InfoMatters

I spent last week at the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ (SCIP) Annual Conference in San Diego. Now talk about a group with identity problems. However, unlike certain other info-professions, these folks are quite happy with ambiguity. The conference also seems to have some money since they waived registration costs for speakers, have real food for lunch rolled into the costs, and the exhibition space offered more freebies to attendees than even seasoned ALA-attendees could carry. Clearly there is a cultural difference at work in this conference. Unlike many others I attend, the sessions here were much more interactive and people spoke succinctly and to the point. In a lunch time session entitled “What happens next?”, a group of us were called on to answer a series of questions, some prepared, some new, and the moderator managed to keep all participants on point and on time. There was no occasion to feel one voice dominated or one person had not given any thought to his or her answers. Now if this had been an academic group, you can only imagine, but the SCIP folks seem fast thinking, direct, and time conscious. The product of this session will find its way in to Competitive Intelligence magazine in due course.

A session on Appropriate Theory for CI, led by France Bouthillier, provoked further interesting exchanges, mostly by audience members who claimed not to be too bothered if CI was a field or not, or if it had any theoretical basis, or if it even had a future in academia. At least, that was the tone at the start of the discussion but it became clearer as the session progressed that people did care but had perhaps not felt the need to address these concerns head on. The audience here seemed to be a mix of people with degrees in business or LIS but there were also pharmaceutical engineers, English literature majors and IT professionals in fine voice. No easy resolution was attained but the door has been opened and more than a few participants seemed eager to walk through and continue this conversation.

So just what is competitive intelligence? Even these participants could not agree but rather than get heated about it, they seemed to enjoy the fact. As Cormac Ryan said from the floor” “We all seem to be in violent agreement on this”.

Am just back from a very interesting workshop at CLIR where a group of about 20 people discussed the future of academic libraries, launching the discussion with a set of prepared essays from eight of us. Too much was discussed across the day to cover here, and there will be a summary of the event produced by CLIR, but here’s some of what I took away:

1) All academic libraries are facing tremendous change and there is concern with the role and mission of such entities in a world where the myths of everything being available on the web drive the understandings of university administrations and students.

2) While everything will likely be digitized in a decade or so, the provision and preservation of high quality curated collections remains a great unknown. The question of controlling the preserved collection (in house or outsourced?) was thought to be crucial to ensuring longevity of access and quality.

3) The staff needed for the transformations and challenges ahead are not likely to be supplied by typical ALA-accredited programs — indeed a show of hands among the library directors in attendance suggested that none thought the accreditated degree mattered when seeking intelligent and able employees for academic libraries.

4) The Library as Laboratory metaphor was used to convey how academic libraries might better fit with the mission of the 21st century university. This points to the library partnering with faculty and academic computing on experimental projects aimed at delivering cutting-edge services to the academic community. Yes, the term ‘libratory’ was coined (mea culpa, but I could not resist).

5) Better determining the boundaries and possibilities of relationships with the commercial sector (this was a contentious one)

6) The need for collective action (more than collaboration) was deemed vital, meaning that several leading academic libraries would need to find constructive ways of working serioulsy together on more than isolated projects to advance the concerns of academic libraries going forward.

7) Libraries are caught up too much in concerns with products when they should be concerned with processes. For example, there is the danger that emphases on repositories will result in a new emphasis on this as a ‘collection’ instead of on the act of curating digital resources into the future. Our own discussions of the process often seemed to end up with products, emphasizing the difficulties we all face in breaking out of this track.

There was much more and Chuck Henry and colleagues are to be congratulated on facilitating this event. I learned a lot but was also delighted to find so many like-minded people seeing the same problems and opportunities. More to follow, surely.

