The Centennial conference of SLA (aka the Special Libraries Association) is next week in Washington DC. Hard to believe such a progressive organization has been around for 100 years. That’s quite an accomplishment. As usual, there will be way too much going on and I will end up totally exhausted. There are continuing education sessions on Saturday and Sunday. The Exhibit Hall is open Sunday afternoon. I’ll be at the Information Today Inc. booth on Sunday if you want to catch up with me. Sunday evening is the opening session with Colin Powell speaking. Monday is crammed with sessions, demonstrations, business meetings, and lunch in the exhibit hall — unless you’re attending one of the many vendor lunches (I think I’ve been invited to at least 4).

Since librarians have been such early adopters of Twitter, I’m expecting the hash tag for the conference to be trending next week. That is, if we can figure out what the hash tag is. I’ve already seen #sla, #sla2009, #sladam, and #slakm. If every division decides to use its own hash tag and if a session is sponsored by multiple divisions, there won’t be enough room to say anything other than a list of hash tags in the 140 characters Twitter allots to a post.

At the Information Today team blog, we’re going to settle on the sla2009 tag. That just seems to be the most logical one to use.

I’ve been somewhat disappointed by the reviews of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, which MSFT is describing as a "decision engine." I began to have the distinct impression that even reviewers who I consider to be extremely tech-savvy, like the Wall Street Journal’s Katie Boehret,  hadn’t looked at Microsoft’s Live search engine in awhile. Some of the things reviewers noted as being new, such as the colorful front page with its little information snippets about the picture, have been on Live (the U.S. version only) for quite awhile. On Monday, Greg Notess published a NewsBreak about Bing that clearly demonstrated he understands the nuances of both the new search, er decision, engine and its Live progenitor.

But will people really adopt the word Bing as a verb? I’ll just Bing that for you? Or, Bingo, Bing got me the answer I was looking for? Then, there’s Bada Bing, Bing Bling, and Bing being the cherry on top. Not to mention Bing Crosby, who might be crooning a Bing tune were he still alive. And, apparently, the word has various meanings in Chinese. The chances for punning about this make me giddy.

Not really in the pun category, but definitely in the "having fun with the name" department is the commentary and "press release" from Stanley Bing, the Fortune columnist, at his blog. He expressed “moderate outrage” at the branding of the new search engine with his name and suggested that the two brands come together with Mr. Bing as logo, symbol and spokesman.  Note that "Stanley Bing" is a nom de plume.

For more on Bing, and other search engines, but probably sans puns, look for Greg’s column in a forthcoming issue of ONLINE and at WebSearch University.

In case you haven’t seen it, there’s a great article by Laura Gordon-Murnane, published yesterday at Information Today’s NewsBreak website, titled "Data.gov: Opening the Doors to Government Data".  With a new administration in Washington, new attitudes towards open, tranparent and accountable government is leading to more accessible information, something all information professionals should applaud.

Yesterday’s NewsBreak on Data.gov is just the tip of the iceberg. Laura will be giving a session at WebSearch University on this very topic and I’m sure will expand greatly on the availability of US government information and bring us up to speed on newer developments in this very important area.

 When WolframAlpha launched, I (and many others) immediately started putting it through its paces. It’s only been a few days since the launch and already some things have changed. Here’s what I wrote for my "Dollar Sign" column in ONLINE (that will be published in the July/August 2009 issue of the magazine):

"A new search engine, WolframAlpha debuted mid-May 2009 to overwhelming excitement—so overwhelming that it couldn’t always keep up, delivering an error message that necessitated familiarity with the film 2001. "I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that." Dubbed a "computational knowledge engine" rather than a search engine, WolframAlpha attempts to provide answers to questions. Not any questions, though, but the ones that can actually be computed.
 
One of the suggested topics in "Money & Finance" and one of the suggested searches is to compare publicly traded companies by entering their stock symbols. Enter, say, BAC WFC (Bank of America and Wells Fargo) to retrieve some very interesting comparative statistics, including a mean variance optional portfolio, something you don’t see every day. Entering just one stock symbol retrieves more information than the comparative statistics, but if you’re doing a full company review, supplementing what WolframAlpha gives you with a company overview from Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, Hoover’s, LexisNexis, and Factiva is definitely in order.
 
WolframAlpha has a promising future, but presently it needs a lot of work. How can a search on "oil gas industry "not recognize the word oil? And why would "home foreclosures" suggest "home disclosure" as the proper search strategy? Falling back to simply entering "foreclosure" gave me the definition of the word, its pronunciation, and broader terms, none of which was useful.
 
When WolframAlpha does give you an answer, it supplies a list of sources. Strangely, it stresses that those sources may or may not have been used to provide its answer. I’m intrigued by the notion of computational search, but concerned that it will not be robust enough to engage business researchers’ interest."
 
