I was browsing through some older issues of ONLINE, ones from the mid-1990s, trying to fact check some dates that various companies acquired other companies (yes, this does have to do with an article in the upcoming September/October issue of the magazine), when I realized how my identity has changed. Back then, in the contact section of my column, The Dollar Sign, I listed my phone number, my DialMail number (16663), my MCIMail number (3397112), my DataMail id (ojala), my CompuServe number (71571,43), and my Well name (mojala). To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any of those anymore. Some of the companies behind them no longer exist. What those contact points had in common was the one-way communication model. There wasn’t much flexibility, or interactivity. They were subscription-based silos. I remember being delighted when I could have one email address that everybody could use, without paying and with much greater flexibility.

In today’s socially networked world, we’ve taken a bit of a step backwards. Now we’ve got an identity at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and numerous other social media sites. Those identities may be expressed slightly, or completely, differently. Twitter handles can be particularly fanciful. Would I intuitively know that Jane Doe on Facebook is Doefull on Twitter (I made that up, so don’t go looking for Jane Doe or Doefull).

Certainly there is more interactivity, more bi-directionality, inherent in the notion of posting to Twitter or updating your status on Facebook. But when you get to the direct messaging portions of social network sites, you’re right back to the silos of 15 years ago. Five years ago I could just check email to see whether I had received important messages. Now I have to check in multiple places for messages.

And then there’s my kids, who pretty much disdain all that social media that we older folk find so fascinating. They’re more likely to text.

Wouldn’t you know it. I’ve been working on slides for my presentations at the Southern African Online Meeting the beginning of August. I’m doing one half day workshop on evaluation and another half day on non-textual searching. So I’ve been looking at lots of image databases and search engines. Lots of color (or, colour), lots of interesting sites. Just as I was wrapping this up, Google up and changed how it’s doing images. At least I got a week’s notice this time! Sometimes things change just as I’m doing a presentation, which is seriously annoying, but comes with the search engine territory.

Google Images now has ads at the top of the results page and is putting some search facets over on the lefthand side of the screen. I’ve seen some commentary about Google Images now looking more like Bing Image search, but although the idea of lefthand navigation is the same, the details are different. And Bing has no ads.

Hope to see friends from Southern African Online Users Group in Pretoria the first week of August!

I went to library school a long time ago, but even then many professionals worried about the image of librarians and the library. And we still do. That’s why, I guess, we get so excited about the portrayal of librarians and the presence of libraries in popular culture. With social media, news travels quickly. When the University of Washington’s iSchool put a video of librarians adapting Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” to library research (CA-Ca-Catalog. Don’t forget the databases”) , librarians blogged, tweeted, and facebooked about it. Most loved it.

Now we’ve gone gaga over Old Spice. When Isiah Mustafa, the actor who play the Old Spice man in the YouTube commercials announced he would post replies to blog posts and tweets, New Jersey librarian Andy Woodworth suggested he mention libraries. In only a couple of hours, the library video went live and quickly became a viral hit, not, presumably, just among librarians, since it’s had 61 million views as of this morning.

Some librarians were upset, however, that he connoted libraries with books. It’s that image thing, again. We want our image to be more than about books. Yeah, don’t forget the databases. We want to be seen as forward thinking, technologically savvy, ahead of the curve, and totally up to date.

Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library may have the last laugh on this one. It’s got a short video that parodies the Old Spice commercial by presenting the “New Spice, Study like a Scholar, Scholar” video. Starring HumorU comedian and BYU student Stephen Jones, who bears a startling resemblance to Old Spice’s Mustafa, it extols the value of the library. (Should I really think of library databases as celestial sandwiches? Hmmm.)

Image aside, what these really tell me is the power of video for libraries. We’ve got to get beyond boring instructional videos, however, and put some pizazz into it. But maybe not too much. I’m still wondering whether the ProQuest video on its new platform is telling me anything or whether it’s just a slick commercial. Compare that with the video ProQuest did of its booth presentation at ALA and tell me which you prefer, or whether you don’t like either one. I haven’t made up my mind, but I do know I like BYU’s New Spice and sincerely hope they make some more with him explaining more about library research.

