explodedlibrary.info

I won't be attending Information Online 2009

I won’t be attending Information Online 2009, even though it’s in Sydney and that’s where I work. I would have liked to, but it looks as if this going to be an extremely lean year, budget-wise. Information Online is quite an expensive conference too, so if work isn’t paying or contributing, then it’s out of my price range.

Looking at the bright side, maybe it’s just as well, because I wouldn’t know how to handle myself when Stephen Conroy opens the conference.

• Would I even give him polite applause?
• Would I turn my back on him?
• If he says something particularly outrageous, such as equating all opponents of his scheme for mandatory ISP filtering in Australia with advocates for child pornography, would I boo or heckle him?

It’s not for me to give advice about this to anyone who is attending Information Online. Unless this becomes an issue in the next election, this will probably be the first and only time that Stephen Conroy is in this situation - where he is in a room with a large number of members of the public and voters who oppose him on the mandatory ISP filtering issue.

first impressions of ALLA 2008

I’ve just returned from the 2008 ALLA conference in Perth.

It was my intention to blog most of the sessions which I attended, but my notes are quite messy and so it will take some time to get them ready. Even after this editing process, I remain a bit diffident about the accuracy and value of these notes, so I’m going to put them in the expodedlibrary bunker, where I sometimes put things which I consider more “iffy”. I’ll be linking to each one from here, so they’ll still be accessible. I’m hoping to add a little value by linking to any books or websites or other linkable things which were referred to.

I won’t be going through my notes in any particular order - just whatever I feel like doing at the time. One will go up tonight, three will go up tomorrow, and then probably one or two each day of next week. If you want to read something right now, Kathryn Greenhill has some brief notes about the sessions she attended on Thursday afternoon.

Anyway, here are my first general impressions of the conference and my trip to Perth.

ALLA was a small and compact conference, with 190 delegates, lasting two days - excluding satellite events and other social activities.

I enjoyed it more than some of the larger conferences I’ve attended recently. I prefer smaller conferences, they’re not quite so overwhelming. You’re more likely to have a chance to have repeated informal chats with people, including the speakers. This was the first ALLA event I’ve attended, and although I noticed that it was close knit, it was not totally intimidating for me as a newcomer. People were generally very welcoming.

There seems to be a real sense of camaraderie amongst law librarians, especially law firm librarians. Could it be because it’s one of the more stressful library jobs, and so it’s nice to find other people who understand what we’re dealing with? Could it be that although from time to time we are on opposing sides of matters, we all face the huge common challenge of dealing with those bloody lawyers ;)

But I don’t want to be snarky. After all, many of the speakers were lawyers and it was gratifying to hear them say very nice things about how they value the law librarians in their organizations. On a related note, one of the themes which popped up in a few of the sessions was the idea that as people who have the tools and skills to find the law more easily than just about anyone else, law librarians have power, and it is our duty to recognize this power and use it responsibly.

My immediate reaction was that I don’t see how this position and ability leads to power, but I’ve noticed that it is the nature of power and privilege that it becomes invisible to its owners. I’m a white male and sometimes I don’t see the privilege attached to being a white male, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. So I’ll try to keep an open mind and think about this some more.

But I digress. The organizing committee of the conference did a great job. The programme was interesting and nicely balanced, and having the new Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia speak was quite a coup! I don’t really have much to say about the trade exhibition. For some people these are the highlight of a conference, but it’s not like that for me. I’m yet to unlock the secret of successfully “working a trade exhibition”, although I did have a couple of good conversations. The social activities went really well, from the opening to the dinner and the closing drinks in the lovely WA Parliament House. The group activity at dinner, making art from discarded library materials, was inspired and turned out to be a great icebreaker.

I only have two gripes. I liked the venue, it was an appropriate size and style for this conference, but I wish it had been more tech friendly. Things like internet access at the podium so speakers could give live demonstrations of things on the web, and power outlets for people with laptops (but kudos for arranging workarounds). I also wish that the conference programme had been purely a single stream, or that it had a complete and equal second stream. I was initially quite miffed that I couldn’t attend the breakout sessions because they were only limited to 20 people and I hadn’t signed up in time. As it turned out, the two sessions I attended instead of the breakout sessions did exceed my expectations, so I’m ok-ish about this thing now.