Of course, looking at WolframAlpha again today and reprising my "oil gas industry" search, I got a completely different answer. It now "interprets" my request as "energy" — that’s it, just one word! Following that is a list of companies (expandable to 238) that WolframAlpha thinks are in the energy industry. WolframAlpha still suggests "home disclosure" for "home foreclosures," though. Since this is a computational engine, I tried something that required a numerical answer: "GDP Czech". That gave a nice, tabular answer, in both dollars and koruna, plus it added in real growth and the unemployment rate. One problem: the data was from 2007. WolframAlpha relies on "curated sources" and my suspicion is that many of these are in the scientific/mathematics arena rather than business. It will be interesting to see how this "knowledge engine" develops.

OK, this made me laugh. So I thought I’d share. The subject line of an email from a PR firm that just hit my inbox was "AACR Implements Collexis’ Reviewer Finder and Journal Dashboard." How, I wondered, could the Anglo American Cataloging Rules implement something from Collexis? Much as I admire Collexis and their technology, I just couldn’t put cataloging rules in the context of finding peer reviewers for academic, scientific and professional journals.

It helps to read the full text of press releases, not just the subject line. The AACR referred to here is the American Association for Cancer Research.

When I see him in Scottsdale (at Buying & Selling eContent), I’ll have to ask Darrell Gunter, Collexis EVP/CMO, if he’s ever tried using his product to review cataloging rules.

Nice article in the January/February 2009 issue of CIO Insight by Edward Cone on "Dealing with Data Overload." I particularly liked the comment from the CIO of Energen who credits his corporate library with getting "the right information to the right people in the most efficient way possible." He says it’s worth the cost and mentions that his librarian has an MLS. One minor issue, when I searched the SLA membership directory, there’s no one listed as working at Energen. Somebody sign that librarian up as a new member!!

The lead story in the March/April 2009 Industry News section of ONLINE details the M&A activities during 2008 of Morningstar. It goes like this:

 Morningstar, a leading provider of independent investment research and famous for its five-star ranking system, has been busily acquiring other companies. It began 2008 by buying Hemscott from Ipreo Holdings. Hemscott covers U.K. investment instruments. September saw the acquisition of Financial Computer Support, Inc. (FCSI), a company that provides practice management software for independent advisors. In November, Morningstar reached out to South Africa, acquiring InvestData (Proprietary) Limited, a provider of fund information for the southern African region. Its December acquisition of U.K.-based Tenfore adds real-time market data and financial data workstations to Morningstar’s repertoire. It ended the year with the acquisition of privately-held 10K Wizard, which provides sophisticated, full text searching and data mining of SEC documents.

Given that I’ve always thought of Morningstar in the most favorable of terms, I was surprised to pick up today’s Wall Street Journal and read that NewRiver, a company Morningstar was thinking of buying last spring, was suing Morningstar for espionage. Morningstar, a spy? NewRiver, based in Andover, Mass., accuses Morningstar of going to a secret web address, presumably password protected, then accessing it more than 134,000 times to download mutural fund prospectuses. It offered these documents for sale to NewRiver customers in an attempt to sign them up with Morningstar. NewRiver uses a patented process to search the SEC website , grabbing the prospectuses as they go online, and storing them in its own Prospectus Express data warehouse. NewRiver’s value proposition is the speed with which it can identify and supply these documents. According to NewRiver, it found out about Morningstar’s activities from its own clients, to whom it granted "significant pricing concessions" to ward off their defection to Morningstar. 
What the news story doesn’t say is whether access to Prospectus Express is continuing. If not, it’s hard to see how Morningstar could build a competitive business to NewRiver using old data from its warehouse. Prospectuses age quickly. The SEC information is freely available. If Morningstar develops a data mining technique not reliant upon NewRiver’s patent, it could be a real threat to NewRiver’s business. Without any need for espionage. And, remember, after the deal with NewRiver didn’t materialize, Morningstar bought 10-K Wizard. If memory serves, its technology is pretty darn good at data mining real times SEC filings, including prospectuses.

Since I do a fair amount of conference program planning, I read Meetings & Conventions magazine. Imagine my surprise when I found the opening sentence of the January 2009 cover story, "Blogged Down," to be all about a librarian blogging the 2008 ALA annual conference! She was "stunned and appalled" to pick up a pamphlet in an ALA session room selling diet pills, with the sales contact person being the wife of the speaker. The article then goes on to quote Jenny Levine, as a representative of ALA, on what conference organizers should do when a blogger posts negative comments. Never did I think I’d be reading about Jenny — or about a national library conference — in the non-library trade press. Very cool! And the advice given in the article is excellent, including how to respond to a negative post, where to track your reputation in the blogosphere, and why conference planners should pay attention to bloggers and, now, microbloggers on Twitter. I particularly liked the quote from Kenny Lauer, director of digital technologies for George P.Johnson, who said, "You lose control if you’re not listening, if you’re not joining the conversation, if you’re not present." Very true.

Just released at the end of last week is a blog devoted entirely to the Buying & Selling eContent show. It had kind a stealth launch, but already there have been some thoughtful observations posted on BSECBlog about the future of publishing. It’s not just a shill for the conference, though it’s certainly meant to help promote the observations and ideas of the speakers and organizers. Worth taking a look at — and I should, in the interests of full disclosure, say that I will be contributing some blog posts to it as well as blogging here.