do in the library every day, the aesthetics of the current awareness email takes a back seat! For reference, this is the layout she was commenting on:

LNUold

Exciting, no?

So, having been given an official excuse for spending my time playing around with HTML, I set out to give the LNU a much-needed facelift.

Our critical friend had mentioned the Legal Week email alerts as a good example of newsletter design, so I had a look at that to begin with. It’s a really simple design – just a table, with a few pictures thrown in and some nice colours. One thing that struck me was how closely they’d modelled it on the design of their website, so I aimed to do the same with the LNU – it makes sense to be using the corporate colours/fonts in our bulletin, which is after all the only communication from the information centre that everyone in the firm sees. This also meant that I could steal the colour codes and fonts from the source code of the firm’s website, thus saving me a considerable amount of time… But that benefit was, of course, very far from my mind!

This is what I ended up with:

LNUnew

Ok, it probably still isn’t going to win any design awards, but I think it’s an improvement on what we had!

I learned quite a lot in the process, which is mainly why I wanted to write this blog post (yeah, you could have skipped through all the rambling above. Sorry). Designing a simple HTML template is easy enough; making it work in Outlook is surprisingly difficult (I should note that I am only referring to Outlook 2003 – apparently things are different again with Outlook 2007, as with the myriad web-based email services your audience may be using. As no one here uses anything other than Outlook 2003 I didn’t have to worry about testing the display in different email systems – I just had to make sure it displays on a Blackberry as well as it does on a desktop PC).

For example, Outlook doesn’t like CSS at all, so the template had to be in pure HTML. This meant looking up some deprecated HTML to stand in for the things I only knew how to do with CSS – and ignoring the warnings on all the websites I used to look up the old code, which all insisted that you never actually use this old code, it’s so much better to use the equivalent CSS instead, and you will look like an amateur if you insist on using this antiquated crap. Ah well. I don’t think it looks too bad.

The other major problem I ran into was trying to make the anchor tags for the TOC work. For some reason, once you paste the code into an email, Outlook reads all of the anchor tags as external links, and tries to open them in your internet browser. I spent many frustrating hours re-doing the links, searching the web for solutions from other people who’d had the same problem, and trying the occasional solution suggested (none of which worked). Interestingly, most of the forums I found where people were discussing this problem ended with someone popping up on the board saying something along the lines of “the only solution to this problem is don’t use anchor tags in your newsletter. They just don’t work in Outlook and there’s no way to make them work”. Which would have been fine, I would have accepted that answer and stopped trying, but I know they can be made to work because the old LNU template used them!

For anyone else struggling with the same problem, the solution I eventually found was ludicrously simple. Once you’ve inserted your HTML into a new email, before you save it as a template, do the following. Right click on each of the links in turn and select “properties” (or highlight the link and go to insert -> hyperlink). This should bring up a box that looks like this:

linktextNote the garbage Outlook has helpfully added in – there should be nothing before the # symbol. I have no idea why Outlook does this, I don’t know what that extra code means, but if you delete it then the link works fine. So, just delete the “outbind://64/”, OK it, repeat for every other relative link, then save your template. Once you’ve done this, you shouldn’t have any more problems with your links.

So those were my main issues – other than that there were just lots of little niggly things that made what should have been a quick job into a needlessly time-consuming one. But hey - we have our slightly prettier LNU now, and we’ve had some positive feedback on it. One of our lawyers even said it was “sexy” – whatever floats your boat I guess!

Postscript: here’s a couple of resources I found useful:

This book, which is a really handy quick-reference guide to HTML and CSS. Some deprecated HTML tags are also provided in an appendix, and chapters from previous editions dealing with deprecated code are included on the author’s website (accessible via a password printed in the book).

This article - handy step-by-step guide to creating a newsletter template in Outlook, although a few of their tips didn’t work for me (I’m not sure why they insist that you should save your template as a signature, it worked fine for me just inserting the HTML into a blank email and saving that).

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