explodedlibrary.info

now where were we?

I never announced the most recent hiatus, it just kind of happened. Work was busy in the second half of 2019 and it became increasingly difficult to find a space for work-related blogging.

The "Black Summer" bushfires of the Australian summer of 2019-2020 happened. Even 18 months after this, there are vast areas of South Eastern Australia which I just cannot visit - it's too sad. Looking back, the mask wearing we did due to deadly fire tainted air seems like a mean-spirited foreshadow of what was to come.

Then my city suffered a devastating once in a century bad hailstorm, followed by that other big thing. Yeah, that global pandemic which refuses to go away.

The first few months of the pandemic seem distant now, but I remember it being an exciting time. There was so much optimistic determination that we could beat this, that we really were all in this together. It was a good time in my previous job at the ACCC. I helped the Library pivot to a completely online service. I've heard similar anecdotes from so many other librarians.

I also really liked working from home every day. I was productive and I enjoyed some of the remote working tech. One of our cats particularly liked gate crashing video conferences. She went back and forth between my wife's Zoom meetings and my work's Teams meetings - sometimes perched on my shoulders.

Then about a year ago, she suddenly became very ill and we lost her. There is a story there. I don't feel like telling it today, but it eventually ends with kittens.

My losses during the pandemic have been next to nothing compared with what other people have gone through. I've been in a country, that so far, has had a fairly small number of cases on a per capita basis. I live in an area of Australia that has been extremely lucky so far, with no community transmission of COVID-19 over the last 12 months.

A few months ago, as the Australian summer was ending, life seemed pretty good here and we thought that the COVID-19 threat was behind us. Now Sydney and Melbourne and Adelaide are locked down.

I don't think I'm the only person who feels uneasy about what's going on in the world. Never knowing when the next curve ball, sucker punch or black swan event (a term which makes no sense for me) will happen to shatter whatever equilibrium we may have recovered.

Some of this chaos is self-inflicted. I'm thinking of those reports about increasing numbers of people making significant life decisions - choosing to leave or change jobs, homes and relationships.

I'm also one of those. After working in the Australian public service for over 10 years, I moved on. I'm now working in systems / web / discovery role at a university. It's been a major change for me. I'll leave the details - switching back to academic libraries after over a decade in special libraries - for another day.

I've restarted blogging because I really need reboot my writing habit - writing that is work related but is not done at work. There's nothing like a fixed and looming deadline to inspire action. It was pre-COVID and seems like a decade ago, but I submitted an abstract for the 2020 Australian Law Librarians' Association (ALLA) Conference. The 2020 conference was postponed to 2021, and my abstract was accepted. Now I need to prepare my presentation and write the paper!

References

Eva Wiseman, The Guardian, Jobs, marriages, cities – we are quitting them in our droves, 11 July 2021

Jamie Ducharme, Time Magazine, Why the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Caused a Widespread Existential Crisis, 29 December 2020

Librarians in the Age of Lies

I don't think it would be controversial if I were to say that many politicians, regardless of party or policy, have developed a reputation of being less than truthful in their public statements. This is especially when campaigning for office. It strikes me as a bit of a game – they attempt to say what is in their short-term political interest to say, without being caught in an obvious, provable lie. There are various techniques for playing this game, tells mistruths which are difficult to confirm or refute, use terms of art (e.g. “taxable income”), make significant omissions, and use various tactics of misdirection.

However, these rules seemed to have changed. 2016 may have been the watershed year, but I think that things were changing for a while before then.
In the new game, it seems to be ok for a politician to be caught in a bald-faced lie, so long as challengers of the lie are dismissed, ignored or intimidated. When this behavior happens for long enough that it becomes a political norm, then the entire concepts of honesty and dishonesty could disappear. Once the concept of truth disappears or becomes irrelevant to public discourse and political discourse, our democracy and our society is in a bad way.

At the same, it is becoming easier to create “deep fake” video content. It is possible to fake a tweet or image. A clumsily faked tweet was caught out during the recent Australian election campaign. In this instance, that specific faked content probably backfired. However, according to a recent analysis of this election by the Guardian, misinformation was weaponised in social media networks in an effective shadow campaign. I think it's a safe bet that more of this will happen in democracies - until there is significant change of heart in the social media giants or there are different laws.