It’s now official, CCMP finalized its acquisition of Infogroup and, no surprise, named Clare Hart as its president and CEO. This story was originally broken by Ross Boettcher in the Omaha World Leader on April 11, 2010, but Hart couldn’t really take the post until the acquisition was complete. She comes to Infogroup after 27 years with Dow Jones, most recently as president of its Enterprise Group. For information professionals, however, Clare Hart is best known for her leadership of Factiva. For years a familiar face at SLA annual conferences, she was not in New Orleans this year. Maybe next year in Philly, we’ll have Infogroup as an exhibitor.

Everybody experiences ALA differently. I commiserated with one friend whose luck in picking conference sessions had been distinctly bad. My own experience was much more positive. Which is not to say that everything in every session I attended was perfect. The sound system in some of the Ballrooms left a lot to be desired. Despite these annoyances, the information conveyed was good.

One example was the Designing Digital Experiences for Library Websites panel, consisting of John Blyberg, Toby Greenwalt, David Lee King, and Bobbi Newman. Although I’ve heard all four of them at other conferences, there are always some new nuggets to think about. My takeaways included comments about involving both library users/patrons and staff. You don’t want to underestimate them, but you don’t want to scare them either. The tools you pick should correlate with what you want to accomplish. Social networking is essential – it’s not an option. People will talk about you, so you should be prepared. I loved the story of how Darien Library became the information clearinghouse, a hyperlocal information hub, plus staying open late so people could get warm, when a power outage hit the city last winter. And Toby’s story about responding to the Skokie public library patron who complained about the library on Facebook and turning that person into a library fan always impresses me.

The speakers were all from public libraries and acknowledged that it’s harder to accomplish things in academic settings, where there’s a slower change process.

In the midst of doom and gloom scenarios about the future of news organizations, it was delightful to attend an upbeat session yesterday at ALA on news literacy. The Education & Behavioral Sciences Section’s program was titled “News Literacy and Preservation: Finding, Using, and Losing the News.”

Hannah Sommers talked about NPR’s archiving of its broadcasts. Given that NPR has been on the air for decades, it was not surprising to hear that much of their material is stored on those old, large tape reels (hey, NPR, if you ever run out of reel to reel players, I’ve got several in my basement). The plan is to digitize these. Even more ambitious is the possibility of preserving entire interviews, not just the bits that make it to air time. Metadata plays an important role. I was interested to learn that NPR has some special codes for audio, so they can tell who’s talking to whom. I also didn’t know they’ve got an open API.

Bernard Reilly, President of the Center for Research Libraries, talked about the challenges facing news archives when secondary distribution channels move from simply aggregating news sources (think LexisNexis, Factiva, ProQuest) to analyzing them and assigning sentiment ratings. He mentioned Factiva Insight and LexisNexis Analytics as examples. Then there’s the introduction of social networking. The Berkman Center at Harvard is using Morningside for sentiment analysis. Another form of analyzing news is to look at blog coverage of a topic. Implications for libraries: We’re paying for databases, but actually we’re only renting them. Librarians should become monitors of news content. News must be structured so that it can be migrated, otherwise it won’t survive.

Debora Cheney, from Penn State, began her talk by quoting Ken Doctor, “Blogs are the rough draft of history.” She then talked about students as news readers who rely on recommendations, not searching, to find news. When they search, they enter proper names, only a few words, phrases, and dates in a search box. Boolean advanced search they don’t use. She urged that libraries re-establish themselves as *the* place for news content.

Most impressive was the first speaker in this session, Washington Post researcher Meg Smith. Her innovative use of new media to research stories was eye-opening. Not only does she look at social media sites such as Facebook (I didn’t know that dead crime victims sometimes still have live FB pages that serve a memorial purpose for their friends and family), MySpace (popular with younger kids, the military, and those living in more rural areas), eBay (a woman who killed her kids was doing online shopping at about the same time) and Twitter, but she once tracked edits in Wikipedia (under a non-obvious email address) to find a neighbor for a reporter to interview in the anthrax poisoning incident. She cautioned, however, that journalistic ethics can preclude use of social media sources in a story.

