I’ve had some responses from my editorial about the power of three in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of ONLINE, but I thought posting it here might generate a few more responses.

Oh, and 3 words appropriate to the season: Happy New Year!

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The Power of Three

When my son turned three, he became fascinated with all things three. “I’m thwee,” he’d say, not being terribly good at pronouncing the r. It’s a good thing he’d hold up three fingers, since it sounded like he was saying, “I’m free,” a rather curious statement from a young child. He also had 3 friends, 3 favorite games, 3 stuffed animals, and probably some threes he didn’t share with me.

This came to mind recently when Colin Beverage posted a challenge on a LinkedIn group—describe what you do in 3 words. Now I took Latin in secondary school. I know Gaul was divided into 3 parts. My Latin teacher declaimed, “Veni, Vidi, Vici” as she acted out the part of Julius Caesar (I came, I saw, I conquered, which is 6 words in English, but only 3 in Latin).

Some people, who answered Colin, took the Caesar approach, using three disparate words separated by commas. “Eat, sleep, drink” was the least professional. I said, “Think, research, write.” Others came up with “define, create, refine,” which sounds a bit shampooish (lather, rinse, repeat). “Converse, plan, deliver” caught my eye, as did “communicate, negotiate, collaborate.” Some of these phrases implied a process: First I think, then I research, finally I write. Others reflected three separate activities. If it was a solo librarian, I can imagine “research, collect, manage,” which could be in any order.

The non-Caesarian approach was to write a 3-word sentence that bordered on a tag line. David Gurteen, known for his Knowledge Cafes, said, “I have conversations.” An independent information professional expressed the essence of consulting when she said, “Informing client decisions.” The person who said “Fight the Hydra” may have been having a bad day. “Reduce legal risk” is an extraordinarily powerful 3-word statement. I’m hoping it was from a law librarian.

It’s a fun challenge and if you share your powerful three words with me, I’ll share them with other readers of ONLINE, attributed or not, your choice.

I’m finding it hard to believe that 2009 ends tonight. 2010 will see volume 34 of ONLINE, the 10th year of WebSearch University, the 15th year of Search Engine Meeting, and the 12th year of Internet Librarian International. We’ve seen massive changes in the information industry and in the information professionals’ work lives over the past few years. Here’s hoping that 2010 brings a better economy, bigger budgets, and more jobs!

In January I’ll be attending both ALA Midwinter and SLA Leadership Summit and will try to blog from those venues. And I’m making a New Year’s Resolution to blog more frequently. I’m afraid I’ve been somewhat lax about that, although I have contributed to the conference blog from Information Today Inc., which covers 4 or 5 conferences each year.

Anyone with ideas about articles for ONLINE or presenting at any of the conferences, please email me (marydee@xmission.com). I’d love to hear from you in 2010!

Intute’s executive director announced this morning that Intute has lost its JISC funding and will maintain its current level of service only until the 1st of August 2010. The Intute blog post continues, “After this date, Intute will still be available but with minimal maintenance. In addition, we are looking at possibilities to develop Informs and the Virtual Training Suite and offer these as membership services.”

Intute has provided a wonderful service and has been a loyal supporter of the Internet Librarian International conference as well. We can only hope that funding will be found between now and August to keep Intute functioning.

Now that Bloomberg owns Business Week, having bought it from McGraw-Hill, it is laying off about 100 staff people. One casualty was the library. And, according to Stephen Baker, who wrote one of the seminal articles on the importance of blogging in the corporate world, published in Business Week, reporters are being advised to take their research needs to Google. That is, for those reporters who are left. Baker, for one, will no longer be with BW come December 1st. Other columnists and reporters let go by Bloomberg include such well-known names as Jon Fine (media), Damian Joseph (innovation & design), Rob Hof (Silicon Valley), Lauren Fine (finance), Steven Wildstrom (technology), and Amy Choi (small business).

This is so sad.

Sage, the publisher of 520 journals in such fields as anthropology, criminology, education, management, medicine, politics, public administration, theology, urban studies, and, yes, even information science, has a special offer for the month of October 2009. It’s offering free online access to all its content from 1999 to the present. You do need to register, but this is an extraordinarily generous offer from Sage. Check out Business Information Review, if you’ve never read it.

Financial Times columnist Tim Harford reported that Dan Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol, sold “more copies in its first 36 hours than any other adult hardback sold in total.” He also notes that the use of the word “adult” kept “a certain boy wizard” out of the calculation. The article then talks about the hugely discounted prices that the book sold for in the UK. Bookstore Waterstone’s offered a 50% discount, but some of the grocery stores discounted it even deeper, 75% in the case of Asda, which meant it lost money on each sale. Harford thinks book as loss leader for grocery stores will, in the long run, be good for the stores, the theory being that people who come in to buy the book will also buy groceries (that, presumably, are not deeply discounted).

I looked at the US online booksellers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books A Million. All three are selling the $29.95 book at $16.17, not quite a 50% discount. You may find a better price at your local grocery store, but stores such as Kroger are not adding the book’s price to its website.

Here’s what I’m wondering, though — do libraries go to grocery stores to buy books for their collections? Or are our libraries paying list price? Here’s hoping they’re getting the best deal possible on books, given shrinking materials budgets!

Subject lines in emails and press releases sometimes make me chuckle. Like this one that just showed up: SPEAKER PELOSI TO ANNOUNCE 100 PERCENT RECYCLED CONGRESSIONAL RECORD. First of all, why does GPO insist on throwing all caps at me whenever they want to announce something? And, second, doesn’t this imply that the content in the Congressional Record will be 100% recycled? Does this mean I’ll be able to see last year’s items in this year’s CR? How fun! Reading the release revealed that it’s not the content that’s recycled, it’s the paper on which the Congressional Record is printed that’s recycled. OH WOW, IT’S RECYCLED PAPER. Now, GPO, please stop shouting at me. And let me read it online with recycled electrons. Think digitization, people.

The PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is usually a well-researched, well-presented show. It employs a librarian and Gwen Ifill keynoted the SLA Annual Conference a few years back. But someone should teach them how to pronounce Danish names. Last night they played a clip of a press conference with President Obama and NATO Secretary General (and former Prime Minister of Denmark) Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The latter was introduced as Anders Fog, when the actual pronunciation is more like Anners Foe. Couldn’t someone on staff research the correct way to say the man’s name?

Then my local television station, which puts its news snippets on Yahoo News, spelled the capital of the country as Coppenhagen, in its announcement that Michelle Obama was there to advocate for Chicago as the next Olymic venue. It’s Copenhagen, WISH TV.

Perhaps I’m overly sensitive, looking forward as I am to speaking in Denmark (Aarhus) next month at the 50th anniversary of DFID, the Danish Federation of Information Specialists. That will be the week after Internet Librarian International in London. Hope to see you in either Denmark or the UK.

Business Week columnist Stephen Baker has a brief comment on the Washington Post social media policy. He makes the point that usually it’s not so hard to represent both the company and your personal brand. I think he’s absolutely correct, but I also think some common sense needs to employed when it comes to social media usage by journalists. This isn’t a particularly revolutionary thought, falling well within the “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” aphorism.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my slides for my talk on Evaluating, Recommending and Justifying 2.0 Tools. One thing I touch on is how to convince management to let you introduce social media into your workplace, since in some organizations it is blocked. I didn’t expect the Washington Post to be one of them. I was really astonished this morning to read in PaidContent that WaPo has issued Social Media Guidelines that banned reporters from having individual, personal accounts on sites like Twitter. PaidContent has the entire text of the guidelines, which seem extremely onerous to me.