Registration is closing soon for what must now be the 9th summit (not bad for an idea that was supposed to be the basis of a one-off hot topic meeting for ASIST in Boston in 2000). I’ve not attended the last couple due to an over loaded conference and meeting schedule but I always enjoyed the sheer energy and irreverence (though not so much the occasional irrelevance) of the gathering. The theme this year is Experiencing Information (hum, where have I heard that before?) but it’s sure to be well-attended as usual. Of course the danger of any innovative grouping is falling prey to the standard behavior of conferences. The iSchool community is now running its third annual conference in UCLA next week. I wonder if there is something inherent in intellectual groups that demands the conference structure as a means of establishing a shared reality? Can you be a discipline without a conference? If you have a conference are you a field? No wonder interdisciplinarity is difficult, it just adds to your calendar!

Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, but he presented an interesting mapping of the general characteristics of cultures (too often for my taste reduced to ‘nationality’) and sample web sites one finds in government, university and large company websites that represent said culture. Fascinating work, but more needs to be done.

The ASIST 2007 conference in Milwaukee this week was also a relatively lively affair. Keynoter Anthea Stratigos from Outsell presented a fast paced look at the world and I believe surprised many of us with the statement that China was fast becoming the leading English-speaking nation in the world. No reference provided but if it is even close to being true, what are the cultural implications? If nothing else, why do relatively recent listings of countries where English is spoken, even if not recognized as an official language, seem to make no mention of this? The best I can do to track this comment is back to the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who apparently predicted that Chinese speakers of English would outnumber all other English-language speakers in the world by 2025. Sound bite as science?

I also had a chance to talk with Tefko Saracevic and Don Kraft about changes they had seen in submissions to their respective journals (Information Processing and Management and JASIST). Tefko noted that he witnessed as many submissions in the last few years as he had received in the 15 preceding years, a fact he attributes to the emergence of information research in China and India. Could the day come when American and European scholars will compete to submit to Asian journals? If it happens it will seem inevitable and obvious with hindsight, but will it happen? One suspects there are many forces at work here, only some of which we recognize. In the meantime, this submission glut has pushed up the rejection rates for these journals to record highs.

I took part in a panel on Digital Genres that, despite its theme, drew a large and very lively audience at 8.30 am Tuesday morning. This really was a panel (not an attempt to sneak papers past reviewers) to which each presenter was limited to 3 minutes and then had to answer questions. Before we knew it, the audience got stuck in and took us on a tour of the problems with definition, the lack of appreciation in the field for earlier work, the absence of a well-informed archival perspective, the value of genre in searching and the emergence of genre in the digital realm. This was the hightlight of my conference sessions but of course, I am biased.

The special issue of Information Research with the Proceedings of the CoLIS 2007 conference in Sweden has now been published. There’s a lot of interesting reading here but let me point to a couple of papers I like. The Talja and Hartel piece examining the concept of user-centeredness in the information literature is a worthy contribution and should be required reading for those who wish to understand the emergence of this defining orientation within our field. Also, David Bawden’s paper, Information as self-organized complexity, provoked a lot of discussion at the conference itself and is now available to all.

I moderated a panel of deans at ASIST 2006, all there to discuss the iSchool movement (formerly ‘project’, now ‘caucus’). Panelists were Ray von Dran of Syracuse, Olivia Frost of Michigan, Jim Thomas of PSU, Michelle Cloonan of Simmons, and Linda Smith of Illinois. Almost 100 people turned up at 8am Monday morning to engage and we went to the floor pretty quickly after some introductory remarks from all to learn what people thought. There were more comments and questions than we could get to (and one or two speeches from people who probably wanted to be on the panel) but generally there seemed to be a pattern to the questions.

Many wanted to know what we thought we were up to creating a caucus of schools (the question was phrased many ways but this was the gist). The answer, of course, was ‘to create a new field’. This answer seemed to convince most but not all, and it was with some relief on my part that Marcia Bates stood up and asked if it wasn’t about time that we stopped saying this and actually told people what we thought the new field was. Amen sister! When the ‘new’ answer starts to get old, as it has, it might be time for another one. I have a view but I’ll save that for another entry.

