Two recent encounters brought Second Life and real life into sharp contrast. And, it has to be said, on this particular occasion I preferred Second Life.

The idea behind my Second Life visit was to see if things had livened up at all in the last year or so. I headed for the library archipelago and was soon redirected to Info Island International where I met a bunch of interesting people who shared my interests.

Before long, I was off exploring their web presences and picking up interesting snippets. One link worth sharing is this one to a free profiling tool associated with the Groundswell book written by analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Gareth Otsuka (real life name Gareth Osler of Liverpool Libraries) tipped me off about the link, mentioning that it is in his library technology RSS feed. Cheers Gareth - nice feed.

Looking at my notes, I was amazed to find that I'd spent 35 minutes with Gareth and some of his colleagues and passers-by. Time passed quickly because of our common interests.

Contrast this with a physical gathering today. In theory, we all had an interest in 'social media'. But the engagement rules were very different. In Second Life, you can click on an avatar to find out about a person and choose not to engage, or move on without embarrassment. In real life you have to do it through conversation. But by the time you realise you want to be elsewhere, you're trapped.

Both environments rely on serendipity to work its magic but, in the case of Second Life, it's definitely aided and abetted by effective focusing and filtration mechanisms. And, assuming you have the graphics power and broadband width, Second Life scores because it also avoids the inconvenience of physical travel.

Kevin Kelly, a Wired co-founder, recently wrote a very interesting piece about the digital economy called Better Than Free. It starts from the postulation that the internet is a giant copying machine. Anything that can be copied and distributed for free becomes worthless (in a financial sense). And, therefore, anything that can't be copied acquires value.

Sounds like common sense, right? But it strikes at the heart of the old order where people were willing to pay for mass-produced copies of stuff. Of course, it is still possible to pay for the convenience of a book, for example. Inexorably, though, online is trumping offline in an increasing number of situations.

But Kelly proposes eight categories of valuable and non-copyable activity. If he's right, and he's thought about these things more than most, then his suggestions provide a series of guiding lights for those of us who are still floundering in the internet economy.

He calls these values 'generatives'. To quote him:

A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

His categories are: immediacy; personalisation; interpretation; authenticity; accessibility; embodiment; patronage and findability. Most of them probably make intuitive sense to you, but do read his explanations, they deliver real insight and understanding. To clarify a couple of the more obscure ones: 'Embodiment' means an analogue version of the digital entity - a book or a musical recital for example; and 'Patronage' relates to paying a reasonable amount to the originator.

In this new world, value is being derived from essentially human skills rather than mechanical processes. We are not talking about a new bandwagon for wheeler-dealers to jump on, we're talking about being rewarded for genuine intellectual or physical effort which delivers real value to the buyer. Something which should resonate with most IWR readers.

(Hat tip to Jack Rickards for the tip-off.)

The IWR American Psychological Association Information Professional of the Year award has been announced and went, deservedly to Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus for the UKOLN organisation.

The award is judged by a panel of previous winners and the IWR editorial team. As editor of IWR when I judge the award I look for an individual who is pushing the limits of information, technology and making the role of the information professional as far as possible and making it an exciting role.  When looking through the final results I could see that the other judges felt the same way and Brian was an excellent choice.

Brian's role is a national Web co-ordinator, an advisory post funded by the educational body JISC and the Museums, Library and Archives Council (MLA).

In this role Brian is looking at the web as central resource for learning and research in higher education and is looking at ways to make the web a successful resource, which is a challenging role, because the web is still very young and is constantly changing. This can be seen with the recent changes dubbed Web 2.0, therefore Brian is going to be pretty busy for some time to come.

Based at the University of Bath, I know from information professionals I have dealt with in the academic sector that he is very well respected and his thoughts are often the basis for great debate within the industry. Linked to this is his blog, which is one of the most popular blogs in the sector.

I hope all IWR readers will join me in congratulating Brian for an award very much well deserved. 

Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikipedia was the keynote speech of Online Information 2007 with a presentation Web 2.0 in action: Free culture & community on the move.

Starts with Britannica editor Charles van Doren 1962, who said the encyclopaedia should be radical, but Wales claims they have been anything but.

Small showing of hands for those that have edited, although Wales believes it’s a good showing, "but not as many as college kids".

I consider us to be the Red Cross of information, he says as he describes its charitable status. Have 10 full time staff and will spend about $2 to 3 million this year, which is tiny compared to the major publishers. Vast majority of the money is from small donations, which he likes because its grass routes and not dependent on advertisers.

