entrepreneurship, innovation, business information and stuff
I don’t normally write much about my SLA Europe activities. But the latest issue of the Newsletter (which I edit) has been something of a labour of love.
Among the 18 pages, it contains two stories from the winners of our Early Career Conference Award. They give a fascinating insight from information professionals who are new to the profession.
Please let me know if you find it of interest.
I was rather shocked to see this posting on the British Medical Journal’s website. The author Tony Delamothe, the deputy editor of the BMJ, accuses our use of the shed advert (shown here) as “representing an absolute repudiation of the role of libraries”.
Here is the introductory paragraph from his article entitled Amnesia strikes the memory business.
“A poster advertising the British Library’s Business and Intellectual Property Centre shows a padlocked garden shed, on which the following words have been painted: “Inside is your invention. We’ll help you stop it becoming someone else’s.” Nothing could better symbolise the suburban smallmindedness underlying this initiative.”
Fortunately Stephen C. Due a medical librarian from Australia corrected Tony’s misunderstanding of the role of the Business & IP Centre in providing information and advice that helps people protect their intellectual property. As he correctly states “There is nothing in this enterprise that conflicts with the traditional values of libraries – it is essentially no different from advising an author on how to make the most of his or her rights and opportunities under copyright law.”
Thanks Stephen for leaping to our defence!
My colleagues in our Science collection have asked me to point out that the British Library-led partnership was recently chosen to run UK PubMed Central. This enables scientists to access a vast collection of biomedical research thanks to a major new initiative that aims to promote the free transfer of ideas in a bid to speed up scientific discovery. Based on a model currently used in the United States, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) provides free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.
Also it seems the British Medical Journal is not entirely controversy free when it comes to open access publishing, as can be seen by this discussion thread Access controls on bmj.com – Restore true open access to bmj.com
In what might be considered something of a busman’s holiday, last night we hosted a visit from the City Information Group. The fifty or so information professionals who came along seemed to be suitably impressed by both our Treasures Gallery and of course the Business and IP Centre itself.
The organiser Jill Fenton has written a nice note in her blog.
Katy Crosse came with a group from TFPL (the Recruitment, Consultancy and Training company), and put a short write-up on their blog.
Apparently the list of attendees was oversubscribed so we may do it again.
One of the surprises during the annual SLA conference in Seattle was to see a full page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal promoting the value of information professionals four days in a row.
This unprecedented marketing event was an unexpected opportunity resulting from the recent take overs of both the Wall Street Journal and the Dowjones company (which includes the Factiva brand) by Rupert Murdoch.
It would be great to see something similar in the UK.
Here is the full text of the advert.
The right people, information and decisions
Behind every good business decision is an information professional.
The competitive advantages you bring to the table are superior management strategies and decision-making capabilities. Both originate from information that’s been gathered, organized and shared throughout your enterprise by people called information professionals.
The relevant, high-quality business information you need to take action doesn’t turn up all by itself. Whether internally or externally produced, it’s the lifeblood of people who work for you: librarians, knowledge managers, chief information officers, Web developers, information brokers and researchers.
The Special Libraries Association, with support from Dow Jones Factiva, is behind your most profitable decisions. To learn how an SLA information professional can benefit your organization, visit www.sla.org today.
http://www.sla.org/PDFs/WSJ-SLAad.pdf
Congratulations to Stacey Bowers and Cara Schatz of the SLA staff for their work with the Wall Street Journal to develop this memorable advert.
My search for the coolest librarian continued during the annual SLA conference in Seattle.
My previous winner of this (grossly under-recognised) award Louise Guy from Cirque du Soleil was not at the conference this year, although I did bump into Chad Eng, drummer in the death metal band From the Wreckage, looking suitably cool with his shoulder length blond hair and goatee beard.
This year I didn’t come away with a clear winner, but instead a trio of cool librarians.
Mary Ellen Bates
The first, and most surprising discovery for me, was Mary Ellen Bates. She is a big name in the information profession with more than 25 years of experience in business research. She has written hundreds of articles and white papers, conducted hundreds of speaking engagements, and is an acknowledged expert on various
aspects of online and Internet research. Instead of her usual topic relating to what’s new in internet research and tools, her much more ambitious title was, The Next Information Revolution, and our Role as Revolutionaries. She caught my attention with her second slide which flashed up for just an instant with this photo of Patty Hearst, best known for her attachment to an SLA organisation with truly revolutionary intentions.
Her presentation (which I will cover in a later blog) was primarily about our new clients and customers known as millennials or digital natives. And how we must re-educate ourselves to provide services they want in the way they want. These are customers who will be telling us what they want rather than vice versa at present. Her blunt but effective scenarios contained scenes of librarians explaining the limitations of their databases or catalogues only to be met with, ‘I see your lips moving, but I’m not listening’. Or even worse, a response consisting of one of the two favourite three letter responses of this new generation, OMG (Oh My God) – meaning I’m not impressed, and WTF (What The ‘Heck’) – meaning I really don’t care at all about what you are saying to me.
