Here you’ve put me in an awkward position. See, now I have to defend AALL’s annual meeting program, and that really isn’t something I wanted to do. If you haven’t been paying attention to the criticism of AALL’s programming you need to catch up. First, read Some thoughts on Programming at the AALL Annual Conference, then A Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL, then Dream Big or Comments on “A “Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL” and the Report of the AALL Annual Meeting Review Special Committee, Programming at AALL – A Modest Follow-Up…, and finally My Experience in Participating in the AALL Programming Process or AALL Educational Programming Needs to go Back to School. Just to tell you where I am coming from in this discussion: I have worked at an academic library for the last year and a half, and spent 5 years before that as a firm librarian. There seems to be a lot going on in these various posts and I’ll try to break it down. Several of the blog posts and some comments say there is not enough relevant programming for firm librarians. But as a former firm librarian I can see relevant programing at almost every time slot. The very first time slot includes sessions on supervisory skills and digital collection development. Sessions on authentic online legal information, copyright, and instruction skills are also have relevance to firm librarians. From my own experience, I could see relevance in sessions on FOIA requests, accounting skills, and even historical legal research. I think, selfishly, one of my own sessions, Going Mobile: new tools to keep your library’s information moving is very relevant. At the firm I was at every lawyer had a Blackberry. Just today I heard a story of lawyers at one firm demanding IT support their iPads. I suspect the real underlying complaint is not that there is a lack of relevant sessions, but a lack of sessions specifically targeted to firm librarians. For example, the Copyright session is not “Copyright for firm librarians,” it is a general copyright session. This complaint is, in my opinion, slightly more valid if somewhat untrue. Like Nina Platt, I do not see firm librarians getting the short end of the stick. In fact, part of the problem with annual meeting programming is that it seems too often to try to cater to everyone and in some respects ends up not catering to anyone in particular. One of the surprises I’ve found as I’ve become more involved with AALL as an academic librarian is that many academic librarians don’t think AALL does a good job of catering to them at all. So while firm librarians may think they have it bad, they are not alone, they are not victims (despite Nina Platt’s anecdote), AALL needs to do a better job of catering to all their member’s needs. Mark Gediman at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog suggests breaking up the conference into tracks based on type of library. This solution may certainly be worth a try. And apparently the Private Law Library section Summit was created in response to the problems firm librarians have had with AALL programming. I can’t say that as a firm librarian I would have been uninterested in the PLL Summit agenda, but the agenda does not seem particularly geared towards firm librarians compared to the general annual meeting agenda. The first part of the summit addresses persuasive communications, time management, better presentations, and business skills. These are not skills unique to law firm librarians and some even seem to be addressed by AALL regular programming. For example, annual meeting program E1 is “Using Pecha Kucha to Enhance your presentations.” Comparing the summit agenda with the annual meeting programming you will see additional items already covered in the annual meeting. I think the need for such a summit would be a little more convincing if the opportunities for such a thing hadn’t already existed within the AALL annual meeting. Besides the examples I’ve already mentioned there is also the Lawberry Camp unconference I’ve worked on with Sarah Glassmeyer. When we were originally proposing the unconference we asked both PLL and the Academic section to co-sponsor it. We then wanted to include the Court section, thus trying to include all members. When PLL and ALL-SIS seemed to not be interested we abandoned that plan. Lawberry Camp is currently free, and Sarah and I are dedicated to keeping it at a very low cost for members in the future as well. Firm librarians would be welcome to come to the unconference, start up firm-specific round tables, give firm-oriented lightening talks and get to interact with librarians from other library types. We would also be willing to work with them to provide some sort of forum within Lawberry camp, as we’ve tried to do with attendees of the cancelled Creative Commons workshop. Now, some criticism of AALL programming is warranted. At the recent CALI conference a random law school IT worker sitting next to me on a bus complained about the programming process and how onerous it was. And the process for presenting this year, my first experience, has not been pleasant. But AALL has made some efforts to improve. Already AALL has shown a willingness to try adding tracks to the conference, moving around deadlines, and hopefully more improvements will come. Furthermore, AALL goes out of it’s way to ensure firm librarians are recognized in AALL leadership, committees, and organization. There’s plenty to criticize with the AALL annual meeting. But having now attended AALL as a firm librarian and an academic I’m not convinced that firm librarians have a particularly strong grievance against AALL compared with the grievance every member should have over the current programing process.

“Innovation isn’t a goal, useful is a goal. If you can be useful and innovative, even better. But useful first.” – Jason Fried, 37 Signals