Wales talks about the desire to extend the languages that are in use on Wikipedia, including Hindi and Afrikaans.

Wiki is free in the sense of GNU, its free to copy, modify and distribute.

Shows a video of his travels to India and how he learnt that the local communities want to use the English version, as the English language is a route out of poverty. His organisation has been out to South Africa teaching students how to edit Wikipedia. "One of the things we have learnt is that if you can get five to 10 editors working together, it can make a great difference." These groups make progress and then they look towards outreach and who they can include. Hence the organisation has set up an academy to find the founding editors. It has begun in India, with 10-20,000 articles a month being put together by academy organisations.

Wikia is his next subject, a separate organisation with 66 languages, including a 67th, Klingon. Wales goes on to demonstrate using Google search results for Muppets and how the top result is the official site, but the rest of the results are from web based conversation, ie Wikipedia pages, forums and fan sites. He demonstrates an article on the Ford motor company and how on Muppet Wiki site, there is an article on Muppet Ford ads and how this demonstrates this level of information would never have been available before.

The search engine is a political statement, in a small P sense, Wales says. The proprietary software of the main players is a mystery in that people have no control of the accountability. The Wikia search will publish its algorithm.

Wales believes that the trust of social networks and setting up trusted networks can be utilised in search. .

On the role of collaboration, he asks the audience to imagine that they are designing a restaurants, discussing the idea that we trust the people around us, we don't put people in cages in restaurants because they will be using knives.
The wiki philosophy is to allow people to do good.

Lorcan Dempsey has worked for JISC and libraries on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. As a member of the National Information Standards Organisation, his blog on networked information and digital libraries is well followed.

Q Who are you?
A I work in Dublin, Ohio, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and spent a long time in between in the UK. I am lucky to have what I believe to be one of the most interesting jobs in the library world. I am responsible for the programmes and research area within OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). I also help shape OCLC strategic direction.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A http://orweblog.oclc.org

Q Describe your blog?
A I say that it is about “libraries, networks and services”. I suppose that over time it has become more general. At first it had more of a technical slant; now it ranges more widely. I tend to talk about how networks are reconfiguring library services and I have some recurrent threads. These include:

Making data work harder.
We invest a lot in bibliographic data and need to use it more imaginatively in our systems and services.
Moving to the network level.
No single website is the sole focus of a user’s attention. The network is the focus of attention. And a major part of our network use revolves around significant network-level services ­ Amazon, Google, IMDB, and so on. These match supply and demand in efficient ways. The real message of Web 2.0 is the emergence of this pattern of service: data hubs with strong gravitational pull generated through network effects.
Being in the flow.
The focus of attention has shifted from website to workflow. The network is not so much about finding things as getting things done, and we have increasingly rich support for “networkflow”. We may construct our personal digital identities around services in the browser or on the network (RSS aggregators, social networking sites, bookmarks, etc), and we use prefabricated workflows (course management system, customer relationship management system, and so on).

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Almost four years.

Q What started you blogging?
A After I arrived in OCLC I tended to send out a lot of emails. A colleague suggested that a blog might be a better model.

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A The comments on some blogs seem more important than on others.

Q What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A I keep a wide range of feeds in my aggregator and will focus on different ones from time to time. Again, I tend to be more interested in “voice” or those from whom I can learn something. From a library point of view, I look at Caveat Lector (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net) and ACRLog (www.acrlblog.org).

Alma Swan’s new blog, OptimalScholarship (http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com) and eFoundations (http://efoundations.typepad.com) from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, are informative and provocative. I find PlanetCode4Lib (http://planet.code4lib.org) an efficient and useful way of keeping up with a range of stuff.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A I have always contributed to the professional literature. But I find that blogging is quite liberating: it is much easier to write blog entries than longer pieces. It has made me write more quickly and to think about short communications.

Q Which blogs do you read just for fun?
A I look at John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 (http://memex.naughtons.org) and William Gibson’s blog (www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp), and the pictures in YarnStorm (http://yarnstorm.blogs.com) make me smile.

Global publisher John Wiley & Sons is not afraid of new technology and ventures, as I recently discovered in a meeting with them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Bookseller reports today that Wiley has now inked a deal with Safari Books Online, an increasingly important on demand reference platform.

Wiley will add its business and technology reference books to the Safari platform and see its content aligned with other leaders like Pearson, O'Reilly and the publishing arm of software giants Microsoft. Wiley will add its For Dummies books, which it acquired from web and magazine publishers IDG, and the Bible range of computer books.

