Monday, January 12, 2009
hakia and Librarians' Race to End the Search Wars
However, besides QDEX (Quality Detection and Extraction) technology, which indexes the Web using SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics, hakia also relies on the subject knowledge expertise of professionals. By combining technology and human expertise, it attempts to completely redefine the search process and experience. Take a look at my hakia, Search Engines, and Librarians How Expert Searchers Are Building the Next Generation Web for a deeper analysis of what hakia is trying to do with librarians. Hopefully, it offers more food for thought.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
A New Web 2.0 Journal
Thanks Dean for recommending this journal to me. It's an excellent read so far.Admittedly, Web 2.0 is a hard concept to get one’s arms totally around as it means anything involving “user content”. This broad definition covers everything from social networks, such as Facebook, to 3D Virtual Reality Worlds, such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, with many, many stops in between. The unifying feature in all of the Web 2.0 systems and tools is that they differ fundamentally from Web 1.0, which is a one-way connection, in which information sources, vendors, advertisers, etc. present information for the reader to consume and / or respond to (the fact that a user may choose to buy on-line from Amazon or Sears does not make those sites something other than Web 1.0 since the user was not the one to initiate the content).
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Stephen Abram and the World of Libraries
Abram has also been highly acclaimed with numerous awards and leadership positions. He was named by Library Journal in 2002 as one of the key people who are influencing the future of libraries and librarianship. Served as President of both the Canadian Library Association (CLA) and Special Libraries Association (SLA). Here is a candid interview that Abram gave a year ago. He reveals he had to apply twice to get into library school, and how he learned the craft of public speaking.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Seasons Greetings
Monday, December 22, 2008
Professor Jerry Newman on Management
Newman's case study was so fascinating that I wanted to interview him and ask him more about his book and whether it applied to libraries, which often resembles a retail fast-food chain in terms of frenetic pace with customers and rigid tension between management and staff. Here is our interview:
Question: Libraries are every bit as dysfunctional as any organization. What can libraries learn from McJob? Is your book written for fastfood and retail only? Does it apply for all?
Newman: The book is relevant to any organization that has multiple shifts in the course of a day, or that has multiple units within the organization. I think libraries qualify on both accounts. The biggest problem in multi-unit operations, and this isn't just me speaking - mcd agrees with this - is the inconsistency across time and units. To be great, first you must be consistent. This isn't always "sexy", hence the reason for low interest.
Question: What can managers learn from your book? If there is one thing they can take away from your book, what would it be?
Newman:
- Fast food jobs are HARD – both physically and mentally
- These jobs provide opportunity to learn important life skills
- Dealing with pressure situations
- Communicating with peers
- Managing conflict (with customers, peers)
- Fast food is more representative of our country’s diversity and makeup than other industries
- MOST INTERESTING: The store’s manager (and not corporate operations procedures and values) determines the climate and ultimately the success of the workplace
Question: What works? You had mentioned the four four R’s. What are they?
Newman:- Realism…People like predictability, set boundaries and expectations
- Recognition…Be an ego-architect – reinforce self worth
- Relationships…Build a social web, identify those employees that connect with others and use them to cultivate camaraderie among the troops
- Rewards…Gold stars still work
Question: What were some challenges you found?
Newman: How to reward your employees when money is not an option.
- Provide constructive feedback: Gold stars worked in elementary school, still work now
- Recognize job proficiency by make an example of a strong employee
- Offer flexible hours and job security
- Facilitate social interaction – build a social web, make the work-place a fun-place to be
- Advertise opportunities to advance
- Build positive manager/employee relationships
Question: What are some key takeaways from your research in this book?
Newman:
- Hiring decisions are key to store success and employee retention
- Culture has the strongest impact on workers’ behavior – and managers are in control
- Camaraderie and strong work ethic are a winning combination
Question: Were there any surprises during the extent of your experiences?
Newman:
- Fast food is not an easy job
- No forum for employee feedback and unsolicited feedback on operations/best practices is not welcome
- Wide disparities exist across stores – even those with the same name
- Women are better managers
- Recognition is a powerful motivator
Thursday, December 18, 2008
New Gen-Archivaria
archives remain, largely, material repositories of cultural memory. It is an accepted historical problematic, however, that culture is often resistant to material preservation. There exists an undeniable and profound tension between scholarly efforts to reconstruct history and interpret cultural traditions and the fragmentary, and often limited, material record. That is to say, scholarship is shaped by a sinuous negotiation around the historical silences that encompass all of material culture. Historical silences, however, can at times be marginalized (or at best excluded) by a sensitive configuration of material evidence with oral history.
The new generation archivist should be motivated by the long term preservation of moving images and by the invention of new paradigms for access to celluloid, tape, bits and bytes. It should be rooted in historical, practical and theoretical study - and rather than limiting itself to one methodology, it needs to assign equal importance to heritage collections and emerging media types.
One example of innovative ways of recording the past is UBC's First Nations Studies Program's oral history archive projects. In particular, Interactive Video/Transcript Viewer (IVT) is a web-based tool that sychronizes a video with its transcript, so as users play the video, its transcript updates automatically. In addition to searching a video's transcript for key words and phrases, and then playing the video from that point, IVT includes a tool that allows users to create a playlist of clips from interviews for use in meetings. While it took historians thousands of hours of transcription work, IVT transcribes in real-time. These are the types of technologies archivists need to be aware of, in order for us to create active archives. And this is where information professionals need to be aware - to anticipate the needs of its users.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Web 2.0 and its Identity Crisis
Saturday, December 06, 2008
The Road to Web 3.0 for Librarians
Recently, I presented to a SLAIS class, LIBR 534: Health and Information Services. I gave a talk about Web 3.0, and more specifically, the continuum from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. I strongly believe that the road to Web 3.0 is linear, and that in between is the Semantic Web. While many interchangeably use Web 3.0 and Semantic Web, I differentiate the two and contend that only through harnessing Web 2.0's social and collective collaboration and applying it using Semantic Web's intelligent technologies can we realize the potential of Web 3.0.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Early Learning and Libraries
Perhaps most controversial is the assertion that upper middle class children often score better on standardized testing because their backgrounds allow for concerted cultivation - that is, the abilities. It's the summer time that makes the difference. Rather than looking at test scores at one time period, we need to take a closer look at the test scores over an entire year, and examine the difference in improvement during the entire year. And what we find is astonishing. The reason for the disparity between the social classes is that privileged children are given more resources to practice and study during the summer time. Perhaps this is not surprising, as libraries play a huge role in the lives of young children. I certainly remember that as a young boy, I went to the local library often. (I only wish I had gone more now that I know how much a summer makes).
Libraries are seminal institutions in a child's early learning and educational experience. I like American Libraries' 12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country. It's an excellent thesis to why libraries are important for society:
2. Libraries break down boundaries
7. Libraries return high dividends
8. Libraries build communities
10. Libraries offend everyone
Thursday, November 27, 2008
PR 2.0 for Information Pro's
The conversation map is a live representation of Social Media evolves as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate. As the authors argue philosophically, if a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen? Indeed. Conversations are taking place with or without you, and this map will help all to visualize the potential extent and pervasiveness of the online conversations that can impact and influence your business and brand.
As a communications, service, and information professionals, we should find ourselves at the center of the prism - whether we are observing, listening or participating. Solis and Thomas' visual map is an excellent complement to The Essential Guide to Social Media and the Social Media Manifesto, which will help us all better understand how to listen and in turn, participate in the Web 2.0 world. A new, braver, world.
Monday, November 24, 2008
While there are a plethora of intellectual points for discussion, 'practical intelligence' in my opinion, is the new key term to take away from Gladwell's book. PQ is a term that psychology Robert J. Sternberg proposed, when he argued that there are three intelligences in human cognition:
(1) Analytical intelligence - the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions
(2) Creative intelligence - involves going beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas
(3) Practical intelligence - the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment.
