The Running Librarian

Connie Crosby has published a very useful article on the latest batch of Social Networking tools to hit the market. Among these is Facebook which I have just started using, this site should come with a health warning because it can be addictive!

A "mini" interview by David Gurteen of Lee Bryant. Lee is from Headshift.

Are there any...well this article provides a link to the top 7 "alternatives"

A couple of interesting looking sites here:

• Feed to Javascript a nifty looking tool.
• http://libraryelf.com/
• Page2RSS one of many tools that will create RSS feeds for sites that don't have RSS feeds.

So last week I attended a Recommind Round Table on Enterprise Search....no please come back its important. The Round Table event, which was hosted by Clifford Chance was an opportunity for publishers and Librarians to hammer out the issues raised by Enterprise Search and the opportunities it provided.

Needless to say it was a very interesting meeting with Thomson/Sweet & Maxwell, PLC and Justis all represented. Issues of concern to publishers were:

• Maintaining their competitive advantage
• Maximising the value of content
• Retaining control of content
• Visibility of client usage
• Costs
• Whether the user experience is as good as it should be

Issues of concern for Librarians were:

• Access where organisations might not subscribe to a suite of resources
• Maintenance of resources
• Ensuring users knew what the resources were that they were looking at
• Integration with existing systems

From my own perspective we don't currently use Enterprise Search but the benefits are enormous, not just for the fee-earners who would have access to resources, quicker and seamlessly but also to the Knowledge Team and Professional Support Lawyers (PSL's). Currently we deeplink to a lot of resources but there isn't one place to search all our internal and external (paid for) resources so the ability to integrate these resources into our existing search facility using "Enterprise Search" would be a huge step forward.

If like me your not sure what Enterprise Search was (until recently at least) have a look at this article by Martin White but don't bother searching Wikipedia as they have a total of zero articles!

Found on the law.com website some useful looking links including a new "vertical search" tool.

This is the title of a post by Mark Chillingworth which is published in Information World Review. The post is a follow up to an event organised by the City Information Group which I blogged about in May.

If anyone attended this event and would like to comment I would love to hear from you.

Two useful resources here which were posted on RSS4LIB:

• RSS Basics and Beyond is the title of a presentation given by Ken Varnum at Ohio State Universit. I'm definitely going to start using some of the resources listed in this presentation.
• RSS and education is a list of 15 things Academic institutions could potentially do with RSS.

The latest of issue of Freepint contains a review of Greg R. Notess latest book, full title"Teaching Web Search Skills: Techniques and Strategies of Top Trainers" among the links included with the article is one to the individual chapters of the Book and more resources...looks good.

None of these have anything to do with Law Libraries, although some of them use Web 2.0 technologies. This is a list that was published by the Independent today. My first thoughts are...only 101.

Highlights from the list include;

• http://www.park-up.com/ - Taking the pain out of parking, what about driving?
• http://www.diydoctor.org.uk/ - I really needed this site about 3 years ago
• http://www.howtocleananything.com/ - They should ask me to write a section on Baby bi-products.
  

Last friday I attended this event (which was run by the Cataloguing and Indexing Group). It was very interesting to see what others Libraries are doing with Blogs, RSS and Web 2.0 tools. Among the presenters were two Library Managers from the Home Office, their presentation was fascinating, especially the use of GMail to diseminate news.

I also had an interesting chats with Helen Nichol from the NHS Connecting for Health Team about how they were using blogs for collaboration and Caroline De Brún from the National Knowledge Service on their use of RSS Feeds on the National Library of Health My Library site.

Lawtel have announced the launch of a new precedent service, it is

• Employment

Lawtel are also planning the launch of another precedent service called Commercial this appears to be content primarily from Practical Commercial Precedents. Prior to these two precdent services, Lawtel launched Commercial Property Precdents

...I will be at the BIALL Conference in Sheffield, not only presenting one session but chairing another. I'm going to need a holiday soon!

Although you should never say never...so watch this space for posts LIVE! from the Conference.

If anyone who reads this blog is going I'll see you there!

Information World Review has not one but two articles on Social Media in its most recent issue.

In the first article Ben Edwards, publisher Economist.com discusses social media on Economist.com

In the second Keely Flint, Lead Information Architect for BUPA talks about how they have used Social Bookmarking at BUPA.

This is the rather intriguing title of an article in the most recent edition of the Journal of Electronic Publishing the abstract explains more:

"Academic writers are used to having their ideas encapsulated and enshrined in printed text (e.g., a journal article or a book), but publishing them in a wiki strips them of this protection. What happens when strangers change our writing? Since the traditional academic publishing paradigm has not caught up with the open-editing, peer-to-peer model, are we equipped to deal with the paradigm shift that wikis represent? These are issues we consider in this short piece"

It's quite an interesting article and has made me think about how I could collaborate more with other Law Librarians on the articles I write. Being able to put drafts on a Wiki and see the history of all edits, rather then a vague memory of having removed something is definitely a draw!

LexisNexis (U.S) have released the results of a survey about Information Professional use of Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management. There is a link here to the press release that accompanies they survey but unfortunately no link to the survey itself.

This is the title of an article on Law.com It's gratifying to see that Law Librarians across the atlantic have the same issues and problems when keeping up to date with technological and other developments. This post follows on nicely from a post on Enquiring minds want to know and my post on the same subject.