Last weekend, I read The Information Diet by Clay Johnson. These days before I buy almost anything from a book to a vacuum cleaner I check online reviews. Reviews for this book were mixed, but positive enough for me to buy it. I needed something new on media bias and a reminder to not be sucked into so much mindless surfing. 

While there were a few interesting points about transparency and broadcast media, on the whole I found the book somewhat depressing and scattered. One chapter covers digital literacy, or as we know it, information literacy. The book fails to acknowledge the role information professionals have played in this, research on information behaviour, or even how we can help you find quality research.

I questioned, after finishing the book, whose fault is that? Debates around information literacy have for years focused on the inability of librarians to brand it as something anyone outside our profession understands. We have also not joined forces with those working on media literacy as much as we could have which could raise IL’s profile.

And yet, as I wonder with any book that clearly is researched and consults academic materials: how can a book be written about one of our primary services and not even be noticed during the process of obtaining that research?

I also reflected on the reviews I had read before making the decision to buy the book. Is it more a factor of the brokenness of reviews, the deprofessionalisation of reviewing that is frustrating to me? My last project working in libraries was to implement a discovery layer. Ranking, the role of reviews, and ‘aboutness’ were interesting by-products of the decisions we made. I can’t help but think that as we continue to absorb more and more information everyday, it’s not important merely whether or not you can get to the data source (as Johnson advises) but that you can easily and effectively find those sources between all the noise. Which, even if you are digitally literate, might be a challenge without access to information, good search, and advocates for quality information – including librarians.

Today, January 18, is a day of widespread Internet blackouts to oppose Protect IP Act and Stop Online Privacy Act, PIPA and SOPA in the US. Just about every post from every country in my RSS reader this morning is discussing this topic. Global Voices has a particularly good post on the issues, and importantly, the post is available in 6 different languages.

I recently returned from vacation, including a week in Los Angeles. I attended a TV show taping, visited Warner Bros studios, hung out at the Santa Monica pier (as seen in any number of TV shows), went to the movies, and spent much of the week on buses and trains reading The War for Late Night by Bill Carter. I am an unashamed fan of The Business. And a librarian who believes in equitable access to information, globally, to all.

One of the most interesting aspects of Carter’s book is the idea of Late Night being a symbol of the problems in media: the divide between the television business as it has always been, tied to ratings and advertising dollars, and new business, embracing a new on-demand, timeshifting culture:

“For Conan, the change he had made in his career had taken on the trappings of religious conversion. He had seen the future; there was no going back. “Everybody is facing the complete transformation of our business,” he said. “You can resist and fight it or you can go with it. I’m saying go with it. Let’s see where this goes.” (Carter, p. 404)

The Hollywood Reporter posted an astonishing article on Monday, Why Hollywood Is Losing the Public Relations War on Piracy (Analysis). The article is a surprisingly honest critique of how media companies have got it wrong in framing the debate on copyright infringement. An argument we hear most is that downloading costs jobs in Hollywood, yet:

“Making an argument on jobs might seem like a winning political one in a tough economic climate. But increasingly, the tech sector is seen as the engine of economic growth in this nation. Hollywood’s estimates of piracy’s economic damage have been picked apart by observers, but more importantly, arguing about the economic sufferings of one industry sector rings hollow as another industry sector thrives.”

We are beginning to see fractures in the PIPA/SOPA debate – former supporters jumping across to oppose the proposed bills, and Internet media companies not joining forces with the big studios. Beyond this issue, there is a larger shift with more shows making clips and full shows available online. Had The X-Files been around now, maybe we wouldn’t have spent all our time in the 90s defending websites against Cease and Desist notices *

Perhaps we need to broaden to who and how we lobby and engage on these issues. Seeing the debate as openness vs big business isn’t productive. We now see some individual shows, agents, and artists embracing the Internet as a way to build audiences, and new sources of advertising revenue. Is there a role for librarians in this? If your library has a celebrity or author champion, or READ posters, it might be interesting to know if they are aware of this proposed legislation, and their position on it. Reach out, and start talking.

* I had a very popular fansite in the late 90s. There is debate about whether it actually impacted a minor storyline on the show. It was featured in Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, the Official X-Files Magazine, and a number of newspapers. None of those publications still exist, nor does the website.

Librarians are very good at making lists, especially of all the things that we did not learn at library school.

