Archive for June, 2011

August is the peak of the summer vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere, but there are still some important conferences on the calendar.

ITI’s Summer Conferences

Information Today’s CRM Evolution 2011 conference (New York, August 8-10) will feature David Gergen, Senior Political Analyst for CNN, and former adviser to four U.S. presidents, and Brent Leary, Partner, CRM Essentials, as keynote speakers.  SpeechTEK 2011, co-located with CRM Evolution, features a panel entitled “Mobility — A Game-Changer for Speech?” and a closing endnote session entitled “Prescription: What’s Needed to Move Speech Forward?”, as well as SpeechTEK University, a series of 3-hour focused talks.

IFLA

In keeping with its tradition, IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, will hold its 2011 Annual General Conference and Assembly—a major event on the yearly conference calendar.  The 2011 conference theme is “Libraries beyond libraries: Integration, Innovation and Information for all”. This year will be the 77^th meeting, and it will be held in San Juan, PR on August 13-18.  The program is now available on the conference website, and a lineup of distinguished plenary speakers has been recruited:

• Dr. Fernando Picó S.J., a highly-respected Puerto Rican humanist, historian, and professor will be the opening keynote speaker. Picó is an expert on 19^th century Puerto Rico and is considered the highest authority in this area and more generally in the field of the island’s history.  He is currently Professor of History at Universidad de Puerto Rico, and he has written the definitive history of Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico: A General History.
• Mr Trevor C. Clarke, Assistant Director General, Culture and Creative Industries Sector, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will be another plenary speaker.  See an earlier post on this blog for further details.
• Dr. Mayra Santos-Febres, a Puerto Rican writer of poems, essays, stories and novels and Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, will speak on Tuesday, August 16.
• Luis Molina-Casanova, Resident Filmmaker and professor at the Communications Department of the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan, will be a plenary speaker on Wednesday, August 17.

A full program of presentations and an exhibit hall will round out the conference.  Over 100 papers are already on the website and are available for downloading.  In addition, 15 satellite meetings have been arranged at locations not only in Puerto Rico, but also in other Caribbean venues as well as far away as Atlanta, GA; Miami, FL; and Mexico City.  Most of them have their own websites; links are available on the conference Satellite Meetings page and on the ITI Conference Calendar.  Finally, translations of presentations for French-speaking attendees are available.

IASL

The International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) will hold its annual conference as well as an IFLA Satellite Meeting immediately prior to the IFLA conference.  The IASL will meet in Kingston, Jamaica on August 7-11; its conference theme is “School Libraries: Empowering the 21st Century Learner”.  The opening keynote speaker will be Ellen Tise, current President of IFLA and Senior Director, Library and Information Services at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.  Four other keynote presentations are on the program.  The IASL Pre-Conference Meeting is on August 5; the keynote speaker will be Mrs Avril Crawford, CEO e-Learning Jamaica Co. Ltd.

ACS-CINF

The American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information (ACS-CINF) will hold a series of symposia at the annual ACS meeting (August 28 – September 1, Denver, CO).  The 2011 Herman Skolnik Award, given to recognize “outstanding contributions to and achievements in the theory and practice of chemical information science and related disciplines” will be presented to Professor Dr. Alexander (Sandy) Lawson, a pioneer in the fields of chemical structure handling, database searching, chemical nomenclature, reading machines, and linking text and structural information.  For most of his career, Lawson was involved with the Beilstein Handbook and the Beilstein Database. He is the developer of the “Lawson Number”, which enhances searches of the database.

More…

Here are some other conferences on the program for August.

• The Society of American Archivists (SAA) holds its 75^th Annual Meeting, entitled ARCHIVES 360°, in Chicago on August 22-27.  Several events are planned in celebration of the society’s significant anniversary.