This is an important deal. Reference books are still an amazing resource for users, and a method of information delivery and publishing that still has plenty of legs in it. Like all information resources though, it is a sector that has been threatened by amateur services like Wikipedia. Reference is clearly an information set very well suited to the web. Safari is a platform that offers a genuine alternative to Wikipedia. Because the content on Safari is from credible publishing companies that check the veracity of information, use knowledgeable experts and put a great deal of effort into the writing, editing and presentation of the information, it is more credible than Wikipedia. Wiley has increased the desirability of Safari and improved reference information on the web.

Dear Mariella,

Enjoyed the repeat of your Open Book programme today. I'd sneaked away from the computer for a bit and up you popped on the radio. It was interesting to get your take on the world of social computing. Like many people who aren't involved, your incomprehension was quite a treat. Afterwards I wondered if you were doing it on purpose to wind up two of your guests,  Victoria Barnsley, boss of Harper Collins,and David Freeman, founder of Meet The Author.

Since I write for information professionals who are interested in both books and technology, I thought it might be interesting to get a conversation going on the value, or otherwise, of the internet to book authors.

Of course, this blog post could just languish, like most do, or it might trigger some interesting feedback. That's the nature of the web. People take a look at stuff and, in moments, decide whether to linger or move on.

The note below is to put my readers in the picture. Feel free to join in.

All the best,

David

The programme involved two websites: Authonomy, from Harper Collins, which will give authors a place to upload 10,000 of their words so that visitors can decide whether it's any good; while Meet The Author plays recordings of authors talking about their work.

Mariella suggested to Victoria that Authonomy was "just a cynical way to get the general public to do the work for you" and "ultimately it's a way of you getting your paws onto new work and creating a degree of ownership  over it before you've had to commit to it financially in any way." Ouch.

The answer is, of course, that people have a chance to make an impression and get picked up for consideration by Harper Collins or, indeed, any other agent or publisher who happens by.

Mariella found it hard to believe that that Harper Collins would not be "upset" if another publisher snitched talent from the Authonomy site. Victoria suggested that this would prove that the site was a huge success. Mariella retorted with, "but isn't it just like a talent show for authors. Like something you'd expect to see on ITV?" She threw the same accusation at David Freeman.

Not surprisingly, both speakers more or less agreed with her. Victoria noted that tens of thousands of authors might get read who otherwise would have been ignored. David suggested that if publishers and agents liked the author's pitch, they might ask to see their work.

In the end, good writing is essential to being published. But these two sites offer much needed visibility and promotion for unknown authors, a way to emerge from the fog that surrounds agents and commissioning editors.

But in publishing, as in the rest of life, the democracy inherent in the internet is a bit hard to get to grips with. It may be a little threatening to people in conventional positions of power.

Would anyone care to comment?

PS I just checked out the 'Meet The Author' site and it operates on vanity publishing lines rather than YouTube. Authors pay for the privilege. I suspect this will not be the case with Authonomy.

René Olivieri, chief operating officer at Wiley-Blackwell, the academic book and journals publisher has resigned, reports The Bookseller.

Olivieri was ceo of Blackwell when the company merged with Wiley in a surprise move last November. Since the merger Olivieri has been heading up the transition team as chief operating officer, a role he has held since May.

He has had a long and illustrious career at the Oxford based publisher, starting out as a publisher in the 1980s, before becoming an editorial direct, deputy md, and managing director. The Bookseller reports he became ceo of Blackwell Science in 2000 and stepped into the role of Blackwell Publishing ceo a year later.

At a major international publishing event like the Frankfurt Book Fair the bright lights of trade publishing and all its household star names could easily drown out the academic and scientific publishers. But this has not been the case.

Talk at the event, in all circles, is about books and technology, in particular search and eBook readers. On both subjects the specialist publishers are leading the way and the trade publishers salute them.

Amazon and Sony were expected to steal the show with their eBook readers, they are instead conspiquous in their absence, but that has not stopped publishers and technology providers from talking about the devices and their potential.

I was particularly interested in a conversation I had with sceintific, technical and medical publishers WIley where they hinted that they and other specialists may get involved in driving the adoption of eBook readers. Could we see the eBook reader adopt a similar model to the mobile phone where users sign up to a subscription service, content of a particular kind in this case, and in return they get a sleek and sexy device? Its certainly worked for the mobile industry, which now resembled the car world with its emphasis on styling and marketing.

But such a move could also be a blind alley, as one expert said to me, these devices don't support the interlinking and interactivity that content users are currently enjoying with the web.

During the fair Google, Ingram Digital Group and Amazon have all used the scientific and academic publishers as case study beacons for just what can be done with books on the web.