LIS curricula is a special interest for me – I work on projects in a number of countries where LIS is dated or simply non-existent, and I am interested in how they can develop researchers and modern curricula. Earlier this year, I met with groups of LIS students at two different schools in the US to hear more about their hopes and fears as they were about to join our profession. And I have also been in library school more times than most, graduating with three LIS qualifications. This year I’ve also been on the other side, doing some sessional work at my alma mater.

I’ve seen a number of trends come and go already in my time in the profession. Remember when we were all encouraged to learn how to code, or get MBAs to learn marketing and how to make libraries leaner and more entrepreneurial? Or when academic librarians were required to have a second degree? (Although this still mostly applies at some universities in the US).

The issue with library school, as I see it, is that there is such an endless combination of topics and specialisms that could be offered, if only for time, money, student numbers, and hindsight. There will always be more to learn. There will always be content that while in school, seemed relevant – but then times change, or you move into a different aspect of library work and you need something different.

Librarianship is the ultimate extensible profession. We have been given the knowledge and tools to learn for ourselves throughout our career. Whatever you are doing now, you may not be doing in 5 years time.

This is not to say that I think library school doesn’t need updating or to adapt regularly – it does. Make the most of your time while you are there, but once you graduate, the rest is up to you, with some help from your employer. Learn from other disciplines if the topic you want is not offered in library school. Attend short courses. Go to conferences. Follow research in different disciplines. Listen to podcasts or iTunesU. Make your own learning.

A caveat. There is one topic that is becoming central to the way libraries operate, and which I would like to see more curricula devoted to: licensing and its impact on access to information in libraries. Will libraries continue to purchase content in the future, or just license? How can librarians at every level advocate for equitable access when acquiring materials? How can we improve our understanding of licenses and develop stronger negotiation skills? While licensing is the ‘now’ topic, underneath this are fundamentals critical to being a successful librarian at any time: advocacy, negotiation, equitable access.

So long as you have grounding in the fundamentals, everything else can be built from there. We have a great, flexible profession. Make it yours.

Meredith has a great post on her research workflow over at Information Wants to Be Free. My research needs are a little different now that I am no longer working in an academic library. When I had access to scholarly databases everyday from my desktop, I was reading the literature far more regularly than I do now, and in a more systematic way. I was writing for publication more then, too. Yet with a major project coming to the end of its first stage next year, there will be a lot of writing to do on methods, impact, and results for a variety of publications. To get prepared, like Meredith I’ve been working on systems and processes to do this in an efficient way.

Workflow: Notes, draft text, calls for papers -> Scrivener. Web clippings and references -> Zotero. Mobile reading -> import Zotero references to Mendeley. Produce finalised article: ?

Scrivener I recently purchased Scrivener to manage all my writing projects in 2012. In addition to articles for the literature, I will also be writing a number of presentations and web content. Scrivener will allow me to write in small chunks so that I can easily reuse and rearrange content.

Zotero I have used Zotero to generate references for previous publications, but in recent years my library has become scattered, full of duplicates, broken links, and unsorted content. You can see the sorry mess at my Zotero user page. I undertook a project recently to reorganise everything but it is a slow process. Like many librarians, I have broad interests, and so my references range from UX to design, economics, development, and so on.

Mendeley I have been syncing Zotero to Mendeley so that I can use the iPad app, but while my Zotero library is so disorganised this is less than productive. I do really like Mendeley’s auto-renaming feature, fantastic for all those databases that think 1.pdf is a good filename. Zotero has this feature too, via a plugin, but it’s not as neat as Mendeley.

I rarely annotate PDFs, but I do have GoodReader and Mendeley installed on my iPad. I do use the highlights feature in Kindle. Quotes and additional references often end up in Evernote.

I had heard it said in the past that the sign of a good research paper is mostly original content, with fewer references as you keep writing and moving towards more original content in your papers. I have found this in my work – my first conference paper had about 30 references (!), my most recent journal article 5. On the flip side, I find this means I lack a good system for finding and reading new research not only to use in future papers, but just for current awareness. Here Twitter joins my workflow, as I follow users like DFID_Research (R4D) to pick up new papers on development topics.

What I am unsure of yet is how all of this will come together when I sit down to write next year. It strikes me that there are too many tools in my workflow. In the past, I have produced articles with Word and Zotero in a fairly linear process. With Scrivener in the mix, and not having tested the reference manager support option yet, I am not sure at which point I will have to jump out of these tools and over to Word. 52 Tiger discusses this problem.