As you can see by her photo Mary Ellen does not immediately strike one as of the revolutionary mould. In fact you could say she looks something close to the stereotype of the female librarian (although sans hair in a bun and wearing a pearl necklace). But with her casual (joking) references to giving up on her crack pipe, and other amusing but unexpected comments I didn’t have time to note, she effectively destroys that negative image of information professionals.
Needless to say, as a cutting edge librarian she has a blog (since 2006) called Librarian of Fortune (Mary Ellen Bates contributes white noise to the blogosphere) at http://www.librarianoffortune.com/
I can’t wait to hear her next presentation.
Not surprisingly this topic came up many times and in many different ways during the recent annual SLA conference in Seattle.
The new generation of information professionals
As I mentioned previously I see the new information professionals as absolutely key to our future, especially given the demographic of the profession which will result in 58 percent of the members of SLA reaching 65 by 2019.
If the three young people (Christina de Castell, Stacey Greenwell, Daniel Lee) on the panel session titled Perspectives of New Information Professionals are representative of their generation then our future is in very capable hands.
SLA Alignment Project
SLA is funding a project with Fleishman-Hillard, the international consulting firm which is leading a team made up of Outsell and Social Technologies. The Alignment Project will be consulting widely both inside and outside the information profession to help SLA anticipate the future and create a strong and relevant brand.
Breaking down stereotypes of librarians
Librarians often suffer from stereotypes in the media, but in my experience many information professionals do somewhat lack in confidence. So it was fascinating to hear Stephen Abram the current President of SLA refer to his early years, when he could never imagine becoming a leader both in his career and of a global association. Having known Stephen for quite a few years now, it came as a big surprise to find out how far he has had to come to reach this point.
Another commonly occurring trait in librarians (which is almost never covered by the media) is their inner strength. I think of it as the opposite of the description of Israelis as Sabras. (Sabra (Hebrew: צבר) is a term used to describe a native-born Israeli Jew. The word is derived from the Hebrew name for the prickly pear cactus, i.e. “tzabar”. The allusion is to a tenacious, thorny desert plant with a thick hide that conceals a sweet, softer interior, i.e., rough and masculine on the outside, but delicate and sensitive on the inside. Wikipedia)
Instead, the librarian has a soft outer shell, but inside is a core of steel. An excellent example of this is Ann Sparanese, a librarian at Englewood Library in New Jersey. She is credited (and gets a foreword mention to prove it) with saving Michael Moore’s first book Stupid White Men. To quote Moore, “Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!” Salon website.
Adding value to our services
According to research done by Barbara Quint, Google answers as many questions in 30 minutes as all librarians in the world answer at reference desks in 15 years. So the only way to keep ahead of this type of competition is to constantly add value to our service. We need to understand our customers needs better and work more closely with them. That way we can become more of a consultancy service than just providing quick and simple reference answers. This is a topic I have written about in Moving from readers to customers to clients in the Business & IP Centre at the British Library, Business Information Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, 125-126 2008
I have just from the annual SLA conference which this year was in Seattle. It was strange returning to the city of my very first SLA event ten years ago. Then I was very green information professional and spent most of the four days trying to get my head around the complexities SLA, the conference and cultural differences between the UK and the USA.
This time I was there to fulfil my commitments as co-convener of the Fellows annual meeting, the First Timers Event and to Chair the Public Policy Advisory Council. Since being made a fellow of the SLA in Baltimore in 2006 I was expecting to be required to continue to contribute to the association.
I was more than happy to be involved with the First Timers Event which is held at the beginning of the five days of conference. I passionately believe in encouraging and supporting new entrants into the information profession. So helping to explain how to get the best out of the conference and to enable networking, as well as the opportunity to find mentors is a job I was happy to do.
The loud buzz in the room from the 300 or so who turned up to the meeting indicated they were more than ready to network with their fellow information professionals.
Chairing the Public Policy Advisory Council gave me great opportunity to be involved with SLA’s effective efforts during 2007 and 2008 to campaign against library closures in the US Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as a host of other activities. In the case of the EPA libraries, SLA in the form of Doug Newcomb (Chief Policy Officer) and Janice Lachance (SLA CEO) had been in the vanguard of the move to prevent the closures without due consideration and discussion.
I was privileged to be invited to the first Sue Hill Recruitment breakfast discussion last month. These are intended to be networking events for experienced researchers, information professionals and librarians. Having known Sue Hill (the founder and director of the 30 staff company) for more years than I care to mention, going back to the early days of my information career, it was flattering to receive an invitation.
Consequently I made an exception to my strict rule of never attending breakfast meetings (a result of 5.30am starts necessitated by my rural location). However, I’m glad I made the effort because I met several new interesting colleagues. This came as something of a surprise as after nearly 20 years of attending meetings and conferences I thought I hat met nearly all my peers.