How is this relevant to librarians? We are the people, who are meant to be able to say with some expertise, that this information exists (or doesn't exist) here – in this physical or virtual location. To co-opt a term in used in the art world, we try to assess the provenance of information. 

While I don't suggest that librarians become fact checkers, I think it is our job to provide an infrastructure where fact checking is possible. Our systems for organizing knowledge, while occasionally arcane or unintuitive, are based on transparency and consistency. This is different from advertising-driven proprietary, opaque and ever-changing algorithms which power Google and other major search engines.

If I'm feeling optimistic, I think that the social failings of Big Tech provide an opportunity for libraries to differentiate ourselves.

A few links to librarian initiatives in this space

Institutions

IFLA, IFLA Statement on Fake News

Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Truth Integrity Knowledge

Articles

Barclay, D. A. (2017). The challenge facing libraries in an era of fake news. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-challenge-facing-libraries-in-an-era-of-fake-news-70828

Farkas, M. (2018). Beyond Fake News: Determining what sources to trust. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/06/01/beyond-fake-news/

Rose-Wiles, L. (2018). Reflections on Fake News, Librarians, and Undergraduate Research. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 57(3), 200-204. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.57.3.6606

Sullivan, M. C. (2018). Why librarians can’t fight fake news. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000618764258

Blogs

Kristen Arnett (Literary Hub), How Librarians Survive on the Frontlines of Fake News

Library Insights blog (Taylor & Francis), Librarians and Fake News: “Trust me, I’m a Librarian!”

Samira Lazarovic (Goethe Institut), Media competence versus manipulation: What can libraries do against fake news?

Educational Institutions

USC Marshall School of Library Science, Librarians Know the Truth About Fake News

 

New blogging, new rules

One of the other things which contributed to the end of my blogging last time was a stifling self-censorship. It was a continual monkey on my back and made me second guess everything I wrote. I've been thinking about how I'm going to deal with it this time around. Because if anything, I feel that the imperative for self-censorship is even stronger now

Due to where I am working, I am bound by certain rules which are directly relevant to my blogging and other social media activity. It is safer if I do not even name these rules here, just out of caution that any comment on them may be viewed as critical. This post is not a critique by me of these rules. I accept that these rules apply and I just considering how I can best comply with them.

Please note that even if you have a notion of what rules I am referring to, do not to mention them in any comments on this blog. If there is any way of interpreting your comment as being critical of these rules, I am obligated to delete the comment, or I may be viewed as endorsing the criticism.

You may be wondering, is there any point blogging in this environment? Is everything going to be so sanitised that the only topics I can safely discuss is music and my favourite bands, so long as this music is not too controversial?

To be honest, it would easier and safer for me not to blog in this environment. I have decided it is precisely because of these difficulties, that it has become even more important for me to persist.

Sometimes I'll need to be more vague than I would like to. At other times, I may discuss issues at a fairly high level, despite my preference getting into the nitty gritty details. There will be topics when I will need to try to be neutral to a fault, and not express my own passionately held views. When I blogged before, I set various rules for myself. In the name of self-preservation, all of these rules are going out the window.

Is it all going to be worth it? I hope so. I think that there are still a lot of library and information issues which I can discuss in this environment.

Also, I have developed a safety valve for the words which I feel could problematic. Instead of self-censoring and just not writing them, which tends to just shut down my whole creative process, I am now writing them privately. I hope that one day, the environment may change  and I will be able to publish them. Alternatively, when I change jobs or retire, it's possible that I may be able to publish them then.

I am also open to sharing the full posts on a one-to-one basis via encrypted channels. If you would like to see the non-published version of this post, please email me at [email protected] - except with explodedlibrary in the first part of the address.

I don't want to over-dramatize and over-sell the unpublished content. There are various levels of constraints which bind me. The unpublished blog content is just my response to the most external layer of these constraints, but I still bound by deeper constraints, no matter what format I use. To use a canine analogy: It's not as if I'm unleashed in the unpublished versions of posts, but I'm on a nice extended and retractable leash, not on a short leash.

For what may be obvious reasons, I hope that this is the first and only I will address this issue. I just thought that it was important to draw a big line to separate my current blogging from my past blogging.

 

 

musings on print and online information in law firm libraries

In my blogging, I have always had a focus on online information, rather than libraries as physical repositories of physical objects. Even the name of this blog suggests this.

But I’d like to think that I’m not a fundamentalist about this. Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between online and print, especially in law firm libraries. This post is a collection of these observations.