A good topic for discussion, Meredith! I’d be interested to hear how people keep everything organised over time. I find it difficult to stay disciplined enough to tag every new item and to correct the metadata before something is filed away.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

Bret Victor, A brief rant on the future of Interaction Design

Not including cancelled talks, 100%ofall #swib11 speakers are male with ~1/3 female participants Congrats to #gender #fail via @nichtich
@nopiedra on a conference in Germany on semantic web in libraries.

I don’t want to overly criticize this conference, as I don’t have more information about it than this tweet. I am not the kind of woman to go around counting the number of women presenting at conferences. However, strategies to be inclusive of gender, new professionals and newbies (to new concepts) are a good thing in my book. Diversity is important, especially when it comes to emerging concepts and practices in the profession. I see this in my day job, working with library communities around the world to communicate better and to be more inclusive.

This blog has really fallen off the semantic web/linked data track, mostly because my interests have changed but also because keeping up was becoming a challenge. My strongest interest lies in working to communicate ideas, technology and practices in a way that is engaging to non-techies, and new professionals. I enjoyed the pieces I wrote for FUMSI, Library Journal, and Internet Librarian International on these topics a couple of years ago, and of course this blog.

Reader, perhaps this is just the kind of motivation I needed to get back into the topics that started this blog in the first place.

Mr. Chairman, we welcome the presentation by the distinguished delegates of Brazil on the treaty on limitation for Libraries and Archives as well as the modified proposals of IFLA and other like-minded organizations and for want of a better expression, Mr. Chairman, permit me to just refer to them as friends of knowledge.

Nigeria delegation, 21 November 2011 at SCCR23, Geneva

There’s been a lot of discussion over recent years in our profession about what we can do to change copyright. The good news is, libraries are working to do this right now at WIPO’s 23rd meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR23), taking place in Geneva until December 2. If you have any interest in this topic, and if you’re a librarian, I’ll take that as a yes, you can follow the events and background issues online on IFLA’s website and even read the simultaneous text feed of the discussions (password: wipo4me).

The Nigerian delegation coined a wonderful new term today: friends of knowledge. Expect to see a lot more of it in the coming days.

Update: Text feed fixed

This year, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the move to streaming services by both individuals and libraries. This was highlighted best in our trip across the US this past March, where there are several providers for streaming films, TV, and music. Other countries have a more limited range of services, not only because of the complexity of negotiating licensing rights, but because of more limited broadband or more established players (e.g. – here in the UK Lovefilm (owned by Amazon) is squarely up against Sky and Virgin TV. Netflix due in 2012).

All year, I’ve been mulling over the promise and benefits of online streaming. In theory, it’s great – you get to consume media that you probably only wanted to watch once, at a lower price than physical or purchased media, and it’s near instant. The growth of these services is a no-brainer. Yet if not matched by a service that offers excellent discovery, search, and a way to record what you have watched or listened to in the past, the benefits of these services becomes very limited.

I have had a Spotify premium account for a while now. I chose the service because I wanted access to offline playlists and the mobile app. Yet, I am now exporting my playlists and planning to cancel the service and go back to a free account. While it’s extremely convenient to have a massive range of songs at my fingertips, there are just too many downsides to a service that is not as one-time watch as streaming a TV episode or movie:

• Discovery in Spotify is terrible. Similar artists is very limited, there is no way to plug in a few favourites and discover new artists like you can with Pandora. Often, I listen to albums in Spotify for a while to see if I want to purchase them. I will return to using preview options on Boomkat and iTunes instead.
• I already purchase a lot of music (mostly vinyl, bundled with digital download). When I moved to the UK I format-shifted all my CDs (the CDs are currently in storage) and they are currently stored across several hard drives. After a while of using Spotify, I realised that most of my playlists were albums I had already purchased on CD or vinyl.
• Search is cumbersome, and not possible when offline. After a while, you end up with huge lists of playlists – the only way to easily find an artist or album. Too much manual scrolling when search is not available.
• Albums disappear. Several times, albums in my playlist have become unavailable in the UK.
• Three device limit even for premium users for offline playlists on the mobile app. Seriously frustrating to sit down on a plane for a long flight only to open Spotify and be greeted with a cheery message that all your playlists are gone because you exceeded the device limit.
• Spotify uses P2P to upstream content to reduce load on its servers. It affects performance of other network-tasks while working. This alone is a reason to cancel.
• Artist compensation per play is extremely low.
• Lastly, iCloud has arrived. Yes, it is really great to buy an album and have it automatically appear on my iPad as well. And to be able to add it to my Android phone since the files are DRM free.

