Yes, I’ve been quiet for a month, lots of other things happening. Most pertinent, I’ve had something of a cleaning of my personal editorial duties and resigned in the last few months from three editorial positions (Interacting with Computers, JASIST, and the Int. Journal of Digital Libraries) and mitigated that somewhat by joining the board at the Journal of Documentation. Been trying to lessen the reviewing load which was becoming increasingly heavy with one of the above and it’s disheartening to see one’s rejections ignored or being landed with a new paper to review within hours of submitting a completed review — talk about punishing those who promptly do the work. We need a system that auto removes those who complete reviews for a fixed period so as to reward them.
I’ve also made a resolution not to write for anyone but myself, meaning I am declining all requests for papers or chapters and taking total control over what I want to write — it might surprise you but many academics spend their lives writing on demand, so now, at 46, I’ve decided to stop saying ‘yes’ unless I really want to do it — ditto talks. Well, that’s the New Year resolution at least.
Naturally ALISE took up a large part of January and now we are set for the iSchools Conference, and you can appreciate how the annual schedule is getting increasingly overloaded. I recommend fewer conferences and stricter reviewing, but then how would the business end of academia cope? There’s a conference for everyone and at anyone time I suspect everyone’s at a conference. Ah knowledge….
The blog has been compromised recently -I’ll spare you the details but if you were getting the spam, you probably know. The price of blogging is (apparently) eternal vigilance, so no wonder Wired recently declared the medium dead. But it’s been quiet in Info world too, unless you figure that US News and World Reports is conducting another ranking exercise. Despite the apparent anonymity of the process, the organizers wrote to me twice telling me the they had not received my rankings and would I please do it! I hope this means that when they get reviews, they can factor out the self-rankings since each program can rank itself. And you wonder why people take these ranks so seriously?
Speaking of rankings, here’s a new one for the most literate cities in the US. You can break the data down by category to explore the various facets of literacy, and you may be surprised to learn that Plano TX has the most educated adult population in the country, apparently, while libraries seem to thrive in Ohio.
Library Journal released it’s annual salary survey for graduates from ALA-accredited programs and there was the usual mixture of trumpeting and excuses. Regional differences explain most of the variance but of course JESSE was used, as always, as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement from some quarters. San Jose claimed great success but in so doing annoyed Michigan by claiming the wrong tuition rates, resulting in a public airing of indignation and so it goes. The data come from recent grads of all the programs, most of whom (in my experience) just don’t complete the survey. For grads who don’t end up working in libraries, the motivation to complete the LJ survey is hard to assess but I know from our program that returns are low. Since it is often the folks going into these other careers who earn the largest salaries, the resulting data set is limited in value.
The bigger problem here is the continual ranking push that has LIS programs shouting from the rooftops about their ‘rank’ (no matter the scale, the method, or the lack of established correlation between any measure of rank and real program quality). And on top of this, US NEWS has just circulated a survey ranking all LIS programs in which people get to rank their own program! JESSE has become a vehicle for telling everyone else in the tiny community just how important you are, how connected you are or how some minor award given by your friends is really an index of your excellence- all submitted under the pretense that you are just sharing info. The rest of the time it’s an excuse for the true believers, the self-selected protection squad to find some trumped up reason to berate the infliltrators (info-traitors?) from the dark side. Real, substantive discussion among educators has taken a back seat to the shrill shouting. Where are you, Jesse Shera, when we need you most?
I learned today that at our university, the Ironport spam protection software actually blocks 97% of incoming mail to UT. Can you fathom that? More than 9 out of 10 mail messages are blocked before you even see them? Apparently the take down last month of the infamous Herbal King spam servers reduced net traffic across the globe by 3% alone. Iron Port itself claims 91% of all email messages on any given day are spam! Unintended consequences of technology, you say? Google to the rescue (not) but they have produced a calculator to let you know how much spam is costing your organization: www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/roi_calculator.html, which of course is part of a promotion to tell you how quickly you could recoup the cost of purchasing a package from them…..it’s all a bit sinister, no?
According to today’s NYT, Obama will be the first president to have a laptop in his White House office. Could this be true? He’s giving up his Blackberry for security reasons and apparently this is going to be a major hardship, proof that he’s as human as the rest of us who are tethered to email. I am not convinced I am more productive with a pda, but accept that there is a certain peace of mind that comes from being able to stay on top of email when moving about the world. Downtime though almost never exists, which proves again that email is not really about mail at all….it’s a time and process management tool that spreads influence and control as much as communication about the world. For all this, there is something amazing that happens when you manage to wean yourself off for a couple of days. You start not to miss it too much and when you return, you get a better picture of just how much of it is unnecessary. There needs to be an index for this which we can apply to info-work.
How many times do you have to be presented with a data point to get it? Seems this is not even the right question because people can be inundated with the facts and still not hear them, no matter how many times it’s repeated. If you ever doubted this, just note that over 20% of Texans who were asked to state Barack Obama’s religion (this October) answered: “Muslim” and a further 28% did not know. OK, let’s see…. on just how any TV shows, newspapers or websites was this ‘fact’ about the leading presidential candidate discussed? Answers to the nearest thousand, please…..