It might seem like a cop out, or a bad review, or even patronizing. But when I say Wolters Kluwer’s Intelliconnect product is useful I mean that as a high compliment. As the quote above states, one of my favorites, useful is something to aspire to. A few weeks ago Wolters Kluwer invited myself and several other law library bloggers to New York to meet with some executives and trainers to learn some more about their Intelliconnect product. Full Disclosure: because this demo was in New York City, and I live in the New York metro area I did not accept any compensation from Wolters Kluwer, except for a lunch on the day of the demo. We have this product at the school, but I haven’t given it much use. This training makes me think I might find a use for it, I might not otherwise had seen. Part of the problem for academic institutions is that this is really a practitioners tool. It’s really geared towards practicing attorneys who live and breathe their practice areas and the editorial content Wolters Kluwer provides for them. I could go into a lot of different aspects of this product – there is a lot to cover – but I am just going to focus on a couple of things that stood out to me. First, Intelliconnect is not a “Wow” product. It’s not going to overwhelm you with a slick interface or fancy features. Rather it is a workhorse product, one with valuable editorial content and a serviceable online interface for accessing it. The first thing I’m going to mention about the current version of Intelliconnect is a negative. It is optimized for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Browser compatibility has become a big issue for me with vendor products. In an academic institution like ours where most students are walking around with Macs, only working on IE, or not being platform or browser compatible is a big problem. I have been able to use the product using Firefox on my Mac laptop. However, I recommend you don’t use it in Google Chrome. While you might be able to get by doing some things in Chrome once in awhile you can run into a problem where you can no longer operate in the system and have to shut down. They say they are working on cross-browser functionality, and that will be great when it arrives, for now you are limited though. Online books or books thrown online? There was a debate among some of those present about whether Intelliconnect is a good interface for accessing the online, traditional book content long published by CCH or if they had simply taken their print material and thrown it online without giving thought to advantages and disadvantages made possible of the internet. I am of the opinion that they have done a satisfactory job of making this material available through Intelliconnect. Part of this may be that no one seems to have gotten online law books 100% right yet, and I am not going to hold Wolters Kluwer accountable for not getting all the way there. I think the reason I may have liked Intelliconnect more than some of the other participants is because I like browsing. Intelliconnect is really oriented towards browsing this material. Unfortunately browsing can be difficult if you subscribe to many of their subject areas. However, they have some nice features that allow you to simplify your menu. You can set your own specific practice areas or save your favorite material to a My Favorites folder. The image to the left shows the Covenants Not to Compete treatise saved to a My Favorites folder. I think this product is really oriented towards practitioners who would operate non stop in a treatise like this one. If you had to  consult this treatise or another manual over and over again, then this product is really geared towards that. Search The Intelliconnect search is ok. Really the best part of their search is that you can search those important practice-specific books that may be valuable for you. Again it’s not going to knock you out like WestlawNext, but it will find the documents you are looking for. It has some nice post-search filtering options. You can filter out results by jurisdiction, library (subject area), and  document type. When you click on a result the document opens in a frame, this can be a little disorienting for some – I didn’t really have a problem navigating through it. This display can be seen below.

Practice Tools The real killer feature for Intelliconnect, at least the library I was looking at, is the Practice Tools. There are a few different Practice Tools available and seem to vary based on the different libraries/subject areas you subscribe to. The Labor and Employment Law State and Federal Law comparison tool I looked at was really fantastic. Essentially it allows you to create something like a 50 state survey (or however many states you select), including federal law , for various employment and labor law areas. I tried this out on the immigration section of the comparison. This state comparison is very well done. One of the great features is that it incorporates editorial content into the comparison. It is configurable to display laws that are updated within 90 days, or even as recent as 10 days. In the image below the new Arizona immigration law is explained in a comparison with immigration-related employment law from other states. You can see that the Arizona content is highlighted in yellow.

Future Developments According to the folks at Wolters Kluwer they have some updates coming where they are really going to focus on improving their search algorithm. While I applaud their investment in search I think they need to keep in mind the need to browse and navigate their practice-specific editorial material. In addition to cross browser compatibility they also mentioned that they would be looking at enabling this content to be available on mobile devices. This would be welcome as well. They have some updates planned to help make the interface a little more intuitive or to give users a little more help when navigating the system. This is always welcome. Conclusion There are problems with the Intelliconnect interface. It is not perfect, and there is plenty I could nitpick with. But for me and reviewing a product like this I am going to go by the standard of whether or not the product is useful. Intelliconnect is not Lexis or Westlaw and comparing it to those products is unfair. Intelliconnect is a practitioners tool, a useful one. And that makes it a good one.

Back in November I had the opportunity to meet and interview Jeff Jarvis at a conference here at Yale. His talk was fascinating and the interview (embedded below) was interesting as well. I promptly had our library order What Would Google Do and was not disappointed. This book is a must-read for librarians. Jarvis starts by outlining how Google has changed, well, everything. He discusses the importance of links, relationships, being public and searchable, and the importance of using data to support business decisions. The second part of the book is more of a thought exercise, with Jarvis (and sometimes his blog audience, and others) discussing how Googlethink might be applied to various industries. He even manages to apply this Googlethink to the restaurant industry, one that would seem to be incompatible with it. But his description of a potentially Googleized restaurant is fantastic. I want to see this happen. He also tries applying this thinking to lawyers, even mentioning Westlaw, Lexis, and Fastcase and how Googlethink may change legal information. Libraries are never covered in the brainstorming session. It would be easy to dismiss the exercise for libraries, and say that we already know what a Google Library would be, Google is already building a library right? But this would be a cop out. The value in brainstorming about partnerships, opening our collections and processes, and re-examining our own roles in the current information ecosystem cannot be understated. Doing this through the lens Jarvis provides is very worthwhile. For example, Libraries would be be well-served by some of Jarvis’ most important lessons. He says, “decide what business you’re in,” and “do what you do best.” Deciding what business libraries are in and what we do best has not been librarians strong points in recent years. Reading What Would Google Do will hopefully give librarians something to think about as they start trying to answer some of these questions.

