Thomson announced to its customers (though not in a press release) that it intends to dispose of its market research and news product lines. To those with long memories, that translates to selling Profound and NewsEdge. Profound, you may recall, was the product vended by Dan Wagner’s company, then called M.A.I.D. In 1998 M.A.I.D. bought Dialog/DataStar and changed the name of the company to The Dialog Corporation. Thomson bought the company in 2000 and then acquired NewsEdge in 2001. They stuck all these together under the Dialog company name. A few years later they unstuck them, demoting Dialog from company to product status and assigning it to
Thomson Scientific in Philadelphia. The Profound/NewsEdge piece, along with Investext (aka Broker Research), InSite, and the news research product, changed its name to Thomson Business Intelligence and went to Thomson Legal and Regulatory to be run under the West banner. Ummm, that never made a lot of sense, since business intelligence isn’t really legal in nature.

Now there’s more rearranging of the deck chairs. In addition to selling Profound and NewsEdge, Thomson will move Broker Research and Insite to Thomson Financial. This seems redundant, since Investext is already a Thomson Financial product. I’ve got a whole review of Investext in the January/February 2007 issue of ONLINE , but I guess it will give them another platform that they will eventually phase out. Investext remains as two databases (files 545 and 745) on the Dialog platform.

The News Research service will disappear in a puff of smoke, so it seems, on December 31, 2007. At least we have lots of notice about this.

So who’s going to buy Profound and NewsEdge? Dan Wagner’s probably not interested, since he’s got his e-commerce company, venda to worry about. Sure would shake things up if it was a search engine company like Google or Yahoo, both of which would like to get into the content business.

Yes, it’s November and the Online Information show is starting in London. Several years ago, that sentence would have read “it’s December and the Online information show is starting in London.” Even longer ago, it still would have been December, but the show’s name was the International Online Meeting. The only constant seems to be the word “online.”

The ITI team’s got a group-authored event blog going on, amazingly enough for the fourth year. Blogging, which used to be extremely cutting edge, is now so trendy that everyone and his dog apparently maintains a blog. I’m anticipating lots of other bloggers at this show, but hope that the ITI editorial team will bring a unique perspective and interesting angles to their (our) coverage.

<

My first time at The Charleston Conference. This photo was taken at the reception at the visitor’s center.

Lots of conversation at Internet Librarian International about Library 2.0, most of it highly enthusiastic. We should all be embracing this, evangelizing this, say folks like Michael Stephens, Jenny Levine, Phil Bradley, and Brian Kelly. Second day keynote speaker Greg Notess brought a note of skepticism to the party. Not that he disagrees with Library 2.0, it’s just that he wants us to consider the user. Are Library 2.0 technologies always the most appropriate ones? Sometimes they most definitely are, but he urged us not to forget about our traditional skills. We need to add new skills on top of the old ones, not replace them.

ILI2006

Internet Librarian International 2006 started off with London School of Economics Professor Danny Quah talking about the economics of publishing. OK, that wasn’t exactly what I asked him to address, he was supposed to talk more about the knowledge glut and the weightless economy, but it’s interesting to hear from an academician who writes the scholarly literature rather than the librarians who buy the scholarly literature. One of his points was that technology advances should reduce the cost of publishing, but these reductions are not passed on to consumers. When it comes to the knowledge glut, he asked if information is viewed purely as an economic commodity, what is the special nature of both knowledge and librarians? Where is the wealth creation? And how do we convince policy makers that the knowledge glut and the value of information professionals is an important issue? We have markets in disequilibrium, which affects the greater social good. There’s a paradox between individuals living within society and the operation of that society itself. If something goes sufficiently wrong, system does not automatically repair itself. This unhappy set of circumstances is why there’s knowledge glut, according to Quah. The supply of information has exploded and much is cheap and abundant, but traditional for-profit publishers continue to raise prices so that researchers in third world countries can’t afford it. Quah cites Kenya as one example.

There was a lot to think about in this talk. Quah isn’t a motivational speaker, he’s a professor of economics. But he cares deeply about defining the digital divide in economic terms that will frame the issues of the knowledge glut in terms that governments can understand.