So a deal has been reached….Google pays $$$ and everyone is happy….right? I was quizzed by a reporter yesterday who took some of what I said and ran with it here but the new agreement does contain within it an interesting note about allowing researchers from universities to query the resulting index (thanks to John Unsworth for bringing that to my attention). Naturally I remain somewhat suspicious of this whole project being under the control of a corporate entity whose aim is to organize the world’s information for us but I do have to acknowledge the sheer ambition of the project. No doubt there are more twists in this tale, especially since the news leaking out of Harvard is their library is sufficiently unhappy with the deal as to decline participation in the ‘in-copyright’ part of the book scanning project.
I spent the best part of the last week in Columbus OH (decent weather, so-so food and service) at two back-to-back conferences, International Council for Knowledge Management (ICKM) and the annual ASIST bash. ICKM was an enjoyable new experience for me and while the schedule was punishing with 8am keynote addresses and almost as many parallel sessions as delegates during the day, I learned that KM is really struggling with the exact same problems as any other discipline of the information field. I spoke on Friday and used the occasion to push the “information accelerates discovery” message out to a new audience and I found them very receptive, being inundated afterwards for copies of my slides (which always makes me a little nervous, but….).
What I learned in two days convinced me that KM has more substance than I’d previously acknowledged, but also the same turf and status battles. Apparently some now argue KM is dead, replaced by Web 2.0 (as if!) and it’s time is over. Well imagine, a world where we don’t manage knowledge! I did learn some interesting tidbits such as the positive correlation between pharmaceutical firms success and their willingness to share info with their competitors (though I note with this that it’s correlational only — success might breed openness). The literature on KM seems difficult to get one’s arms around as it morphs into technology studies quickly or uses lots of terms you know to talk about slightly vague activities in organizations, but I’m working on it. There seems to be no end of stories of the KM role being handed to one person who is told to ‘get on with it’. Still, the complementary nature of KM to the information world in which our students reside suggests to me that we must look more seriously at this domain, and I intend to do so. Suggestions welcome.
You have to wonder about the power of IT to mess up business practices when you receive three bills in one month for the same phone. I just did. To add insult to injury, it was three different bills, each demanding a different sum. To add further injury to the insults on top of the original injury, the last one to arrive tacked on a late fee to a bill that was not due to be paid for another two weeks. A quick call to customer service, you say? Sure thing — cue the “we are experiencing high call volume and anticipate significant delays in answering your call”. And this AFTER spending 115 seconds navigating their menus to find the operator.
I gave up twice before persisting three days later and getting through to a pleasant but befuddled operator who after much back and forth, including leaving me on hold for minutes at a time (my minutes???) confessed, “we don’t know”! Apparently their system was ’set up’ this way so that even though it billed me three times and included a late fee, it was apparently not really a late fee at all but a legitimate charge that was part of my bill(s). Oh, that’s good customer relations! I asked if I would get 3 bills a month from now on for the one phone but she thought not, maybe two for awhile (she was not even slightly intending to be funny). When she asked me at the end if there was anything else she could help me with, I told her to haul out for public hanging the accounting folks who designed this practice. I was intending to be funny (at least that’s my defense if the authorities come knocking). I think I detected a smile at the other end…..
One cannot put a price on the costs of such design stupidity but it seems now we are at a stage of having no control over AT&T and their kind, you just have to pay what they ask, when they ask, as you know it will only cost you time, money and a few grey hairs to get to the bottom of their thinking on this. If I believed they actually knew what they were doing, I might have at least some grudging admiration for this cynical approach to obtaining $$$ from customers, but I suspect it’s all a bit too much even for them.
One final note of irony here: when I picked up my phone from the AT&T store, one of the staff audibly complained to another when told that to complete the process she would have to ring through to customer service. “Oh no, not them” she groaned. Man, the people selling this stuff can’t stand their own customer service system. Should have been warned…..
Post script — Irony upon Irony, the day after I wrote this entry I received a Thank You letter from AT&T, telling me how happy they were to welcome me as a valued customer.
The University of Kansas today announced it would revamp its school of fine arts. The move creates a new school of music as a standalone unit but pushes the remaining departments into a new School of the Arts…..ok, the words ’shuffle’, ‘deckchair’ and ‘Titanic’ might come to mind but I suspect there is a little more to this than meets the eye. The leadership at UK impresses me from past experience and I doubt this move is just a simple reorganization of units to ease budgetary controls. The push for arts education in more majors, if nothing else, will increase the appreciation of creativity and exploration in problem solving and might help future citizens develop a tolerance lacking in business education, oh, just to pick an example. That said, the press release does remind me of that line from Deep Purple’s Made in Japan (1973!!!!) where Ian Gillan asks the soundman, “Can we have everything louder than everything else?”