So what’s the lesson here? For me, it has reinforced how important discovery is to my enjoyment of music. I find new music from recommendations, reviews, podcasts, and radio. As yet, there’s no great tool that allows me to aggregate albums I’m interested in buying or recommendations to look up. For now, it’s back to the old way – scribbling down details heard on the radio in a plain text file.

Sometimes, it’s the simplest of things that can become the greatest burden. In the mid 2000′s, a flurry of articles in journals appeared about the virtues of Personal Information Management (PIM), and how librarians could help with that. The idea being that as the amount of information in our lives continued to increase at a seemingly exponential rate, the anxiety faced to organise it effectively also increases until we are left with disorganised files, badly named files, and a lot of time wasted on trying to find things. We librarians often joke that the irony is that as much as we might seek to help others overcome this problem, we are ourselves amongst the worst at effectively naming and storing information – take a look at any librarian’s desk or files. In the last half-decade, PIM has become an industry of its own, with every new mobile phone announcement focusing on to do apps, reminder tools, personal information assistants (Siri), calendar apps, alerts, project charting tools and more.

The notion that a human professional can help you with that seems to have faded away. I’m not entirely sure why that is, when more and more people find themselves with thousands of digital photos that have no metadata whatsoever, to give just one example.

Yes, it’s easy to get carried away with productivity and organisation advice, and to procrastinate on actually working in favour of checking out the latest app or to do method (and I’ve been guilty of this too many times to mention) but there has been many a time when I would have sought out such a service at a library, if it existed. Libraries already offer a range of hands-on lab sessions, geek out days, petting zoos and more for a variety of topics including cooking, crafts, digital photography and computers – why not for productivity and getting organised (online and offline) too?

Does your library offer anything like this?

As for me, after spending several years battling document management and version control, I am both interested in and wary iof the shift to app-based file management, most significantly seen in Apple’s iCloud. I travel over 100 days a year, and in the past few months the iPad has become my go-to device on the road. Buying it has forced a shift in how I store information. Below is a screen capture of the apps I use for work. Using these apps, I can access all my notes, calendar (Agenda app is on a different screen), to-do lists, email, professional development reading, reference articles, bookmarks, documents and colleagues. There are many things that the iPad cannot do (writing complex documents or long emails with lots of attachments? Forget it), and things I need to workaround. However, this approach has forced decisions about where to store information (almost everything on this screen syncs via a cloud-based service) and started me on the path of dull but necessary tasks such as getting better at organising my email since Mail can only display a limited number of messages in the inbox.

One of the best meetings I have taken part in recently involved sitting down and deciding together how best to manage our folder schema and file naming. Basic, records management stuff, but it can so easily be forgotten. But incredibly helpful in deciding what and how to share files, and how to manage version control in lieu of a version control system. Have you had this conversation with your colleagues lately? If not, you might be surprised at how useful it is.

Any librarian that thinks that libraries move at a slow pace should try standing outside them sometime. In the past two years alone we’ve seen the the eBook market grow from virtually nothing in non-US markets to dominate conversation, a huge increase in the amount of legal streaming content (and simultaneous geolocking), copyright term extensions, new organisations like Library Renewal spring up, attack and defence of libraries whether by word, or by physical will.

It’s been two and a half years now since I last worked in libraries (I now work ‘for’ libraries and rejoined IFLA in 2009), and roughly that span of time since posts have been more sporadic on this blog. Not for want of issues to discuss, but rather for space and time to consider what to say, since Twitter tends to take most rapid thoughts, and in-person meetings the rest. Perhaps some blog fatigue – I had to smile when a post elsewhere said I had started blogging recently. It’s now been 12 years since I started my first blog (and had the dubious distinction of being the first Australian library blogger). Now everyone has an (abandoned) blog. In my current role, I’m fortunate to travel, visit a number of libraries and to discuss issues in the profession with a broad group of experts and professionals. While I remain interested in the Semantic Web, and Linked Library Data, it’s become just one of many things that I’m monitoring these days in both the library and development communities. Yet Semantic Web as an idea remains important – if not only because it harkens back to fundamental principles of standards, openness, transparency, and the role of ICT in development. Much that I have learned from the development community – crisis mapping, aid transparency, and developing flexible services for multiple platforms including mobile is deeply relevant to libraries too. There is growing awareness of this in many developing countries, but perhaps not so much in libraries elsewhere, in a twist on old information flows. Open Access, and the way countries can collaborate cross border to advocate for increasing access to information, remains on my mind.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to watch and discuss these topics in person in a lot of countries from Australia to Ukraine over the past two years, and I’m looking forward to bringing it back to the blog. Thanks for sticking around.