Monday, February 23, 2009

Shame on You Wall Street Journal

It is regrettable indeed.   I was deeply saddened and somewhat enraged by the Wall Street Journal's closing of its library.   In our information age, that depends so much on knowledge workers, Wall Street has decided that it could cut back taking away a vital piece of information news gathering, organizing, and dissemination of up-to-minute information.   Can news reporters expect to do all the work themselves?  Can they properly search for relevant and pertinent information? Is that even their jobs?  

Could we inset librarians and information professionals into the jobs of news journalists?   Of course not.  Wall Street - give your head a shake.   A knowledge centre, particularly in a top-notch industrial media giant such as Wall Street, requires expert searchers.    When asked, a spokesperson responds,

It is regrettable. Our reporters do have access to multiple databases including Factiva and this migration to digital databases as you has been happening for many years.

Sure.  Good luck with having your reporters spend up to ten times the amount of time it would take to find information a trained information professional could obtain for you in a fraction of the time.  A librarian is like the glue that holds the house together.  You can only go so far and so long without a librarian's information retrieval skills before the infrastructure cracks and crumbles.   Particularly in our emergine Web 2.0 world of social media and open access resources, can a company survive alone without expert information and knowledge management?  Best of luck Wall Street Journal.  

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Video Sharing for Librarians




I recently presented at TOTS. What is video sharing Whyshould we care? How can be of use for information professionals? What are some issues for us to consider? Let's take a look together.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Who Video Shares? Barack Obama Does!




Who uses Web 2.0 to its fullest capacity? Barack Obama does. The President posts regularly to Vimeo. Vimeo is different in that it offers High-definition content. On October 17, 2007, Vimeo announced support for High Definition playback in 1280x720 (720p), becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Mashups at PSP 2009


View more presentations from Allan Cho.
I had recently given a presentation as part of a panel at the Association of American Publisher's Professional Scholarly Publishing (PSP) 2009 joint-pre-conference with the National Library of Medicine, titled "MashUp at the Library Managing Colliding User Needs, Technologies, and the Ability to Deliver."    Here are the slides I had used - any comments most appreciated.