I wanted to wait a few days for part 2 of my post to think about my position and what had been written and said. Since then a few more posts have shown up, most notably from Tom Boone, and at the Law Librarian blog. And, as is always the danger when waiting to post something, much has already been explored by other bloggers. But I do have something to say about this, and I’m going to say it. The best way i can describe this post, is me trying to think my way through why this is such a controversial issue. The title of this post is a joke of course about the oft contentious relationship between librarians and vendors. But the reality is that the vendor-librarian relationship should never be an adversarial one. It may often feel this way. Vendor’s reps are often selling something while librarians seem to be always trying to do more with less. But it is a relationship rather than a transaction. And the relationship between vendor and librarian is key. As a people person myself I have always valued relationships with vendors and some vendors have been better than others in that regard. As difficult as it is for some librarians to believe, for me, Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL) has been one of the better vendors in terms of relationship building. In recent years, their marketers have been very good at engaging librarians in social media and building relationships without resorting to traditional sales pitches and “vendor-speak”, often genuinely engaging people on twitter and blogs. And I think this is why the SWAG issue is so contentious. We are uncomfortable with an extravagant gift,  as most of us would be when anyone we had a relationship with simply handed us something like an iPod. And for myself this is why I don’t accept vendor SWAG. This feeling of unease, extends to something even small. But what then, are we to make of vendor dinners, or sponsorship of events? Even Sarah Glassmeyer admits to being conflicted about what is and is not appropriate to accept from a vendor. But these particular benefits don’t seem to bother us as much. And why should they? I have bought drinks and dinner for colleagues. As Scott Berkun says in the keynote I embedded in this post, there are three timeless technologies: speaking, writing, and drinking. Vendor parties involve two of these. Dinners and parties are relationship building events. Similarly we are not bothered by accepting LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer and other vendors sponsoring AALL grants. And we shouldn’t be. They are not buying allegiance to their brand, and we are never quite as suspicious of these activities. Similarly we should not make that assumption about SWAG. Of course sometimes AALL must take a stand on certain issues. Many of us applauded, rightfully so, when AALL refused money from TRL last summer for refusing to participate in the Price Index. TRL refusal to participate is contrary to the relationship we thought we had. But the relationship between this vendor and our flagship organization continues. It must. But this is just proof that despite our missteps, and there have been plenty of actions by librarians and vendors which are contrary to a healthy working relationship, we are still partners. TRL invited many bloggers who were critical of their product to take the trip to Eagan, MN. And they and other vendors would do well to continue the practice of engaging critical bloggers, Sarah Glassmeyer included. However, I would advise librarians to do the same. When vendors are deserving of criticisms, we should criticize, worthy of praise we should praise, and even if we have to sanction we should do that too. But these vendors, whether we subscribe to their service, or we remain only potential customers, are our partners and we should always remember that.

Sitting at dinner with executives from Thomson Retures Legal (TRL) in St. Paul, MN, one of my colleagues asked, “what do you expect from us?” The answer was that they simply wanted to tell their story. At the time I wondered if this was a direct hint toward a recent blog post I wrote, encouraging vendors to tell their story. I put the suspicion from my mind. My suspicions were re-ignited the next day at their headquarters in Eagan, MN when one of the reference attorneys presenting to us specifically referenced that blog post. But the most amazing part of the trip was what TRL successfully did during that meeting, and have failed to do since. They told their story. That’s why I had been planning on writing a post about the trip to Minnesota, and meeting with the WestlawNext folks. It was a unique experience and an interesting process that itself could be important, beyond the topic of discussion (WestlawNext). And after February 1 when they unveiled WestlawNext at LegalTech in New York, I was prepared to blog about the value provided by the bloggers I sat in those meetings with, compared to the superficial tweets and posts coming from LegalTech. But my friend and colleague Sarah Glassmeyer may have forced my hand a little by raising the issue of vendor swag and question of ethics, including the decision I and others made to accept an all expenses paid trip to Eagan Minnesota to meet with the WestlawNext team and preview the product. Comments about this have ranged from the on point, to the factually inaccurate (all librarians on the trip had passwords which enabled them access to the product). And a larger discussion of librarian vendor relations has followed. Now, I currently do not accept vendor swag. I used to. I do not remember the exact point at which I stopped accepting it (early 2009), nor do I remember the exact reasons (general feeling of ickiness). But I do not accept swag anymore. However, I did accept this trip to see WestlawNext. I did not accept the trip immediately and not without some reservation. Yes, I questioned whether or not it was appropriate to accept a trip from TRL to preview this product. Beyond the ethical questions raised by accepting such a trip, flying to Minnesota, on about two weeks notice, in January at the start of the semester, is at best an inconvenience and at worst a pain in the ass. As my colleague mentioned this was not a trip to Hawaii. Now here’s where it gets a little tricky. I am a blogger – whatever that means to you – to me that includes some amateurish semblance of news gathering, editorializing, and simply passing on information. I decided long ago to not to place too much emphasis on counting how many visitors I have, subscribers to my feed, etc. I have had offers to monetize this blog and turned them down for one reason or another. But there are some people who do indeed read this blog, and find it valuable. Now, since I am not employed as a professional news gatherer my organization cannot afford to send me to every event that may be valuable. I either use part of my professional development/travel budget, or pay my own way. Which is fine. In this particular instance, TRL decided to pay to fly me and other bloggers into Minnesota on their own dime. They gave me a place to stay for the night, and fed me. It was not a vacation. I spent most of one day traveling, and the second day in meetings. I decided, right or wrong, that it was within my professional responsibility, and the scope of this blog to accept this trip. I mean that it may be advantageous to the organization that employs me (Yale Law Library) to have a staff member get an early insider’s view of an important new product, it may be advantageous to my career (I am up for promotion in a few years) to note that I was recognized as a blogger recognizable enough to be worth the cost to fly out to Minnesota, and valuable to the readers of my blog that I was at the meeting. I stand by the decision. Now some people,like this commenter, might think this makes me a less reliable authority on such matters. That doesn’t worry me. Long time readers of myself and Tom Boone know who we are and whether or not we are valuable, reliable sources of information. Frankly, I think devaluing our two voices (along with the other dozen or so bloggers there) is a disservice to any law librarian and their own professional reading. There is of course a larger issue of vendor-librarian relations that I think should be addressed. And this is a wholely different issue than accepting an ipod (a gift I wasn’t offered and would not have accepted). FYI, I was offered but did not accept any swag while on this trip. But I will save this larger post for later. Let’s consider this part 1.