• The12th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IEEE IRI-2011, Las Vegas, NV, August 3-5) is organized around three major topics: information reuse, information integration, and reusable systems.  Information reuse and integration help enhance decision-making processes in various application domains.
• 

  Carol Tenopir

  The 9th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services (York, UK, August 22-25) has as its theme “Proving value in challenging times”.  The main topics to be covered are value, impact and outcomes of libraries; statistics and quantitative measurement for library and information services; and quality.  The keynote speaker, Carol Tenopir from the University of Knoxville, will discuss the IMLS Lib-value project.

   
• The annual Basilage Conference, focusing on the theory and practice of markup technologies for structuring and managing information, will be in Montreal on August 2-5.  It will be preceded by an International Symposium on Document-oriented XML on August 1.
• Two events on semantic computing and ontologies have been scheduled for August 8-12:

—    The 3^rd International Summer School on Semantic Computing will be in Berkeley, CA.  It provides an introduction to this interdisciplinary field via tutorials and plenary addresses.

—    The 5th International Workshop on Modular Ontologies is part of the 23^rd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), and will be in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  According to the conference website, “modularity is central not only to reduce the complexity of understanding ontologies, but also to facilitate ontology maintenance and ontology reasoning.”

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

 

 

 

Here’s an interesting departure from the traditional activities at conferences.  On the last day of the 2011 ACM-SIGIR conference in Beijing, July 28, a workshop on a single query will be held.   And it won’t be just any query either–it will be entertainment-focused.  The task will be a challenge for attendees in Beijing, a city most of them probably are unfamiliar with, to plan their evening.  So typical queries might be to find a restaurant, theater, or other entertainment venue, and then get information on where it is, opening hours, transportation, etc.   This sounds like a most enjoyable, but also educational, activity.  If you’re going to Beijing, check it out!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

Note that SLA 2012 is in July, not June as in the past.

See you next year in Chicago!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

The closing endnote was by James Kane, an expert on loyalty and author of The Loyalty Switch and Virtual Loyalty.   He began by introducing himself at some length by telling his life story along with many other details about himself and  the minutiae of his life.  He explained that this first lesson of loyalty.  He does this because something that he shared might be familiar to you, and you would then think “I like him because he is like me”.  You may think that if we like one thing in common, we will like many other things in common.

Our brains are constantly looking for shortcuts.  They find patterns, which is how we build relationships as well.  We are not good about making predictions about the future, even though we like doing it.  When someone in authority makes a future prediction, we all believe it.  We tend to base our predictions on the present.  When we are born, our brains have no information in them.  We spend our lifetimes in gathering information from people (like librarians). We do not need to be above average, just be good at building relationships.  Most of want to have our lives fulfilled and have the people around us care about us.  It doesn’t matter that you can connect to the rest of the world.

Humans do not have claws or fangs, cannot run very fast, and our skin is thin.  Yet we dominate the planet because we have learned to work together.  We are social animals.  We have had to develop skills and emotions to tell us who we trust.  From the moment we are born, we need other humans to survive.  We cannot take care of ourselves very shortly after we are born, like animals can.  We do not have instincts; our emotions protect us and help us get through life.

Loyalty is not made up.  It is about making our lives easier and better.  If I have you in my life and you do these things then I want you around.  It does not come out of a competitive edge.  We do not need to be loyal to want someone to make our life easier.  You need to eliminate choice.  We trust things that can simplify for us.  Control is what makes us happy.   Your brain hates losing control; too much choice will paralyze your brain.  The real challenge is to develop relationships that are not simply about making lives easier, but also making them better.  Making lives better is the core of what you have to do.

Trust is competency, character, consistency, capacity (can you fulfill the objectives?).   It is an expectation.  We trust people until we learn that we cannot trust them.  What do your relationships already expect of you?  If you do those things, you will not need to promote your value.  The only way to fix a trust issue is to manage expectations of your boss, client, etc. (recognize that it may be unrealistic).  That will force you to interact with people.

Purpose is vision, fellowship, and commitment and what we do for each other.