I also enjoyed the conference because it gave me an opportunity to visit Perth, a city that I really liked. Perth seems to have a nice balance, with the infrastructure and opportunities and diversity one would expect from a large city, while not being as stressed and overloaded as Sydney.

Of course, Perth is the hotspot of Australian librar* blogging, and I was very fortunate to be able to have dinner with the bloggers behind Librarians Matter, Ruminations and Suelibrarian. Although much of blogging is like a conversation, it is nice to occasionally have these interesting conversations face to face.

upcoming visit to Perth for the ALLA conference

[Photo credit: huwp on flickr, Creative Commons License]

I would like to be attending the ALIA conference right now, but at least I have the benefit of Michelle McLean's updates. Unfortunately it would have been difficult to be supported by my work to attend that, so instead I'm attending the ALLA (Australian Law Librarians' Association) conference in Perth on September 18 and 19.

I am thrilled to be visiting Perth. I've never visited WA at all before. I've probably seen more of the USA than I have of Australia. But that's also kind of normal, isn't it – when you're somewhere else, you tend to see more of it, because you don't know if you'll ever be back there again. Whereas with places closer to home, it's easier to blasé about them.

Well I've been interested in visiting WA for some time now. I'm taking off a few more days so I can see more of Perth, and get a glimpse of other parts of that huge state. In particular, I'll be spending some time near Albany and the Stirling Ranges, where I'm hoping to do a lot of hiking. It should also be a good time of year to see some of WA's famous wildflowers.

The conference should be good too. I'll be taking detailed notes of the sessions, so I might as well blog this conference. I've never done conference blogging before, so those posts will be marked with L-plates.

Attending this conference will help me get a much better sense of what it's like to be a law librarian in Australia. Although I've been a law librarian before, most of that was in Minnesota and it wasn't in the law firm environment. I hope in this conference, I'll get a better idea of how to move forward and implement new technologies in this more conservative environment. Some pointers on change management amongst the change resistant. And if that doesn't happen, I'll definitely learn some tricks to improve my reference skillz. ~

The Australian Financial Review decides that it no longer needs librarians

Just in:
Margaret Simons, "Fairfax's business arm shooshes the librarians", Crikey, 9 July 2008

Australian Financial Review and Fairfax Business Media have opted out of a new budgeting system under which they were called on to pay their share of the cost of groupwide services, including IT, accounts and library services. Fairfax Business Media have decided they don't need to pay for the library. [my emphasis]

...

Now, according to Brown's [Deborah Brown, Information Services Manager at Fairfax Media] e-mail, AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be "self-service researchers". Yet she says that previously, Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.

Anybody who cares about the quality of business journalism in Australia, or the role of libraries in media organizations will read this and weep.

different ways of dealing with obstacles

A few months back I went on a short walk to see Terrace Falls in the Blue Mountains. I wanted to try some different tracks in the area, a wish which led me to a track which was little better than a kangaroo pad along a steep hillside. Maybe it was once a good track and has slowly been going back to nature. Then there were all the fallen trees in my way. After scrambling over the third or fourth such obstacle in the space of fifteen minutes, I started thinking about we deal with obstacles on the path - and in work and life.

These are just six responses, I'm sure there are more ways than this, but this is all that came to me at the time. In no particular order:

- Climb over the obstacle or go under it. There are some problems which can be fixed if  enough people dedicate sufficient time and effort to solving the solution. This seems like climbing over the obstacle. There are other obstacles which appear imposing at first, but when analyzed calmly, it's easy enough to find a good and non-disruptive workaround, which could be liked to squeezing under the obstacle.

- Leave the track and go around the obstacle. Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to take an unorthodox approach that is not in the procedures book. The danger is when you have to depart too far from the track. If you're not careful about returning to the track as soon as possible, you may get lost. Last year I helped somebody who had been lost in Sassafras Gully for seven hours, because he had wandered from the track in dense and confusing terrain, got lost and panicked. Sometimes the danger is not so much the possibility of getting lost, but dealing with hazardous terrain, as depicted in the photo.

- Go through the obstacle. Imagine your obstacle is a deep muddy bog. There have been times I've been able to pick a way through the bog without sinking in. This approach calls for extremely good observation of what you can get away with. Walking on mud without sinking in also demands particular delicacy, but if the obstacle is a mass of leaves and branches from a fallen tree, brute force and tenacity help. This approach can be risky, and it's advisable to have a Plan B. What happens if you do sink into the mud? Sometimes I've tried this approach with office politics, wanting to stay above it - sometimes being successful, sometimes not.