Quite rightly, some seasoned faculty members pointed out that the gathering of deans to talk about a new field was hardly going to be very exciting. We all agreed, that is why there has been an iSchool conference for the last two years to which doctoral students and faculty have flocked. Cue mumbles about how another conference based on this was bad for ASIST and why hadn’t the iSchool deans worked more with ASIST, which led to handwringing from all concerned but the truth is that the iSchool caucus is wary of affiliating with any professional society at this time so as to avoid alienating anyone. Fortunately nobody mentioned the links with CRA (oops). More directly, the caucus is not intended to be another professional society and it may even be only a temporary organization aimed at advancing the ‘new field’ (TM) before riding off into the sunset once it becomes clear that people respond to the term ‘Information School’ with something other than a blank stare. At least, this is my dream — let’s get the field understood a bit better and then move on (and please, no jokes about how many deans does it take to make a field understood?)

There were a number of comments about where the idea for an ischool movement orginated and the history of various developments at schools such as Pitt and Syracuse were outlined. Clearly this is not an overnight development but has been brewing for years, maybe decades. This led to discussion of how being ‘in’ the iSchool consortium could or might benefit our various programs locally and nationally. There is no doubt that many schools feel they should be included and, as a result, feel excluded by the requirements to have a doctoral program, sufficient external grants, and a direct report to the campus provost or chancellor. Naturally these criteria for membership were discussed and I believe most people were happy to learn that the iSchool Caucus has agreed to make affiliation a much more open affair going forward. Stay tuned but you can watch for updates at www.ischools.org/oc/

There is no major conspiracy afoot (sorry!). Rather there is a genuine attempt being made here by a group of schools to place the information field on a more stable and yes, visible platform. The schools involved are united by a dream of the future more than an identification with the past and it is possible that with this group taking the lead, many more schools involved in the human and social aspects of information across its lifecycle will benefit. Or we can just argue amongst ourselves, right?

The conference was a great event over 6 days, depending on when you started. For me the official kick off was the iSchool party at the Cedar Door where our tab had to be upped several times to handle the thirsty hordes. I had dinner later with our first keynote, Laszlo Barabasi, who is a delightfully engaging guest and speaker. His keynote address was fast paced and pointed to the insights to be gained in viewing human activities on the web as scale-free networks incorporating bursts of activity. He argued that 10% of most networks provide the key to holding the network together and that fitness attracts a disproportionately large number of links from other sites. Of course, the mystery of what makes a site or a linked node super-fit remains something to be discovered (and sold, I suppose). You can find out more about the man and his work here: www.nd.edu/~alb/

Attendance was up and most people seemed genuinely happy with the program and the location - Austin makes for a great conference venue though I needed to work on people to move them beyond the dubious delights of 6th St when seeking entertainment. Several sessions just would not end — a well attended set of presentations on blogs ran 30 minutes over (it was lunchtime) as people just would not stop asking questions of the various presenters. And it was not just new areas that caught the buzz. The panel on historiography was equally in demand even on the last day! I make a point in my program notes that ASIST is one conference where the old and the new mix easily, and it is this type of perspective-mix that keeps me at ASIST year after year. It was also good to see so many PhD students and younger members - ASIST seems to have lost many of the younger set in recent years to the equally-large IA Summits but when President Mike Leach asked at the outset how many people were attending ASIST for the first time, it was good to see so many hands go up.

Peparing a conference program is a long process and I am glad it’s over. I had superb assistance from Dick Hill at ASIST and three executive program committee members (France Bouthillier, Javed Mostafa and Carole Palmer) but it remained a long slog which I am glad to hand over to next year’s committee (see the call for papers: www.asis.org/Conferences/AM07/am07cfp.html). While the society is good about awards events for various members, I think the program committee each year deserves a little more than a piece of paper commemorating their efforts and handed out in a rush at the poorly-attended business meeting. But this is a minor issue - the conference is its own reward, right? I’ll just not be rushing to serve on future program committees.

It was good to see so many faces there, and to talk to several readers of the blog - hello!! More later when I get a chance to think about it all.

The Usability Professionals Association will be holding it’s annual conference in Austin in 2007 — the call for papers is still open, see: www.upassoc.org/conference/2007/