ILI2006

Thanks to Karen Blakeman for telling about the UK history project to blog UK daily life tomorrow. She found out about it from Peter Scott’s blog — and he’s Canadian, not British! Here’s the post:

“The heritage organisations involved in the “History Matters - pass it
on” campaign are asking every UK resident to take part in a mass blog
event, which will record how we lived on one single day: Tuesday, 17th
October 2006. The aim is to create a massive electronic treasure chest
of diaries showing everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century,
to be kept as a social history archive by the British Library. The date
is chosen deliberately as an ordinary Tuesday, with no national
importance. But with your help, it will become truly “One Day in
History”: by logging on to historymatters.org.uk and taking part in this
mass blog everyone will be contributing something valuable to the
historic record a fascinating resource for future generations to
explore. Uploading can be done until 31 October 2006″

So I hope all the UK bloggers at ILI contribute to this, so we can memorialize both the conference and how important and influential all internet librarians are in daily life!

ILI2006

Masterclasses for Internet Librarian International were yesterday. It’s always tough to get people to come to a continuing education event on Sundays, particularly Sunday mornings, but Jane Macoustra and I managed to attract a small audience for our masterclass on business information and sources. It amazed me that amongst us, we represented three continents and yet, each person in the room had a connection with another person in the room. For example, I knew an American librarian that the delegate from UAE had worked with in UAE. Another British delegate had met Jane at an SLA Europe function. All those “one degree of separation” (no sixes for this group!)relationships made for a truly wonderful educational experience with none of the reticence that sometimes marks these events outside the US.

In fact, Michael and Jenny, who were doing their masterclass on Conversation, Community, Connections and Collaboration, complained there was too much laughter coming from our room. Sorry, guys.

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

Technorati tag: ILI2006

It’s always difficult for conference organizers to predict which topics will be important and/or popular enough to warrant a large room. Sometimes speakers face almost empty rooms, at other times it’s standing room only. This morning I went to an IFLA session on the collaborative efforts being put into place between social science and government libraries. The room was empty, which was particularly unfortunate because the last speaker, Judith Dueck, deserved many more listeners than she had in the room. Her topic was human rights information and she discussed HuriSearch, which is a database covering the topic in 77 languages. Although there was no Internet connection in the room, Judith showed screen shots of the search engine and records from the database. She had some caustic comments for the censorship activities of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in China, citing that as one reason to supplement Web searches with HuriSearch.

In the afternoon, the same room saw an overflow crowd to hear speakers talk about marketing library services. Now, I’m the first to admit that marketing is important and a crucial function for librarians to master, I just have to wonder at the disparity in the sizes of the audiences.

ifla

I’m blogging from Seoul, South Korea, this week as I’m at the IFLA conference with a few thousand of my favorite people from all over the world. I do wish Blogger, however, would stop noticing where I am, since all the instructions are in Korean. It’s a good think I remember, spatially, where the commands are on the screen.

One interesting measure of the “internationality” of the IFLA conference is to search for the organization’s acronym in Technorati . Most of the posts are in languages other than English.

There was an interesting discussion this morning about libraries and advocacy. Although I’ve been in similar discussions before, this one was different because of the many nationalities and types of libraries involved in the discussion. Definitely food for thought. We in the developed world tend to take it for granted that having libraries and information available for everybody is a goal understood by and wanted by the world at large. Yet in some parts of the world, that is far from the case. It isn’t just about money, it’s about culture, context, and politics. One story that came out of Africa equated libraries with mothers because they share the same nurturing functions. I confess I’ve never thought of a library as my mother — and I don’t intend to, either!

ifla

I just ran across a
YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert’s take on Wikipedia, in which he urges people to change the Wikipedia entry on elephants to indicate their numbers are increasing in Africa and talks about how realilty can reflect a majority opinion rather than true reality. He points out that if you took an astronony course before Galileo and said the earth revolves around the sun, you’d have been considered crazy.

This is one of his Word segments and, as usual, the Word’s comments on Colbert’s rants is funnier than Colbert. It ends with “The revolution will not be verified.” It’s a good segment, not only because it points out an inherent flaw with the Wikipedia model (Can you really trust the wisdom of crowds? Are all crowds equally wise and trustable?), but it looks at a larger problem, which is that if enough people say the same thing often enough, it becomes true. I’d like to think that librarians and online searchers are non-believers in “wikiality,” instead fact-checking and verifying sources, but I’m not always sure this is the case.