Innovation in e-information - UKeiG Conference, Manchester Conference Centre, 16-17 June 2009
April 26, 2010
Manchester
Freshly restructured into the Systems Librarian role for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, it seemed a good time to attend a conference in the hope of meeting those in similar roles, and hopefully picking up some ideas and experiences to apply to my own workplace.
The UK eInformation Group is a Special Interest Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, but is open to all those concerned with electronic information resources. The conference was therefore attended not only by a variety of library workers but also publishers, intranet developers, web portal editors and others. The conference centre provided a modern and well-organised setting, the only grumbles I heard being the lack of free wi-fi. Equipped with a free pen-drive (actually inside a pen) and floating with coffee we plunged straight into the first keynote ’E4Enterprise: understanding your customers' future needs’ from Jan Wilkinson, the University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands University Library Manchester.
Ironically, this presentation was one of the few disappointments of the conference. The ‘wake-up call’ that users are increasingly reliant on the web for information should not be news, especially for this kind of audience. There seemed to be a reliance on the concept of the ‘digital consumer’ as a pattern of model information users, without it being clear whether this behaviour style (reliant on fast scanning and superficial reading) necessarily translates fully to the majority of information seekers (rather than online shoppers), especially in resource-poor contexts. The advocation of better understanding of the user and their behaviour was fully justified, but more discussion of how this can be achieved would have helped. Some useful existing research was referenced, although not adequately synthesised. There is evidence from the British Library’s ‘Information behaviour of the researcher of the future’ http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf that online users have poor searching and critical appraisal skills, and expect instant gratification, although this is not likely to be news to anyone involved in user education. Of more interest to myself, needing to justify resource spend, was evidence from the Research Information Network’s ‘E-journals: their use, value and impact’ http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/E-journals_use_value_impact_Report_April2009.pdf that higher spend on electronic journals equates with improved research outcomes, even if most researchers use Google to access these resources.
‘Waves of Innovation: signposts to a new web of information’ from the ‘technology evangelist’ Richard Wallis (Talis) was an altogether livelier affair. At the heart of a dash through Web 2.0 onto Web 3.0 and even 4.0 was the message that the core data from much earlier days is still key and the challenge now is to join up and add value to it. While conventional libraries are in competition with other websites as information sources it is in everyone’s power to offer a clean, accessible, easy to use interface to their services and resources. The key message was not to restrict users to one’s own data but to provide a gateway to other resources through embracing Open Licensing, mashups, freely available data and resources, and over all through cooperation. Inveitably there was a certain ‘selling’ of Talis concepts such as the Talis Platform http://www.talis.com/platform/, but the overall experience was an inspiring one, placing information professionals as key to the development of new information concepts.
Nic Price’s presentation ‘The constant gardener and the ecosystem at work’ focussed on the cultivation of corporate intranets, based on his experiences in managing the BBC’s intranet. There was a welcome practical focus with tips on user- and task-focussed design, getting clarity over the system’s purpose, advantages of allowing users to initially develop content on blogs and wikis rather than forcing CMS use immediately, and training and marketing.
‘Stag hunts and Stories: making Web 2.0 matter to people’ focussed on the ‘social’ aspect of social media as experienced within the Royal College of Nursing. The benefits of wikis for collaborative working were heavily advertised and there was good coverage of how to introduce these tools, but the potentially radical implications of social media and the behaviour encouraged, both positive and negative depending on points of view (e.g. sharing ‘confidential’ information) were somewhat skated over in a rapid rush through citizen journalism, Twitter and more, and at times the focus of persuading reluctant workplace users seemed to be lost.
‘The Long Arm of the E-Law: or To Put It Another Way - You Can Run, But Can You Hide?’ was ironically one of the most enjoyable and useful presentations – ironically because much of Lawrence Bebbington’s presentation could be seen as pouring cold water on the earlier excitements. Essentially it was a warning that information law does not disappear with new technologies and applications, and that the more open, shared and public resources and communication tools are, the more legal implications need to be thought about. In addition to the more familiar areas of copyright and personal information law, librarians entering the Web 2.0 world may come up against the issues of defamation, piracy, licensing breaches, liability, privacy law and more. Cloud computing and globally-available applications and resources bring in issues of international law, loss of control over data and its use, and the inability to hide anything. Clear and extensive tips on avoiding trouble were given and it was clear that the old favorite copyright is the biggest source of legal risks still for information workers.
After the usual conference delights of pre-dinner drinks, dinner and a quiz, providing an excellent opportunity to meet those with similar roles and issues, the following day included workshops as well as papers.
Initially the ‘legal’ theme persisted in the papers ‘Using a risk management approach to build successful e-information business cases’ and ‘Information security – key issues for the information profession’. Martin White outlined how to use risk scoring and related tools to convince managers to invest in information management, and Lucy Burrow’s presentation dovetailed well with earlier topics, showing how to embed IT security in the organisation by tools, policies and organisational culture, with lively campaign poster examples.
Delegates could attend 3 workshops – feedback was given afterwards from all workshops that afternoon, which not only allowed coverage of those topics not attended but indicated interestingly different perspectives and results from ostensibly identical workshops.
Useful tips and ideas picked up, both from workshops attended and feedback heard, included the viability of Sharepoint as an intranet, the risks of over-customisation of intranets, treating intranet page-adding seriously as a skill (with certification for colleagues), the importance of swiftly acting on any potential legal threats and having a take-down policy for disputed material, integrating information risks into an organisation’s risk register, circumstances under which a library’s computers have been confiscated, and the need for discretion in getting personal information.
There were wildly varying views on the pleasures of e-book readers and the expected demise of the print library (and print altogether), information on the integration of Twitter into the corporate environment, advise on monitoring blogs and Twitter for attitudes to one’s organisation, and searching alternatives to Google.
The final plenary ‘When social means business: the potential of social computing tools to support collaborative work as part of the organisational information infrastructure’ promised more in its title than it delivered. It was in reality a fairly limited (and self-consciously pilot) piece of research between Edinburgh Napier University and tfpl, looking at LIS worker attitudes to social networking tools in the workplace. LIS staff examined for the study were enthusiastic but wary due to poor earlier experiences with inadequate implementation. This finding, apparently not covered in the literature, was not discussed here, but the finding that LIS workers rate wikis highly as a tool (and these are widely available) but their users make much more use of Twitter and the like was. However, it seemed to me at least something of a jump from here to the enthusiastic promotion of microblogging as a solution to this mismatch, and the note that LIS professionals may want and need different tools to their users was briefly mentioned yet seems a potentially very important point.
Overall I found the conference a highly enjoyable, inspiring and useful experience, and have a long list of links and projects to further explore, and some immediate concerns (especially legal) to implement immediately.
Most presentations from the conference can be accessed via http://www.ukeig.org.uk/conf2009/index.html. I have also a copy of Lawrence Bebbington’s presentation and material from Charles Oppenheim’s ‘Avoiding legal problems’ workshop.