Looking for pictures for a presentation, I came across this mosaic from the flickr group Librarians in Shower Caps:

Librarians in Shower Caps

It’s a little bit old now, but worth a fresh airing as an accompaniment to Hair 2.0, especially since those featured are mostly Twopointopians.

(via Libraryman, who also highlights the Librarians in Hardhats flickr pool).

As a relatively new (2007) member of the International Society of Knowledge Organization, I’m really pleased to see that the latest Knowledge Organization is a special issue that aims “to explore the definition of the interdisciplinary field of ‘knowledge organization’ through historical and contemporary perspectives … to provide a shared framework of terminology, theories, methodologies and approaches to stimulate research”(Preface) containing:

McIIwaine, I.C. and Mitchell, J.S. Preface: What is Knowledge Organization?

Interview with Ingetraut Dahlberg, December 2007

Hjorland, B. What is Knowledge Organization (KO)?

Tennis, J.T. Epistemology, theory and methodology on Knowledge Organization: towards a classification, metatheory and research framework

Lopez-Huertas, M.J. Some current research questions in the field of Knowledge Organization

Gnoli, C. Tem long-term research questions in Knowledge Organization

Green, R. Relationships in Knowledge Organization

Zeng, M.L. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS)

As Birger Hjorland points out in his article, “KO has mainly been a practical activity without much theory,” so this collection of articles and opinion is a welcome introduction to some of the more theoretical aspects.

Really, really happy to be speaking at the Elisad Conference in Turin in October. Especially looking forward to seeing my friends and colleagues from the AOD sector.

I’ll be talking on ‘Online Collaboration: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats’ - basically doing a SWOT analysis of Web 2.0 tools and ecommunities, focusing on features like commenting and user-generated content and, as usual, asserting that the skills needed to make a success of the read/write web are strategic and organisational - skills that information professionals have in abundance.

Other invited speakers include Karen Coyle and Bonaria Biancu. 

The call for speakers is open until the end of the month [download Word document cfp]

I’ve been a little out of touch recently, getting up to speed in my new role and delivering on some outstanding commitments, so I only noticed today that London Clip 15 is online, including reports of Helen Nicol’s talk on ‘The business of knowing’ and Caroline De Brun’s talk ‘Why Charter?‘

Stephen Cook. The business of knowing [Report of a talk by Helen Nicol]. London Clip 15: 2.

Anne Welsh. Why Charter? [Report of talks by Caroline De Brun and Angela Jefkins]. London Clip 15:2.

- This is “the Golden Rule of Management,” [*] according to an article in Information Management Journal. In a swift survey of the literature, the authors identify six classes of bad managers:

The Incompetent

The Bully

The Crook

The Know-It-All

The Dodger

The Walking Policy Manual [*]

They argue that the impact of bad management is keenly felt, impacting on businesses as well as personnel:

As we enter the information age in the workplace, many employees add value simply because of what they know. They are usually referred to as knowledge workers, and how these employees are managed is seen as a major factor in determining which firm will be successful in the future … At the present time, in all types of organizations, power is shifting not just at the top management level but at lower levels as well. For example, knowledge workers believe they have the right to work autonomously. According to M.A. Von Glinow’s 1988 book The New Professional, knowledge workers tend to identify more with their profession than they do with any organization. [*]

In the face of this culture shift, the authors assert that authoritarian, old-style management techniques simply do not work. Referencing their Golden Rule, “Manage as you would like to be managed,” the authors highlight five more detailed techniques for modern managers:

Demonstrate a high level of integrity

Remove fear from the workplace

Fight for employees

Help them save face

Overcome a lack of trust[*]

It’s depressing to realise how many books and articles have been written on managing a bad manager, indicating a large market, and therefore a large number of people quite literally labouring under an incompetent, disinterested or down-right dishonest boss. However, it’s heartening to see such common-sense and common-decency solutions as the results of management research.

Ref

[*] Sam M. Abbasi, Kenneth W. Hollman and Robert D. Hayes (2008) ’Bad bosses and how not to be one’. The Information Management Journal, January/February: 52-56.

As usual, my day has been brightened by the post on Glasgow Daily Photo - this time the statue erected in tribute to Lobey Dosser, a real piece of our heritage.