- Remove the obstacle. This can be the heroic option. Not only are you dealing with the obstacle, but you're making sure that nobody else has to. It's easy to do with little obstacles, but larger obstacles require something extra, be it strength or a chainsaw. There are sometimes unforeseen consequences to this. You might remove the obstacle from your path and it throw into somebody else's path or cause some environmental damage. Last week I was walking in Dante's Glen near Lawson and came across some track maintenance workers clearing fallen trees from the path. I was grateful for what they were doing, but I happened to be there when they rolled a huge trunk section off the track. It crushed several small trees and ferns on its way down the gully. I can't help but wonder if there had been a better way.

- Turn back and choose a different path. In the Blue Mountains there are plenty of tracks which look promising in the beginning but then deteriorate into animal pads leading nowhere. Some people turn back too soon, because the ideas of facing any obstacles is too scary. Other people are very reluctant to turn around ever. It seems like admitting defeat, that the initial decision to take this path was wrong. But after facing a huge and seemingly insurmountable obstacle or a depressing series of smaller annoying obstacles, it's worth asking the question if this path is still the right one. This could be the situation when somebody decides to leave a relationship or a job. Once you know that you are on the wrong path, it's better to cut your losses and turn around immediately. This can be quite disheartening, but hopefully the lessons learned from this wrong turn will be helpful in the future

Any of the above five approaches are fundamentally valid, they could be the best approach depending on the person or the circumstances. There's one other response I'd like to mention. This is how it goes: If you reach the obstacle, close your eyes. Close your eyes and try not to think about whatever the obstacle is. After a while - seconds, minutes, or even years later - open your eyes again, hoping that the obstacle has disappeared. If that didn't happen, just repeat and try again until the obstacle does disappear. The hope is that if you try hard enough at ignoring the obstacle, the better the chances of it going away. No, it's not a very effective method, but I'm mentioning it because it's very popular with libraries who don't like how their users have changed lately.

afr.com follow up

[8 October 2007 update: As I find out about new stories about afr.com, I will be adding them here]

There's been a flurry of posts and articles on the future of afr.com. If they are to be believed, it's much hated flash interface will soon be abandoned. I've decided to compile a list of all this commentary which has appeared since I wrote about afr.com back in June. In roughly reverse chronological order-

• Lara Sinclair, Fairfax defends paid site, The Australian, 26 November 2007
• Miriam Steffens, Fairfax stands by Financial Review website fee, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 2007
• Peter Griffin, Knives out over web sales, NZ Herald, 5 October 2007
• Andrew Dodd, To pay or not to pay: the Fairfax online dilemma, Crikey, 3 October 2007
• Matthew Ricketson, Finance pages tangled as web revolution overwhelms print evolution, Melbourne Age, 3 October 2007
• Lance Wiggs, Good AFR.com news - but will they finally get it?, 25 September 2007
• Seth Yates, AFR.com site to relaunch, 25 September
• Jane Schulze, Fairfax 'got it wrong' on afr.com, The Australian, 24 September 2007
• Jesse Hogan, AFR to unveil new, less Flash website, Melbourne Age, 22 September 2007
• Sonja Koremans, Kirk admits AFR site was bungled, B & T Weekly (Australia), Sep 21, 2007. p. 3
• Mark, Will AFR.com be next to go free?, Australian Newsagency Blog, 19 September 2007
• Duncan Riley, The End Of The Pay For Content Model Is Nigh, TechCrunch, 18 September 2007
• The embarrassment of AFR.com, Crikey, 17 September 2007
• Mark, Making news free online, Australian Newsagency Blog, 9 August 2007
• Mark Day, Fairfax punts on 'different' afr.com, The Australian, 2 August 2007
• Ben Kremer, More on afr.com - a quick traffic analysis, LawFont.com, 18 June 2007
• Ben Kremer, How not to conduct an ebusiness, LawFont.com, 8 June 2007