Print is not just going away

There are two parts to this, working with library users who have a preference for print resources and the role of print resources in historical legal research

Of course, sometimes it goes beyond a preference for print resources - sometimes it’s an obligation, thanks to the need to provide authorities to Court which are in an authorized format. Because legal databases are increasingly providing cases as pdf replicas of the print version, this is becoming less of an issue, but it’s not going away entirely.

But a lot of the time, it is just a preference. We continue to get requests for print copies, even when information is available in an online databases, where it is searchable, where it can be used by more than one person at once, and depending on the database, there are other useful ways to work with the information. The benefits of the print version, we are told, are that it is easier to use, easier to read, and makes it easier to view the information in context. I have a confession to make: I would do what I could to chase down the requested print copy, but I did not feel at all sympathetic about these requests. Maybe I was annoyed because I saw this rejection of online information as a failure of our training or marketing. It’s been interesting, because there have even been graduates and new solicitors who prefer printed information over online information.

This issue leads to one of the fundamental questions about law libraries:
Do we give people what they want, or what they need? I guess this question can be considered a few different levels. We’ve all had those reference interactions which may have initially been expressed as a want to locate a particular case or article, but after further conversation, we see that the actual need is something else. On the other hand, nobody likes a paternalistic librarian who ignores what users actually want, so they can push their own agenda.

I still think that online information has a lot of advantages and when somebody rejects it in favour of print information, I’m interested in knowing why. But where I’ve possibly become more moderate is realizing that sometimes these individual preferences can’t be changed by more education/training or marketing. They run deeper than that, and should be respected accordingly - even if they can’t always be prioritized.

I can imagine that at some point in my library career, we will reach a point where current legal materials are all paperless, whether it be cases or statutes or articles or books. But I can’t imagine that anyone will ever bother to digitize a long forgotten textbook on Admiralty  law from the 1850s, or every single unreported decision from every jurisdiction in Australia.

I am aware that many important old materials have been digitized, but what about the long tail? Would Google or anybody else digitize a document which has a 99% chance to never be needed again? And what about smaller jurisdictions? It’s one thing to digitize historical legal documents that are relevant to the huge US legal market, but what about smaller jurisdictions such as Australia? Within Australia, what about smaller jurisdictions such as Tasmania?

I know that most of us will cope with this by interlibrary loans or arranging access to libraries with good historical collections, but that only goes so far. The time for the fastest possible document delivery can be unacceptably long in a law firm library. I just wish the powers that be would realize that the paperless library involves a trade off.

It would be nice if a good historical collection of legal materials were seen as a competitive advantage for a law firm, rather than just wasted floor space.

Law firm libraries are under constant pressure to become smaller

Floor space is expensive, and its allocation is highly competitive, which means that it is a very rare or lucky law library which has managed to keep all of its space after a move. In addition to that, decreasing floor space is connected to with reducing a firm’s carbon footprint.

Libraries need space for two main things, housing print resources and providing a conducive place for studying and research. One difficulty is that both of these things are difficult to put a dollar value on.

Another difficulty is that when we try to use space more efficiently for housing the collection, it can detract from the use of the space as a place of research. Compact shelving makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think it’s as visually attractive as less efficient low shelving. Offsite storage makes sense too, but it disrupts the browsing process.

I’ve heard many example of new solicitors getting stuck on a research problem, and basically going around in circles on it for hours, even days, before contacting the library for help. I would like the law firm library to be the antidote to this problem, with a pleasant and non-intimidating environment, so people go there for hard-core research - sooner rather than later. It could provide a shelter from the constant interruptions and has experts -librarians - at hand, who can help with smaller questions (such as using a research database effectively) as well as the bigger ones (such as consulting on a research strategy). I can’t see this happening as effectively in a broom closet or a corridor, to use some extreme examples.

The challenge for law libraries is that the people who prefer printed information, whom I discussed above, are often not the same people who make decisions about the size of libraries.

It’s an awkward time, where most information that is needed most frequently is online, but there is still a vast expanse of historical information which is occasionally needed. If the trend of physically smaller libraries continues, will historical information end up being held by fewer libraries, causing it to become less accessible? Will this trend cause a vicious cycle - or virtuous circle - so that as historical information becomes less accessible, it is used less and therefore needed less, causing it to become more obscure?

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.