Glad to find out that my hair, neglected and unshorn as it is from time to time (I never seem to make that hairdresser’s appointment early enough), is pretty much 2.0 all the way. Having just had it cut before starting in my new office, I’ve gone from second from left on the bottom row of the seminal Infonatives Librarian 1.0 / 2.0 Hair / Shoe Opinion Survey to something close to top right. Phew! Can rest easy in my bed knowing that …

See how your own hair and shoes rate here.

One of the big stories in search this week came from an unlikely source - the BMJ:

Despite recent controversy, no one knows how easy it is to find sites relating to suicide on the internet and what sort of information they contain. Recent studies of internet search behaviour suggest that most people use search engines, that queries are broad—mostly composed of a few words and rarely including Boolean operators or phrase searches, and that users rarely look beyond the first page of results. [1]

Authors of a study at the University of Bristol searched the Internet to study the sort of results a ‘typical searcher’ might find:

We sought to replicate the results of a typical search that might be undertaken by a person seeking information about methods of suicide. We conducted searches using the four most popular UK search engines and 12 broad search terms—a total of 48 searches. The terms entered were those likely to be used by distressed individuals, determined partly from interview data collected in an ongoing qualitative study of near-fatal suicide attempts and by using search suggestions provided by the engines upon entering terms such as “suicide.” The terms used were:

(a) suicide; (b) suicide methods; (c) suicide sure methods; (d) most effective methods of suicide; (e) methods of suicide; (f) ways to commit suicide; (g) how to commit suicide; (h) how to kill yourself; (i) easy suicide methods; (j) best suicide methods; (k) pain-free suicide, and (l) quick suicide. The entire web (not just UK sites) was searched.

The terms were entered into each search engine in turn and we examined the first 10 hits retrieved by each search. In total 480 hits were reviewed. [2]

Sites were then classified into 14 groups ranging from pro-suicide sites offering tips on how to commit suicide through to prevention or support sites.

Just under a fifth of hits (90) were for dedicated suicide sites. Half of these were judged to be encouraging, promoting, or facilitating suicide; 43 contained personal or other accounts of suicide methods, providing information and discussing pros and cons but without direct encouragement; and two sites portrayed suicide or self harm in fashionable terms. A further 44 (9%) hits were sites or pages that provided information about suicide methods in a purely factual (24), partly joking (12), or completely joking (8) fashion. Twelve hits were chat rooms or discussion boards that talked about methods of suicide.

Sites focusing on suicide prevention or offering support and sites forbidding or discouraging suicide accounted for 62 (13%) and 59 (12%) hits respectively. [3]

The authors discuss different ways of controlling access to pro-suicide information, especially for young people, and conclude that

It may be more fruitful for service providers to pursue website optimisation strategies to maximise the likelihood that suicidal people access helpful rather than potentially harmful sites in times of crisis. [4]

This is an interesting issue in terms of search optimization, revolving as it does on key ethical points - access to information that might make a suicide attempt more effective versus freedom of information and privacy arguments.

MSN came out well in regard to access to information, retrieving “the highest number of sites focusing on prevention, support, academics, and policy”[5], while Yahoo and Google, with their generally more successful relevance ranking algorithms, returned more pro-suicide information.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the search engine companies say about this issue. It would also be interesting to see if the results were similar in a study searching for information on alcohol and drugs (perhaps also analysing the differences between search results for (legal) alcohol and (illegal) drugs).

Listen Online

‘Suicide websites “prominent”‘ - report author David Gunnell on solutions for a “safer” Internet. BBC News, 11 April 2008.

Refs

[1] Lucy Biddle et al. (2008) ‘Suicide and the Internet’ BMJ, 336: 800.
[2] Ibid: 801.
[3] Ibid: 800.
[4] Ibid: 802.
[5] ‘Is the Internet pro-suicide?’ Medical News Today, 10 April 2008.

My new job is entirely webby, so I don’t have to deal with ad hoc enquiries any more, and, although that was not a principle motivator in accepting the job, it is proving to be a major side benefit. This post from Infonatives sums up fifteen reasons why.

These ones, I still need - possibly more so as a newbie backroom type:

2. How to remove paper jams

9. How to explain things without using library jargon

10. The value of a smile [*]

Ref

[*] ‘Fifteen things you need to know as an academic help-desk librarian’. Infonatives, 7 April 2008.

Thanks to James Mullen (aka The Running Librarian) for pointing out that the presentations from the NCVO Publishers Forum conference (including mine) are now online as pdf. Now I can blog my conference notes with proper webby references. (Later - lunch is calling).