There are just three observations I'd like to make about this.
1. As late as August, Fairfax seemed to be brushing aside all criticism, other than the obvious, that afr.com was slow and they were working on that. Now the Managing Director of Fairfax admits that "we got it wrong" and other Fairfax publications are being critical of afr.com. What caused this change? I wonder if the tipping point was the decision of the New York Times to abandon its walled-garden in mid September and the rumours that the same thing may happen at the Wall Street Journal.
2. Previously I was quite baffled by the behavior of Michael Gill, head of Fairfax Business Media. Now I think I know what he's trying to do. The idea of having a usable website for the Australian Financial Review newspaper is oh so boring, especially when he could do something amazing like turn afr.com into Bloomberg-lite. The trouble is that people don't  seem to want that. I'm not sure that Michael Gill's boss, David Kirk, wants that anymore.
3. The users of my library (business school faculty and students) seem to have got used to life without searching for or citing AFR or BRW content. The typical user reaction has been something like, “Well, that’s too bad I can’t use stuff from the Fin any more – so what else is available online?” If that’s what Michael Gill wanted, he can give himself a big pat on the back.

photos of the APEC fence

Police backed on photo ban of APEC fence, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2007

Tourists forced to delete fence photos, The Australian, 2 September 2007

flickr search on the APEC fence

Fortress Sydney, Digital Photo Gallery of Ted Szukalski

John Howard Readies Fortress Sydney, Stuff-Em-Up the hill backwards

© 2007 Bruce Phelan

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

[6 October 2007 update: This post has been followed up here]

The Australian Financial Review, nicknamed the Fin and sometimes AFR, is perhaps the newspaper of record for the Australian business sector. It used to have arrangements with aggregators such as Factiva, Media Monitors and NewsBank. At some point, it decided that it wasn't making enough money from licensing its content online in this way. In addition, the head of Fair Business Media, Michael Gill, was convinced that AFR content needed to be locked down, "because because one bank used an AFR article to support a prospectus." So AFR decided to develop its own platform for online access to its content and abruptly ended licenses with Factiva and the others.

There's was more information about the afr.com debacle in the second article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey called "Remember the glory days of AFR.com", but sadly that's in the pay section of Crikey and I can't link to that. So I thought I'd add my impressions of afr.com and thoughts about the whole process. I am the first to admit that what follows is not a thoughtful objective review, but a rant. The afr.com fiasco has been a major inconvenience to me and many of my co-workers and faculty and students at MPOW.

I tried out the new afr.com both in beta and since its release on a trial subscription. My first impressions of the beta product was that it was an absolute dog. The current release is better than what I saw in beta, but I still think the product is a dog.

The product has a flash-driven interface. This has a number of effects. It makes afr.com a real memory hog. For example, when I'm running Firefox for Windows I don't use it lightly. I have multiple tabs open, I have various web apps running and maybe the Firefox application is using 90 MB of RAM. When I'm running afr.com in Firefox, that number jumps to 250 MB. The other thing is that the application is very slow. Don't bother trying to do anything quickly in afr.com, especially typing or scrolling or clicking on buttons. The other "feature" of the flash-driven interface is that it's impossible to copy and paste text from afr.com. This is a part of their strategy to eliminate copyright infringement by treating paying customers as if they were thieves.

Even if one pays for a monthly subscription (the cheapest being $A 25/month), it is not an all you can eat package. Usage is metered with credits. It costs one credit to open an article. What struck me as tremendously stingy - or clueless - is that if you do a regular search on afr.com, you do not see any page numbers in the list of results. That exclusive information only appears once you choose to spend a credit to open the article. Don't they realize that page numbers are needed in most citation systems?

I was expecting that afr.com would, if nothing else, be a good way of reading the Fin online, similar to wsj.com, the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. But there seems no good way of browsing the current issue of the Fin in afr.com. The home page on afr.com seems to contain some articles from today’s paper, but it also contains links to other non-premium publications like Reuters or the Sydney Morning Herald – both of which can be viewed for free elsewhere. I've since learned that afr.com is different from the Digital Edition of the Australian Financial Review. The digital edition is only included with afr.com when people subscribe to the spendy ($A 150.00/month) advanced markets package. Compare that with wsj.com, that's available for $US 9.95/month [yesterday, that amounted to approximately $A 11.92].

I have one positive thing to say about afr.com. At least they bothered making it compatible with Macs. The product does work with Firefox and Safari, except that mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in either Mac browser.  For some reason, they use the most unreadable font for full-text articles in the Safari browser.

And what's with the advertising? I don't mind ads on products I use for free, e.g. Google or smh.com.au. But afr.com is priced as a premium product. I think that somebody paying for a clunky product should be spared from ads.