Geographically the Far East is the leading adopter as its markets radically develop according to Mark Carden, Ingram senior vp.

Perhaps Amazon spread rumours of a possible launch to see if there was real interest, well if the level of conversation we've heard is anything to go by, the eBook reader is in demand.

Information literacy expert Sheila Webber takes time out from the blogosphere and her Second
Life incarnation to extol the delights of blogging

Q Who are you?
A Sheila Webber, 54, senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A My Information Literacy blog is at http://information-literacy.blogspot.com and my Second Life blog is at http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com

Q Describe your blog?
A The Information Literacy (IL) blog highlights IL resources (such as tutorials, articles and portals), IL related developments and upcoming events worldwide, and carries conference reports. It’s primarily an information blog. The personal touch comes from the photographs of flowers and landscapes I put it – I mention them because some people have said that they look at the blog for those rather than the IL!
The Second Life (SL) blog is a diary of my avatar in SL, Sheila Yoshikawa. It started as a Bridget Jones-type blog, with a learning diary angle.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A I started in April 2003, with Stuart Boon as co-blogger, using Moveable Type software that was already available on a server in my department. Unfortunately, after we’d been blogging regularly for two years this server got hacked, an event that coincided with the only person who knew the setup moving elsewhere. We made a new start on Blogger in 2005.

Q What started you blogging?
A Initially, it was to publicise an IL project but I soon realised I was a natural blogger. I like writing short pieces and people seemed to find them useful. If anyone is interested, I wrote a piece about why I blog at http://inquiry-in-im.group.shef.ac.uk/team2007/02/20/learning-about-myperspectives-on-blogging

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A I don’t do much commenting, probably because the IL blog is not really a social networking blog. When people want to comment on my blog, or tell me about an IL item, they also tend to email me rather than comment on the blog. I think that I, and the blog readers, want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. It’s a bit different on the SL blog, where I mention more social and personal things (perhaps strangely, considering it is about SL rather than my first life!), so there tend to be more social chitchat-type comments from SL friends.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?
A I hope that the blog helps show that we in the department are participating actively in the information world. Since I have readers worldwide it helps bring the department to their attention. I also like to think that it may attract potential students who are interested in information literacy.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A Apart from the trips abroad,getting in contact with people via the blog. Also it’s nice when a stranger comes up to me at a conference and says they like the blog or my photos.

Q Which blogs do you read for fun?
A I don’t look at that many blogs outside work interests. There are blogs about fashion in Second Life (aggregated at http://fashionplanet.worldofsl.com) that are useful because the search function within SL itself is rubbish.

Which bloggers do you watch and link to?
Moira Bent
http://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/moira.bent
Michael Lorenzen
www.information-literacy.net
ALFIN blog in Spain
http://alfin.blogspirit.com
Jill Walker Rettberg
http://jilltxt.net
Brian Kelly
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com

The word 'cuts' has been rearing its ugly head in the information sector with far too much regularity in the last month or two. The latest two organisations to be threatened are the two jewels in the British crown of not only information, but also our culture – the BBC and the British Library.

No organisation can spend willy-nilly and difficult as they often are to deal with, the money men have their place. But if the focus becomes too narrow, in other words too short term, the damage can be lasting.  Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library penned an item in this weekend's Observer discussing what will happen if the money men starve our national library of cash. As she rightly points out, "I simply don't want to run a second rate organisation. Slipping from world leadership to the second tier is not something that can be reversed."

Talk to anyone on the street and they will believe that Britain is second at just about everything. We've lost our iron grip on manufacturing (it was only really in place because our Empire was the world market), we are no longer a military super power and other than the brilliant efforts of Lewis Hamilton we are not winning every sporting event about. Yet when you tell people that the UK is the world leader in the information world they are surprised. But once again the money men could very well cut the costs and accept second place whilst talking of being winners.

If funds are cut the quality will drop. The quality debate has, of late, been caught up in a debate about information literacy and egalitarianism born from the Web 2.0 movement. Yet an excellent analysis of the role of Radio 4 as it reaches 40 in the Saturday edition of the Guardian summed up what I've been feeling, "The confusion is the assumption that unstructured demotic chatter is more "accessible" than a well written talk by someone who really knows about a topic. As sources of information and comment proliferate, the demand for authoritative, well informed programmes increases rather than diminishes." The last sentence sums up what faces the information world at the moment, not a need to ditch our methods in place of Web 2.0, but to improve our resources to complement Web 2.0.