After the initial introductions, during which many of the attendees also revealed Sue’s positive influence over their early information careers, we got down to the serious topic of the future of the information profession. Given the current economic climate, in which services such as libraries and information departments are often the first in line for cuts, plus the more general recent trend to outsource service departments, this was not a theoretical question.
The consensus around the table was that information professionals need to become much more flexible than before, and give more emphasis to continuing professional development (CPD). We need to develop a higher level of technical understanding, improve our general business skills and ensure we understand the business of the organisations we work for to ensure we align our services to these.
It was agreed that failure to look outside of the confines of our information departments, and to become more engaged within our organisations (particularly with senior management). And even more importantly in my view. to move our services up the value chain, would lead to the demise of the profession. Standing still (even if our services are already good) is no longer enough.
The wonderful business information expert Karen Blakeman of RBA Information Services publishes a list of top business research tips on her blog at the end of each of her Business Information workhops.
This is the list generated by the researchers attending her workshop in April. As you may have spotted the 10 has grown to 15 in this instance.
1. FITA Import Export Business and International Trade Leeds. http://www.fita.org/. The “Really Useful Links” in the menu on the left hand side of the screen takes you to a range of international sources on business information. One participant of this workshop found the “Doing business”, and in particular in the Middle East, especially useful.
2. Nationmaster http://www.nationmaster.com/. An interface to a plethora of statistics on web sites world wide. Some of the statistics are 2-3 years old but there are links to the original site so that you can search for more up to date information. Several participants suggested that this site is a good ‘index’ of where data is likely to be found.
3. Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/. One of several blog search engines, but this was singled out for its Trends graphs. These show how often your search terms are mentioned in posts over a selected period of time. In a business context the occurrences will usually match reports in the mainstream media. When they don’t, click on the peaks in the graph to see what is going on behind the scenes. Superb for picking up on rumours and gossip.
4. Yahoo Finance. Go to any Yahoo and click on the Finance link. For the UK version go to http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/. Yahoo Finance provides basic information on stock exchange quoted companies on the major stock exchanges around the world. Information includes current share price information (delayed by 15-30 minutes) provided by the stock exchanges; company profiles; charts in which you can compare the company share price with another company, the sector and an index such as the FTSE 100; current news on the company and focussing on the regulatory news; and daily historical share prices as figures that can be downloaded to spreadsheets.
5. Freepint Bar http://www.freepint.com/. Head for the discussion area, labelled as the Bar, where you can post your query and tap into the knowledge of regular ‘tipplers’
6. Silobreaker. http://www.silobreaker.com/. A new site pulling news from the usual newspapers and journals, but also blogs, video and audio. In addition It offers geographical hotspots, trends and a network visualisation tool, which was singled out by one participant.
7. Contact a relevant research, trade or professional body for help in locating experts. sources of information and reports. They may not have anything on their web site but there may something ‘on file’ that they are willing to supply free of charge or for which they are prepared to negotiate a fee.
8. Intelways. http://www.intelways.com/. An interface to many search tools grouped by type e.g. news, video, image. Type your search terms in once and click on the different search tools one by one. A reminder of the different types of information that you should be looking at and of the wide range of search engines that are out there.
9. Click on the Advanced Search option for any of the tools that you encounter, be it Google et al or a web site’s own search option. They offer great ways of focussing your search by date, file format, site, author etc.
10. RBA Business Sources. http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/. Selected sources of business information organised by type e.g. statistics, share prices, company registers. Yes, it is my own site [blush] but they did insist!
11. Phil Bradley’s web site and blog. http://www.philb.com/ and http://philbradley.typepad.com/. Excellent sources of information on Web 2.0 ’stuff’ and search tools. In particular, his blog has no-nonsense reviews of new search tools that claim they will change the world of search.
12. Intute. http://www.intute.ac.uk/. Forget about the ac.uk label. This is an excellent starting point for anyone working in business and wanting to identify quality resources on a wide range of subjects and industries.
13. Hometrack. http://www.hometrack.co.uk/. This site provides key statistics and data on the UK housing market and financing of that market. Especially relevant in the current economic climate.
14. Alacrasearch. http://www.alacra.com/alacrasearch. A Google custom search engine that focuses on business sites selected by Alacra. [A personal note: this is in my top 5 favourite search tools].
15. CIA World Factbook – country profiles. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factboo/. Key statistics on every country. For those of you of a more adventurous disposition when it comes to travel, it even includes the number of airports with unpaved runways.
After my recent blog post about the rather exclusive location deep below the reading rooms of the British Library, I was surprised to discover this week that Stephen Fry was there before me. He was there as part of a fascinating documentary in which he helps to build a copy of Gutenberg’s (and the world’s) first ever printing press. You can still catch this fascinating program via the wonderful BBC iPlayer service.
I love the way he demonstrates the principles of typeset printing using an old John Bull Printing Outfit whilst sitting in the British Library Café. I have fond memories of that game from my early youth.