On Tuesday, 2/2/10 I’ll be co-presenting about how to use Google Wave. We have created several waves for this presentation. This post is an will be an example of embedding a wave on a website or blog.

So lots has been written about WestlawNext. Much more detailed analysis has been floating around. So rather than rehash what’s already been said all over the web, I’m going to provide some random thoughts I had about the project as I was sitting in the meeting at Eagan, MN. These are just from some notes I jotted down, that I think are interesting. Disclosure (again): Thomson Reuters paid my way to Eagan and put me up for the trip. 1. Attorneys do not look at documents on Westlaw beyond the first 5 to 10 results. I suspect it’s the same for Lexis, and pretty much any search site nowadays This is what they found when researching how attorneys used Westlaw. I know that this is a problem on Google, one that has led to the emergence of the Search Engine Optimization industry, that search results beyond the first few almost do not exist. But to hear that attorneys by and large will rerun a search if desired search results don’t show up within the first few hits is very… I’ll say illuminating. Is this a failure on the part of firms, librarians, legal education, or attorneys themselves? Is it a failure at all, or just how research is done in the Google age, something that databases, search engines, librarians must simply accept as a modern research practice? WestlawNext is now accommodating this practice, as will other vendors I’m sure. Should librarians? 2. Analyzing customer usage to make the relevancy rankings more relevant, in particular measuring “meaningful interaction with documents” For me, this may have been the most welcoming revelation about the new WestSearch relevancy rankings. They wanted to take user behavior into account in relevance rankings. But users click on documents in search results which are irrelevant. So how do you measure document relevance to a search. WestSearch incorporates what they called “meaningful interaction with a document” as signifying relevance to the search. Meaningful interaction may include actions like keyciting a document, printing a document, citing with reference, saving it to a folder, downloading, etc. These are the types of actions that were found to signify a relevant document. WestSearch will incorporate these actions into relevance rankings. In addition to search results, WestlawNext will analyze documents saved to their folder system. The theory is that documents that appear in the same folder may have links between them and can also improve relevancy rankings. What does this mean? It means that Westlaw’s relevancy rankings should continually improve as more people start using the system. Awesome. 3. All browsers will be supported. But Chrome is the best Gone are those annoying pop-up windows, and messages telling us that something is best viewed on Internet Explorer. WestlawNext will be available on all browsers (Chrome is coming in mid-February). That means Mac users, Firefox users, Chrome users, Safari users will all be able to use WestlawNext on their desired platform. This is a very welcome development. It also makes me think that Westlaw may have been listening to all the user complaints about browser compatibility. Oh, by the way. Their studies found that Chrome was the most steady, fastest, most reliable browser. 4. Synchronization across all platforms Save a document to your folder on WestlawNext online. Access it from your mobile device later. WestlawNext has been built with portability in mind. As we enter an age where people expect content to be accessible across multiple platforms, WestlawNext appears to deliver. 5. Possibility of command searching Librarians seem to be worried about the disappearance of boolean searching. I am excited about the possibility of command searching. Currently in WestlawNext if you type “keycite [citation]” you go directly to a keycite report for that citation. Not a big deal, as Greg Lambert mentioned on the video I posted earlier. But imagine the possibility of typing “define [term]” and going straight to the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary. How about typing “ALR Index [term]” going straight to the ALR index. Do you see where I’m going with this? This system seems ripe for these types of shortcuts, and I am excited about some of the possibilities opened up by it. Whether or not others will be as impressed, or if and when these capabilities will be fully explored in WestlawNext has yet to be seen. But I would like to see it. 6. Super Bonus Final Random Thought There is a lot more to think about with regards to WestlawNext. The system is by no means perfect. There are other issues to consider, like pricing. But this new system is obviously a major shift in legal research. Couple this new product with Bloomberg, and the new Lexis product coming later this year, and alternatives like FastCase and the entire ecosystem of legal research may be completely different by this time next year. I know some librarians and others are worried about what this means. But I think the application of modern search techniques, coupled with new web technologies may open up a whole new world of legal research for us. I look forward to some much needed changes.