I doubt that this going to be a huge problem for me, seeing that I don't intend to use the product again, but the online help in afr.com is very poor. They are large glossy-looking slow-loading pdf files which look and read more like marketing pieces than online help. It's a microcosm of the problems with all of afr.com, they go for bling and end up with something slow and unusable.

Afr.com’s major flaw as a product is that it provides all sorts of miscellaneous research tools, as if it’s aspiring to become its customers new research portal, but it doesn’t provide cost effective (or effective in any shape or form) access to the frickin' newspaper, which is only thing that I think 95% of likely subscribers would care about. But that’s not the only flaw in play here. An esteemed colleague of mine is convinced that in a few years from now, there will be books and business case studies about this afr.com fiasco. How could a supposedly smart company get it so wrong in so many different ways?

I wonder if they thought they could get away with it because they thought, “we’re the Fin, the paper of record in the Australian business community, people will put up with this crap, because they need us.” The answer is no, if you make life too difficult and expensive for your customers, we’ll adapt to life without you. Some day you may realize that actually, it was you who needed the goodwill of your customers and suppliers – and try to win us back. That may work, but maybe by then we’ll have got used to not using the AFR at all.

[14 June 2007 edit: I wrote something else about afr.com here]

new Sarah Blasko album

I have just returned from something I have not been to before, an album opening. The occasion was the launch of the new Sarah Blasko* album, What the sea wants, the sea will have. As much as I like music, I have not yet got into the habit of enjoying live music. It’s likely that this will change.

Tonight’s concert was something a little different. It was invitation-only concert in a small venue. How did I manage to get a ticket to something like this? It was nothing to do with blogging. I’m on Sarah Blasko’s email list and there was a competition for members of it, and I entered and got lucky. It also turned out by happy accident that I got a front row seat.

Everybody that I know who’s seen Sarah Blasko live has said that she’s an amazing performer. Despite these high expectations, I was not disappointed. Her stage presence was powerful yet also subtle and understated. It’s hard to explain. And then her mesmerizing voice and music! The time went by very quickly. I enjoyed her first album, but I would only have described myself as a lukewarm fan. After the experience of seeing her live, and also because I think the songs on the new album are stronger and more varied, the lukewarm feelings have disappeared.

 

* One way that Sarah Blasko is known outside of Australian music circles is that her song, Always worth it, was played in the final episode of Six Feet Under – when Claire decided she'd go to New York, despite no longer having a job waiting for her there.

Edit: See the photo gallery of this concert on the triple J website.

back blogging

It's been nice to have a break. It's been a real break - I haven't even been reading  all but a handful of blogs. I'm now looking forward to getting back into my regular blogging habit. The complication is that nothing stays the same, and resuming normal service cannot meant the same thing today that it meant a month ago.

I'm quite excited to see that librariesinteract.info is up and running. I've been curious about being involved in a group blog for some time, and am looking forward to contributing to this one. I've been thinking about how my contributions to  librariesinteract.info will be different from what I do here. I'm pretty sure that the explodedlibrary is a place where I'll discuss (sometimes rant about) things in more detail. I expect that in the group blog, I'll be announcing things more succinctly and with a little more objectivity - or least less bias. This also means that I'll have somewhere to palm off my collection of Australian library-related blogs.

Another difference is that I'm still quite happily experimenting with Vox - sorry, I'm out of invites right now, but I'm sure that will change. It's likely that I'll be doing most of my more personal blogging in there, which includes my photos and books that I've read. This explodedlibrary blog will refocus slightly to be both more practical (refining information that's useful for me in my work) and theoretical (pondering ideas that I'm interested in).

Breaking news and being an earlyish adopter of tech toys is not really my thing, but I do have a little of this tonight. I've been mucking around with some of  the widgets I can use with TypePad. One of the more interesting ones is the Rollyo widget which is current near the top of my left sidebar. It allows you to search the Australian library blogosphere. Use the drop down menu to access the custom search, ozliblog search, which searches this blog and most of the other more active Australian library blogs. It still needs a bit of tweaking, I set up the current configuration in less than five minutes. It will be helpful to me if no one else, because it will help me refind old posts when I only have the vauguest idea of what I had written.

I'm also trying the category cloud, which I like so far and will probably keep. There's also the opinmind widget, which shows little quotes from this blog. I wasn't sure if it's more interesting or annoying, so I'm testing it here.