Smith had great stories to tell. Her ability to use social media in unexpected ways should inspire researchers not only in news organizations but also in other types of work settings.

Looks like the International Bibliography of Art (IBA) has dodged a bullet, thanks to ProQuest. Getty’s intent had been to discontinue its support of the database due to budget problems. Now ProQuest says it will take over the indexing function and put the database (2008 -2009) on the CSA Illumina platform and will begin bringing the file up to date. ProQuest also hopes to expand geographic coverage to Asian, Latin American, and African art.

I’m no art historian nor have I ever done research on art topics, but having ProQuest rescue this database makes me feel good. I do, however, find it troubling to realize that even so estimable an institution as the Getty faces money shortages. What Getty has done, to its credit, is place the Bibliography of the History of Art, the predecessor to IBA, on its library website as a searchable database.

Apparently this will remain as is, but newer records will appear in the ProQuest version.

Just when I think Reed Business Information has finished its changes to publications, mainly by selling or closing them, RBI makes another announcement. I wrote a NewsBreak about RBI’s title divestitures, but now I need to add that Personnel Today is ceasing its print publication after 21 years and going to online only. The announcement cited “the migration of recruitment and product advertising” to the already existing Personnel Today website as the reason.

I know that New Orleans, from a cuisine viewpoint, is Cajun with its jambalaya, poboys, and gumbo. The SLA conference in New Orleans, however, struck me more as sweet and sour.

The business meeting was particularly sweet and sour. Amidst the awards, the wonderful camaraderie, the fascinating accomplishments of SLA members, and the outstanding work of SLA staff, lurked the financial situation, which was very sour indeed. Essentially, association revenues and lower than expected and less than what it spends to support members. Dues are down, conference registration monies are down, and vendor support is down. Not a happy picture and one that the association will have to do something about. The phrase “everything is on the table” in terms of expense reduction and revenue generation permeated both the leadership meetings and the annual business meeting.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s not sweet and sour. It’s more like Cafe du Monde, with the sweet beignets and the bitter chicory coffee.

SLA (aka Special Libraries Association) is holding its 101st annual conference in New Orleans. Attendance is nowhere near the numbers we saw in Washington DC, which will have some serious impacts on the financial condition of the association. We’ll hear more about that at the annual business meeting this afternoon.

It’s a shame, really, because SLA members who are here are learning a lot and the exhibitors had so much to demonstrate. From the still-warm beignets at the Financial Times booth (fresh every day from Cafe du Monde!) to Factiva’s “Factinis” (in a breathtaking shade of blue), exhibitors did their level best to entice SLA conference goers into their booths. The FT has a iPad version that is fascinating–and has just (on June 8th) won a design award from Apple for the app. This is a major accomplishment, as there were only 5 winners worldwide. Congrats, pink paper!

As for buzz at SLA, I’d have to say it was around platforms. Many vendors were showing either a new platform or a prototype for a new platform. Ovid has one, Dialog has one almost completed, and ProQuest’s will follow Dialog’s.

Factiva has added many new sources and plans to expand its language capabilities from the 23 it presently has. Westlaw was showing its Westlaw Next product (reviewed by Amy Affelt in the May/June 2010 issue of ONLINE) and LexisNexis is rolling out its new Academic interface.

I could go on and on, detailing all the interesting and innovative products on display at SLA, but that laundry list would probably bore everybody to tears. The advantage to conferences like this one is the opportunity to see all these vendors in one place, be introduced to features and products with which you’re unfamiliar, get to know the people at the companies (which really gives you an edge in contract negotiation), and update yourself on what’s new that will benefit you and the organization you work for.

The exhibit hall closed yesterday but today there are still sessions, plus the annual business meeting and closing keynote by Nicholas Carr.