ABA Journal and New York Times have already written about it. Lisa Solomon and Robert Ambrogi have seen it also. On Feb. 1st Westlaw unveils it’s new product WestlawNext to the world at LegalTech. Yesterday they met with a group of legal information professionals to talk about the product and it’s creation. I was lucky enough to snag an invite to the meeting. Disclosure: they paid our way out there and put us up for the trip. Soon I will post some (hopefully) cohesive thoughts about it, including some discussion of the meeting itself, but in the meantime… After the meeting Tom Boone, Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Jason Wilson and I sat down at the Minneapolis airport and talked about our thoughts about the product and the meeting. I videotaped it. The video includes discussions of features, potential price considerations, and other issues raised by the new product.  So please enjoy, the video runs about 40 minutes long.

Discussion of WestlawNext from Jason Eiseman on Vimeo.

When I received a phone call from Yale asking me to come out for an interview for my current job the person on the other end of the conversation informed me I would have to give a 20-minute presentation about the future of emerging technologies in law libraries. I was shocked. At some point during my education I was informed that academic librarians often have to give presentations as part of their interview, but it just hadn’t crossed my mind when I applied for this job. As I was thinking of what I wanted to say about technology and how to start my presentation, I went to my good old-fashioned standby – tell a story. And I started with one of my favorites. It seems to be something of an academic folktale, told differently by different people to illustrate different points. And if you hang around me enough you’ll probably hear me tell it.  The basic story can be found at this 37 Signals post. Some of the interesting twists and takes on the story can be found here. The story loosened me up, set a good tone, and made the presentation a successful one. Whenever I don’t know what to write or how to start a presentation I try to start with a story. And if you look at some of my previous blog posts you’ll see many of them start with stories or feature them prominently (including this one). When I think of my favorite blog posts and presentations, and professional interactions, stories are always prominently involved. I was reminded recently about the power of storytelling after watching the video of Scott Berkun’s keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in NY last month.

What I love best about his talk is the application of storytelling to the vendor – customer dynamic. As many law librarians are aware vendor – librarian relations have been rocky for a while and 2009 was a particularly bad year for vendor relations with law librarians. It occurred to me as I was watching the video that my interactions with vendors almost always tend to be sales pitches. A sales rep, not “someone who was in the room” as Scott says in the video, tries to sell me on a product or feature. They tell me what librarians love (if I had a nickel for every time a rep said “librarians love this” …), they give me slogans and buzz words. These sales pitches are missing the two important aspects of storytelling touched on in the keynote, honesty and authenticity. Telling a story is not the same thing as a case study, although a good case study tells a story. And I’m not referring to an off-hand comment like ‘professors at x school like to do this’, and ‘this library has tried this’. Tell me the story as you might if we were sitting together at a bar. Why did these professors and libraries do what they did? What problems were they trying to solve? What was culture of the organization and did that factor into the choices made? Maybe getting back to this basic storytelling could be a great way to rebuild the trust between librarians and vendors. Storytelling can restore the honesty and authenticity that’s been missing from this relationship. To change the game from a struggle between spending money and cutting resources and selling products to a conversation between partners helping each other solve problems. There are a lot of good resources out there for storytelling. Scott Berkun’s blog is very good. Anecdote is also a good resource. There are others who advocate for this, but these are just two who come to mind. It may be naive to think that storytelling will change this too-often dysfunctional relationship. But I am going to try to start doing it anyway. So Librarians: When I network with you at a conference tell me a story about what’s going on where you work. What are some problems you’re facing? How are you dealing with those problems? I’ll share stories about what’s going on at Yale. And for vendors: next year at AALL, or online sometime, or if you come to visit me – I am going to ask you to tell me a story. You can tell me a story about how the product was developed, or why. You can tell me a story about someone using the product right now, or how you were able to sell the product to someone else. But please, when I ask you to tell me a story have one ready.