Belonging is made up of these characteristics:

1. Recognition.  Do you know who I am?  Am I just another number?  If you want loyalty, you must know who I am.  If you do not know which people are most valuable, you must recognize them, who they are, and what they care about.  Remember things people tell you so you can learn something about them and develop a relationship.
2. Have insight into what I won’t tell you and the challenges I face. Understand the other person, show some empathy and find what causes them to act that way.  If you have insight, you become more valuable to that person.  That is why they stay loyal to you.
3. Proactivity.  Once you have insight, you can solve their problem before they ask you.  Anticipate their needs before they ask you and solve their problems.  We collect information from people all the time.  Do we collect what matters to us or what matters to them?
4. Inclusion is a very powerful motivator.  If you include people in your circumstances, they will be loyal to you.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Librarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and one of Library Journal‘s 2009 Movers and Shakers gave a stirring challenge to librarians on the biggest threat to libraries today.  Surprisingly, that is not money, but rather modern copyright practices.  Network neutrality is a major worry for her. We are on the cusp of losing the Internet, and a major reason involves copyright owners who consider the Internet a platform for piracy.  Today’s Internet does not care what is being sent over it.  Copyright interests want to make it care, and that should not happen!  The DMCA is threatening the Internet in favor of huge corporations.

Where are libraries intersecting with CR and how is it threatening them?  There are 4 major areas:

1. Collection development. Physical books are perishable in a way that e-books are not.   The 26 checkout limit recently instituted by Harper Collins is a high handed and stupid approach. What is different about e-books is that there is no first-sale doctrine, in which the seller ceases to have control over an item once it is sold.  A recent case, Costco vs. Omega may have implications for the first-sale doctrine.  (Although that case applied to watches, it has been applied to the first-sale doctrine.) Because copyright design elements in books bought overseas do not apply in the US, we cannot legally import or lend them.
    

   Another area related to collection development is the perennial serials crisis.  Copyright owners know that libraries will not have any money for subscription price increases, so they are desperately looking for other ways to replace those revenues. For example, Nature Publications tried to impose a 300% increase on serials prices at the University of California, which threatened that faculty would boycott their publications with the result that Nature Publications rescinded the increases.

    
2. Teaching.  Libraries are teaching organizations.  They believe that offering e-reserves is a fair use.  Several university presses are suing universities to prevent them from offering an e-reserve program.  If this is decided in favor of the presses, it will spread to all universities which will lead to terrified faculty and libraries.  This is really about the death of Fair Use, which copyright holders would like to extinguish.Other efforts by publishers are disturbing:
   • The STM Association’s Statement on Document Delivery would prohibit digital interlibrary loans across international boundaries, except by the publisher, which would give the US the most restrictive copyright law in the world!
   • If you bought an e-subscription to Harvard Business Review, you cannot put it in your course management system unless you pay an additional fee.  This happens because contract law trumps fair use, so you no longer have those rights.  Teaching gets much harder!
   • E-theses are popular with colleges.  But the American Chemical Society will not allow students to publish their articles in their e-theses because the articles are open access.  And if dissertations are available as open access, some publishers will not consider publishing them.
      
3. Digitization.  Some universities are not digitizing sound files because of copyright concerns.  So those files might as well not exist.  We have lost sight of the fact that digitizing something does not create a new copyrightable unit.  Orphan works are another large problem.
    
4. Preservation gets hard to do because of copyright.

Despite this gloomy picture, some good things are happening in libraries and there is hope.  Some universities have instituted open access policies, and new organizations like Unbound and Gluejar have proposed innovative ways to meet the costs of open access.  Librarians can do collective collection development on a global scale.  The HathiTrust has launched a major effort to identify orphan works.  And libraries are taking open access seriously in their own industry; College and Research Libraries is now an open access journal.

Salo closed with the thought that the day of the nice librarian is over:

• When copyright holders act as enemies of all we value, we need to treat them as such.  We are in this game for fairness and for our users, and we do not owe publishers a living!  It’s not all about us.
• If we think open access is important and want it, it is time to pay up.
• We are not the copyright police and should resist all attempts to turn us into copyright enforcers!

Good luck to all of us, we are going to need it!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor