Defending Libraries in a Time of Budget Uncertainties

Wednesday, September 17 (formerly August 12): SLA San Francisco and San Andreas will co-host a dinner meeting featuring SLA CEO Janice Lachance speaking on “Defending Libraries in a Time of Budget Uncertainties.” The 45-minute lecture will be based on Janice’s experiences and lessons learned from defending the EPA libraries . . .

Innovative to provide UC's next ILS

Innovative to provide UCB's next ILS

Abe Lederman Interview

Interview with Deep Web's Abe Lederman

Stanislaus County Library cuts 94 part-time jobs

Many Public and School libraries are facing drastic budget cuts this year and resorting to drastic cuts to keep their institutions in the black. The Niles Library in Fremont was open regular hours during the Depression. For the past several years it has only been open half a day twice a week. As institutional and community priorities change it is difficult to truly determine why the will to keep the libraries open was so strong in the 30's but so weak today.

SLA urges action on National Agricultural Library Budget Cuts

SLA urges action on the proposed National Agricultural Library budget cuts.

Starving libraries into submission by cutting their budgets is a great way to distribute & grow information about health, food, etc., in a democracy. Elsewhere in this blog we have commented on the struggle of EPA & other federal libraries to stay funded and stay focused on delivering excellent, timely information to their constituencies during these turbulent budget years. The struggle continues. As the EPA pendulum finally swings back the other way, Agriculture is taking the hit. This month's "Information Outlook" (v 12 no 5) the cover story is: "Public Affairs: Keeping a State Library Open & EPA Libraries Coming Back". Coming full circle from 2006 when they were weeding their collections and selling off their furniture while they were under GAO investigation ordered by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committe , the EPA will now reopen regional libraries in Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City, plus the headquarters repository & chemical library in Washington, D.C. at least four days a week with professional librarians at each site. The libraries will re-establisha nd maintain on-site collections & will provide core services of reference/research assistance & interlibrary loan/document delivery. All libraries in the EPA network will follow standard procedures implemented to sensure that all EPA libraries maintain or exceed standard service lievels in accordance with library best practices.

Second in Enterprise Search series by Mark Bennett

Mark finishes up discussion of the technical differences between Internet and Enterprise search, with an emphasis on the source data that is to be searched, and the spiders and connecters that are creating the search index.

New Idea's 20+ Differences Between Internet vs. Enterprise Search - And Why You Should Care (Part 1)

Mark Bennett's series of articles in New Idea Engineering's Enterprise Search newsletter provide a valuable perspective on discriminating between the needs and requirements for enteriprise search vs web search. Managers embarking on Federated search or portaled search of enterprise research will find this series titled: " 20+ Differences Between Internet vs. Enterprise Search - And Why You Should Care" to be worthwhile reading!

Organize your Life with Online Tools

PC World, recently, had an article about online tools. The article is a brief overview of different online tools, including Digg, Wesabe, Backpack and Sandy. Some of the tools are pretty common such as Google Notebook and the Amazon Gift Organizer, but there are some gems, too. Definitely good for a quick read. If you get one tip out of it, it was worth it.

Tagging the Web

TVC Alert reported on an interesting thought about further indexing the web. TVC Alert writes "Can Tagging Improve Free Web Search? (31 Mar) Citing a conference paper on the topic, Phil Bradley asserts that social tagging could go a long way toward improving traditional Web search. I think it's a potential worth exploring. I've been impressed with the use of tags in search results in smaller experiments such as LibraryThing.
Phil also shares a tip for finding tagged information at del.icio.us. I'd like to add that the following format automatically generates an RSS feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/[insert your tag here]."

Yahoo tried to do something like this in the early days with their human indexers. Their idea was good and their implementation was great, because they considered consistency to be important. So, I don't think the reemergence of this idea is crazy at all, but I worry about the taxonomy piece. What about the variations in terms e.g."social networking sites" vs. "SNS"? Is anyone going to link them? If they aren't linked, you will have to do additional searches in order to be convinced that you have done your search work thoroughly. I think the message is to tag pages if you have the opportunity and we'll have to see how the search piece shakes out.

Institutional Memory

In the "News from Lake Wobegon" today, Garrison Keillor tells the story of Fred, an 80 year old who plows people's gardens for them in the spring. He is laid up with a broken ankle and worries about his son charging the wrong people and charging people the wrong price. He has his price list in his head and has never transmitted it to anyone or written it down.

Fred is talking about institutional memory, even though he doesn't say it in those terms. Institutional memory is a huge issue for companies today. When people leave, very few companies make much of an effort to document the knowledge that person has in their head. It is important for managers and executives to evaluate the people who are leaving and what they k now about the company, or better yet, to document as they go along.

Wikis are a great way to document knowledge on the department level, because they are easy to use, easy to access and participants are notified automatically when there is a change. There are lots of different wikis, many of which are free and publicly available. There are also versions that can be loaded on a server for internal use only.

*You can download the podcast from the front page of the the Prairie Home Companion site or from Audible.com.

Call us if you need help documenting institutional memory or working with wikis.