A few years ago I was asked to speak at an Enterprise Information Management conference in San Francisco. It was very exciting, the first time I had been asked to speak somewhere. I was slated to speak on the second day, but after attending the first day of sessions I was very nervous. It became quite clear that I was very likely coming from the smallest organization of all the speakers, a mid-size law firm, of about 500 people. One of the people I had been hanging out with gave me some great advice that has always stuck with me. He said that I have something important to say, no matter what type of organization I come from.Great advice. And in just a few days I learned a lot from him. Later I found out some interesting things. This person managed the intranet for one of the largest corporations in the world. This person was an expert at managing knowledge in an enterprise. This person had received a Masters Degree in LIBRARY Science. This person was not a member of SLA, ALA, or any other library organization. These organizations, according to him, did not address his professional development needs. See, as much as SLA members want to talk about how great is to be a librarian, and the importance of the word librarian, the fact remains that there are “librarians” out there who’s needs are not met by any of the traditional library organizations, and SLA, the organization that should meet their needs, is not either. Now the question before us is should we change the name of the organization from Special Libraries Association to the Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals? Now, obviously simply changing the name of SLA to the Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals is not going to immediately bring people like the one I described into the fold. But it’s a start, and a good one. I think it describes more accurately and more thoroughly the entirety of membership of the organization. This new name encompasses librarians, information professionals, knowledge professionals, information centers, information architects, taxonomists, indexers, and more. There has been much written and much debate over the new name. And except for a few posts and posters, and tweets most opposition to the name has been respectful. I was finally moved to post my thoughts after reading a post at the Embedded Librarian. And while his points are fair I must disagree with some of what he wrote, and I think this highlights the difference between our positions. The most telling section from the post is this: Librarianship is a “big tent” – and we need to make it bigger. The profession is open to all who share our competencies, interests, values and ethics. The whole profession is undergoing dramatic changes and I see positive examples in all sectors. All librarians need the alignment leadership that our Association is providing through research, professional development, and peer to peer collaboration. Now is not the time to abandon librarianship, now is the time to expand it. We should welcome all who share the ideals, interests, and competencies of librarians, and encourage them to call themselves librarians too. We should educate executives about why they need to hire and promote librarians. But we will not be able to do that if we abandon the term “library” in some form. This paragraph summed up opposition to the name for me. Essentially it argues that we should expand our tent by forcing those who would seek entry to our organization to adopt the name Librarian – and everything that we librarians say they should. Or as I said in a tweet a few weeks ago “disappointed some would rather force everyone to bow to label ‘librarian’ than acknowledge new directions for info & knowledge pros”. This attitude is not how you expand an organization or make a big tent. Telling people they are librarians and will accept that name and our definition of it will not build the inclusive organization I think most of us would like.Despite the fact that we may think of them as librarians other knowledge workers may not think of themselves that way. And while some librarians may not like the phrase “knowledge worker” others may like that name. But I think the name “Knowledge Professionals” can be a common thread or at least lead us to get us thinking of each other as tied together by the type of work we do. Will this name change and the alignment get the colleague I mentioned earlier to join this organization? I don’t know. But I know it’s the best bet I’ve seen. I am a Librarian. I am a Strategic Knowledge Professional. And I will continue to be both, proudly, no matter what the results of this vote are.

Jim Milles is in town for the Journalism and New Media Ecology conference and I managed to score an interview. We discussed news and journalism, his new position, and the future of libraries. Enjoy.

Recently there has been some heated debate, and even a backlash against the use of certain technologies in libraries.Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper is planning presentations questioning innovation in libraries. A colleague here at Yale, started a debate by suggesting it was “reprehensible” for information professionals not to be on twitter. I am going to frame my thoughts on this issue in a somewhat different light, talking about imitating and stealing in library innovation, and how those concepts relate to lack of overall strategy as libraries approach new web technologies. I will specifically use the analogy of “cargo cults.” To be honest I’d never heard the term “cargo cult” until I saw the following video of a presentation by Jeff Veen about Great Designers:

and while he uses the concept to discuss great design, I think it applies well to the use of technology, particularly social media, by some libraries and librarians. In more blunt terms, too often librarian adoption of new technology seems like the native populations building airplanes out of straw and waiting for the cargo to arrive. We think because we have an account on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter that is enough to bring social media success, to start a flood of users/patrons waiting to “friend” us, and driving traffic to our library web sites and physical locations. We see librarians & libraries who’ve successfully implemented blogs and wonder why our own blogs don’t enjoy the same success. But too often we have not successfully aligned these new technologies with the strategy, mission, goals, values, or even overall direction of the library. As Aaron stated in his blog post about library innovation, these technologies too often lead to feature creep, outside of the scope of the library focus. And so our library’s web presence becomes fractured, scattered among too many uncoordinated social media sites. The brand that is our library suffers. Going back to the video, I think the problem comes from librarians imitating and copying what other libraries and librarians are doing. And like the cargo cults we will struggle to achieve the desired results. Are our target communities active in these social spaces? Do we have plans for initially populating and maintaining our presence with content? How do these technologies fit with the strategic plan for the library? for our website? for our web presence? These are just a few of the basic questions we should be asking ourselves as we approach web technologies. Trying to imitate what other libraries have done will not work unless we fit them into our overall strategic framework. Wholesale implementation of someone else’s plan will often fail in a different institution, as there are complex and incompatible issues of culture, talent, and resources which must be considered. But as Jeff Veen suggests, stealing elements of what other librarians have done and incorporating those elements into our existing strategy to create something new can be a recipe for success. The difference being that when you steal an idea, concept, element, plan, etc. you make that thing your own. Like the great designers, artists, and creative types described by Veen, Librarians should seek to take ideas that fit their existing culture & strategy rather than imitating someone else’s. We should pick and choose what to steal and discard what won’t work. We should not be afraid to take existing ideas in new directions. I guess the same mantra from the video can be applied to libraries. Good librarians copy other’s ideas. Great librarians steal them. But in specific reference to library use of social media debate I would say: Good libraries create accounts on social media sites online. Great libraries create a cohesive and coordinated web presence.

Today, Stephen Schultz and Harlan Yu from the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, and two of the creators of the Recap project, presented Recap at Yale Law School. Afterwards I had a chance to record a short video interview with Stephen Schultz about issues related to Recap and online access to government records. My hand was a little unsteady, so it’s a little Blair Witch, but think it’s an interesting interview, enjoy. Here’s the links for the petition to improve PACER and Fedthread, both of which he discusses.

via youtube.com Cool videos about Digital Preservation.

Posted via web from jeiseman’s posterous

I created a word cloud from the tweets marked with the #aall2009 hashtag. There were over 1250 so some editing was in order. The word cloud appears below, click on the image to see the full size at http://wordle.net where it was created.