The three intelligences, or as he also calls them three abilities, comprise what Sternberg calls Successful Intelligence: "the integrated set of abilities needed to attain success in life, however an individuals defines it, within his or her sociocultural context." While society tends to have bought into the idea that innate talent, through such test devices as IQ tests, can predict the success of a person, Gladwell re-examines this piece of wisdom, and argues otherwise. This book will be useful for anyone with a curiosity for success. It gives us a better, more complex, inquiry into what fuels success. And it's not just about brains, you know.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Calling All Librarians - Reference Extract
My thoughts? It's not unlike similar attempts to outdo Google. Have you heard of Refseek? RefSeek does not claim to offer more results than Google; instead, it strips any results not related to science, research and academia. It’s different from Google Scholar in that it indexes documents that includes web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers. It also has more results from .edu and .org sites as well as various online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Answers.com. With Refseek and Reference Extract, are we having much of the same, except in a different shape and size? We'll see...
Sunday, November 16, 2008
My Secret Life on the McJob
In my opinion, My Secret Life on the McJob is a paradigmatic shift in the field work analysis of organizations. Too often Library and Information Science educators are narrowly confined to questionnaires and quantitative analyses and equally narrowly churning out generic, boring, and unusable data about user statistics. Instead of viewing from the top-down, Newman does the exact opposite. Jerry Newman turns a stunted methodology of interviewing and statistical analysis on its head by actually doing a personal sacrifice (physical risk included) through experiencing the problems and flaws of organization behaviour and working as a covert fast food worker. What does he discover? The inefficiencies of retail, fast food, and traditional hierarchical management techniques passed down by the Ford Assembly Line era are not working in our globalized, mobile workforce era.
What Newman forces us to review about our workplace is that people are important. It's about the people. Good ideas come from the front lines. This applies not only to the retail world, but businesses of any kind, and especially libraries.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Are Libraries Knowledge Cafes?
The World Café refers to a living network of conversations that is continually co-evolving as we explore questions that matter with our family, friends, colleagues, and community. In helping us notice these invisible webs of dialogue and personal relationships that enable us to learn, create shared purpose, and shape life-affirming futures together, the metaphor of the "World as Café" is a growing global community of people, groups, organizations, and networks using World Café principles and processes to harness wisdom of the crowds.
As information professionals and librarians, we need to take notice of such trends and see how it can be applied in our own work spaces. Many knowledge managers today are introducing what they call knowledge commons in which employees can freely (or not) chat among themselves as they commute to and fro during the day. As a result, this space is turned into a knowledge hub where gossip, conversation, and useful ideas normally trapped within the confines of cubicle and office walls are broken free and released into the work place, making for a growth of a healthy work culture and environment.
In a way, this is done everyday in the form of Web 2.0 technologies through social network and instant messaging programs such as Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, and blogs. Employers, especially knowledge workers, must find a way to integrate this into their working spaces. In my opinion, libraries and information centres need to look towards the knowledge cafes model. Libraries must turn towards becoming information cafes and less as gatekeepers of information.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Web 2.0 Publishing
Contrast that with Schema Magazine. Schema Magazine strives to reflect the most culturally mobile and diverse generation of Canadians, the generation it coins cultural navigators. We showcase their unique sensibilities, interests and their pursuit of ethnic cool. As Schema's focus on the Vancouver Asian Film Festival shows, the focus of "Asian" is broad and widely interpretable. Schema also uses Web 2.0 technologies as its main channel of communication. Not only does it use a content management system for its webpage, it also has a Youtube channel of Schema's interviews.
The two rival Asian Canadian organization offer an insightful examination into the changing landscape of media and publishing. Staff-wise, both are similar - yet, when it comes to coverage and reach of audience, Web 2.0 simply wins out.