So I did this by using the Twitter API to download all 1250+ tweets. Then used some PHP code to extract the text of the tweets. I removed some stop words, and some usernames like @jeiseman and so forth. You’ll notice I left @conniecrosby and @zittrain. The reason being that those tweets had more to do with content of the conference as opposed to messaging back and forth. Thus this is more of an editorial project than a scientific one. Anyway, with some tweaking I entered the text into http://wordle.net and tweaked some more untill we got a nice style. I also did the same for aallsecrets tweets.

If you’re like me and responsible for using new technologies to connect with patrons or if this is just a topic you’re interested in then I have a book recommendation for you:

Groundswell : winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Written by Charlene Li of Forrester Research and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell is geared towards marketing types and other corporate employees interested in and responsible for using social media to connect with customers. But I’ve long contended that librarians have much to learn from corporations, startups, and marketers, and Groundswell might be the greatest example of how this is true. The most important lessons boil down to: 1. Knowing your audience 2. Knowing the social technologies 3. Using the correct technologies to target your audience While this sounds simple, as many of us know it can be very difficult and corporations and libraries alike have failed in implementing social technologies to connect with users. Where Groundswell excels is in breaking down how to evaluate the target audience. In Chapter 3 the authors introduce a social technographics profile, a way of analyzing target audiences by types of online social behavior the audience engages in and comparing those behaviors with societal averages. Those behaviors allow people to be divided into groups such as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. Based on activity in those groups in target audiences librarians can use appropriate social technologies with maximum effectiveness. Examples of social technology profiles for various age groups can be found at the Forrester website: http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html. Groundswell goes on to explain different ways corporations can tap into the power of social technologies, and includes case studies of successful ways corporations have connected with users. There are also useful chapters on using social technologies inside your organization (something I think is very important) and how social technologies may change your organization. As I said at the outset Groundswell is geared towards corporations. And some of it’s suggestions, for example investing hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring outside consultants to monitor social media, and build customized tools, simply are not feasible. One of the challenges for librarians will be how to apply the lessons from Groundswell in an era of increasingly tight budgets. But there are ways to accomplish these goals and Groundswell does have a few tips for this. For example, the authors suggest that if your target audience has already built a community around your product/brand/company then you should focus on connecting with that existing community rather than building your own. I said it before and I’ll say it again: Groundswell is not written for librarians, but we have as much to learn from it as anyone else. The framework the book provides for how to connect with people online is crucial for using social technologies in libraries. I look forward to implementing the lessons learned in Yale’s use of social technologies and hope to see other librarians learn from it as well.

I created a word cloud for the #calicon09 tweets with Wordle.

Thanks to Yankee in Canada for the idea. Here’s how I did it: 1. Used the twitter API to access the tweets with the #calicon09 hash tag in a json format. 2. Based on some code found around the interwebs, I put together some php for processing the json format. <?php $json = file_get_contents(”http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=#calicon09&rpp=100&page=1″, true); //getting the file content $decode = json_decode($json, false); //getting the file content as array foreach ( $decode->results as $results ) { echo “{$results->text}\n”; } echo “<pre>”; print_r($decode); $count = count($decode); print_r($count); echo “</pre>”; $text = $array['results']['text']; print_r($text) ?> <?php $json = file_get_contents(”http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=#calicon09&rpp=100&page=1″, true); //getting the file content $decode = json_decode($json, false); //getting the file content as array foreach ( $decode->results as $results ) { echo “{$results->text}\n”; } ?> Note the api for twitter only returns certain numbers of results per page. I had to run a few pages at 100 results per page to get all the tweets. I know there are ways to automate this, but it’s a little beyond me at the moment, and this was fine for this particular task. 3. Drop the text of all the tweets into a text editor. 4. Shaped the data. I removed the tag #calicon09, removed @usernames, and a few other stop words. I’m sure I could remove more, but I think the resulting cloud is nice. 5. Paste the text into Wordle’s full text form. I’m sure people may find some problems with the way I cobbled this together. I welcome constructive comments.

I’m back from CALI and even now, a few days later I still have trouble wrapping my head around what I’ve learned. Sarah and Meg enjoyed the conference. A lot of the other cool kids were there also. If I didn’t link to you it doesn’t mean I don’t care though. I just wanted to write down some of my impressions. 1. CALI is a friendly and accessible conference I met some online friends, met some old friends, and met some new ones. Really there were too many to name. Anyone who thinks that the crowd at CALI would be unwelcoming is wrong. Even when there were some disagreements in a few sessions, between participants, discussions were respectful and professional the way they should be. In addition, you don’t have to be a hard core coder/techie to get something from the conference. There were sessions at all skill levels, and that met the interests of anyone involved in legal instruction. If you think you might feel intimidated, don’t. This is an accessible conference. 2. Your online friends are not who you think they are This is probably poor phrasing. I am not accusing anyone of being misleading by their online presence. Rather I think the depth of knowledge you gain from meeting someone face to face or in “meat space” as Sarah says, gives new dimensions to the person you’d only previously met online. What you may think someone is like from reading their blog posts, tweets, or watching their facebook page may never fully prepare you for the complex person you meet live. Of course it does get a little more complicated. There may be times when people have not accurately represented themselves one way or another. Thankfully I didn’t run into that. 3. Presenting can be nerve wracking, rewarding, fun, and a learning experience I can be a tough critic on myself. For the presentation Tom Boone and I gave I got very nervous. More nervous than usual. I’m not sure if it was the new title on my card, presenting in front of my online friends for the first time, or something else, but something felt a little off. But I got through it and received some great feedback. But I also look at everything as a learning experience. I look forward to seeing the video, analyzing myself and how I prepared and see if how I can improve in the future. But looking back at it was also fun. Tom and I were able to incorporate the twitter stream for the conference into the presentation by putting up a screen showing the tweets behind us. This proved distracting as I saw people react to the tweets. What I should have done is interact with the twitter feed. But the potential is there to create an amazing presentation experience. This is particularly true because CALI was live streaming the event. Interacting with twitters watching live from afar would have been very cool. I would like to explore how these tools can be incorporated into future presentations. Speaking of twitter… 4. Twitter is an amazing communication tool I still hear people put Twitter down occasionally, but it really is a powerful tool. The amount, quality, and depth of the tweeting at this conference was unbelievable. It added a whole new layer to the whole conference. The ability to send and receive information, wholly relevant to a session, with other session attendees added real value to each session. This is why I think Twitter could help make presentations even more powerful. 5. People involved in legal information are doing some amazing things Whether it’s the Cornell LII, Justia, or the ScheduAALL, people involved in legal information and instruction are doing some amazing things. We live in a time of incredible opportunity. This is a chance for us to try something new. Whether it’s spurning wexis for some of the free legal information options out there, or taking a chance on a new way of doing something, we should take what we’ve learned and see how we can put it to good use. I look forward to trying to do that.

I think I’m a pretty good networker, and after recently meeting some bad ones I’ve been thinking about networking a lot. It’s such an important skill, and with CALI coming up and AALL after that I thought it might be a good idea to offer up some networking tips. These are the things I think about when I am heading to a conference or some other networking event and what I wish everyone else would know also. 1. Be yourself This is the number one rule. Just about all the other rules derive from this one. Do not pretend to be something you’re not. If you’re shy don’t pretend to be super-outgoing-crazy-fun person. If you fake it I can tell. I may be too polite to call you out on it, but if you’re not honest with me we’re not going to make a productive long-term connection. 2. You have something very important to say It doesn’t matter where you work, how long you’ve been working or if you’re not currently working, you have an important perspective don’t be afraid to share it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a student and you’re talking to someone with 30-years experience, they have as much to learn from you as you do from them. 3. Have an elevator pitch Here’s mine: I’m the Librarian for Emerging Technologies at Yale Law School. I am responsible for helping to manage new technologies and electronic services in the law library. I am interested in meeting you but I don’t have time to listen to everyone’s life story. Be succinct, concise, tell me what I need to know about you. Dear vendors: an elevator pitch is not a sales pitch. I’ll know very quickly whether or not your product or service is relevant to me. If I stick around after your elevator pitch then you can give me your sales pitch. 4. You are not a “dream maker.” You are not a “thought farmer”, “dream maker”, or “guy who makes things happen.” If some company let you put that on your business cards that’s fine but otherwise please tell me what your real title is. And yes, I did once meet a business consultant who described themselves as a “farmer”. 5. You’re probably not that funny “I’ll tell you the same thing I told a comic I once saw at a strip club in Reno — I’m not here for the jokes.” — Dr. Kelso from the television show Scrubs. 6. Don’t pretend you remember me I’m good with names. I’m good with faces. Sometimes I can’t put them together. I meet a lot of people and your name, position, details may have escaped me for the moment. There’s nothing wrong with politely saying “I apologize but I’m blanking on your name,” or some variation. But don’t pretend like you remember me when you obviously don’t. 7. Don’t be offended but I may walk away from you I’ll be polite about it, and say something like “excuse me but I need to say hello to someone.” Conferences are a time to catch up with old friends and colleagues. I am interested in talking to you, but if I see someone I don’t get to see very often I may need to excuse myself to say hello. I won’t be offended if you do this to me. 8. Don’t do me any favors Every so often someone will say something like “this is a networking event so I thought I should come over and say hello.” Well thanks a lot. So you have no interest in talking to me, but felt like you had to because we’re at a “networking event?” Save it. 9. You don’t have to exchange business cards with everyone: use social networking too Bring business cards. Lots of them. If you’re a student or unemployed order some at Moo. But just because you have them doesn’t mean you should exchange them with everyone. If I am interested in getting in touch with you after the conference I’ll ask for your card, if you want to contact me after the conference ask for mine. But just because I didn’t ask for your card doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy meeting you. I’m just as eager to connect with colleagues on the various social networking sites available. I have profiles everywhere, just tell me where to find you. 10. If you see me, say hello. I’d be very happy to meet you. I’m easy to talk to, I accept fist-bumps in addition to hand shakes, and even once had a motherly vendor rep pinch my cheek.

Today, I attended a presentation at the Sterling Memorial Library by Aaron Swartz. He came to talk about his project, The Open Library. If you haven’t heard of this project it’s definitely worth checking out. It was a great talk and he had a very interesting perspective on things. He’s “kind of a big deal” and holds a special place for law librarians.

So it was really great to take a few minutes afterwards to ask him just a few questions about libraries and the Open Library. Sorry the sound is crap, I have two flip video cameras (long story), and hadn’t used this one before. It may be a little annoying, but I think the short video is too good not to post.