The same is true of the British Library, according to Brindley, for the cost of a cup of coffee and a muffin (presumably at the BL café) the nation has access to some of the most important cultural, academic; and informed works on earth, including the Magna Carta.

If these two scions of information and quality are reduced to silver medal holders then the information industry as a whole will suffer.

A report from the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) in the USA shows that fair use of copyrighted material is beneficial to the national economy. According to the CCIA industries that can use material under the terms of fair use earned  $4.5 trillion, which adds more weight to the arguments of the Free Our Data campaign from newspaper The Guardian.

Free Our Data wants information held by the government, and therefore paid for by tax payers, to be made freely available so that organisations can use it.

Amongst the organisations using fair use terms that have benefited the US national economy are media organisations, education sector and software developers. 

Industries bound by copyright control with no fair use aspect contributed just $1.3 trillion to the US economy.

Fair use under US copyright law is described as being the use and copying of copyright protected material to comment upon, criticise or parody. Examples include summaries and quotes from medical articles for news, use of media content for teaching or the use of copyright protected material as evidence in a court case.

The Guardian Free Our Data campaign, run by its Technology supplement argues, rightly, that information collected by the Highways Agency, the UK Hydrographic Office and Ordnance Survey should be made available to organisations in the UK without being encumbered by clunky copyright restrictions. Although designated as trading funds, these three organisations receive almost 50% of their income from the public sector, which means taxpayers pay for it. Access to this data is charged for and as a result, organisations are turning to Google Maps for mapping information rather than using information they have already paid for through their business rates.

IWR supports the Free Our Data campaign because we are passionate about online information and want to see the UK remain a leader in information provision and we want to see British information professionals continuing to manipulate information in innovate ways that is beneficial to their user community.

Earlier this week PaidContent.org launched its UK and European information service at a swanky Scottish bar in, err, London.  IWR went along and once underneath the deer antler chandelier it was as if a time and space wormhole had opened up and we were transported back to 1999 and they heady dot com boom.

The zeitgeist was unmistakable, young trendy professionals in Chris Evans glasses, sharp suits, bright shirts and an excitable level of conversation about "content" and "funding". It was uncanny. The headache's from the launch parties of Boo.com, Handbag.com and anything you like .com have only just cleared at the IWR Editor's desk and all of a sudden I get the feeling that it is all about to happen again.

The last web boom rapidly replaced CD-Rom in the professional information space and for those of us commentating on it for the traditional information sector, we were regularly told our days were numbered and the geeks would inherit the earth. In many ways everything has changed, yet also, nothing has changed.  Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia are significant changes, but despite falling ad revenues, the stalwarts of information still remain kings of the jungle.

Interestingly at this party, fund toting entrepreneurs didn't make the same mistake of predicting the demise of traditional information providers; instead I heard many conversations about partnerships, relationships and hosts. Kewego, just one of the bright (complete with lime green logo) Web 2.0 start ups present talked of the importance of the "content owners" and rattled off the names of respected information providers. The general feeling I left with is that if we are about to start partying again, but the difference is not that the new players think they have all the answers and will replace our libraries, publishing houses and research departments, instead they see themselves as a component and supplier.

Widgets is a term used widely in the blog world and already newspaper groups are adding widgets to their online portfolios. The next information wave appears to be about a wealth of new ("funded" and partying) companies offering to add their widget to your information. For information professionals this means understanding what a widget is, what it offers your users and negotiating a good deal for all parties involved.

A friend of mine is big on creativity. In fact, he's a visiting professor at De Montfort University's Institute of Creative Technologies. He also runs a company that gets paid for coming up with bright ideas.

He has the most brilliant and clearly articulated approach to harnessing creativity profitably, which I'd like to spill the beans on, but can't. Not yet, anyway. At school he was a nightmare because of the way his mind worked. He fluctuated between total hopelessness and utter brilliance.

Sometimes his brilliance was misplaced but, as his subsequent life has shown, he has learned to corral his creativity and put it to good use.

Through his teaching, he is helping future generations harness their creativity. He knows this is what makes the difference between success and failure in today's frantic world.

Continuous innovation is demanded and this can no longer be the exclusive preserve of company founders or a coterie of engineers/inventors/whatever. We're all in this together and facilitating creativity seems to be right up the information professional's street.

The problem, as Jim Magee pointed out recently, is that to be creative, you have to be curious. And curiosity doesn't sit well with the suits that run organisations. I think they fear that if everyone followed their curious instincts, no work would get done.

Creativity rarely comes out of thin air, it usually comes from fresh juxtapositions of existing information. When I invented some software a long time ago (it sold tens of thousands of copies), it was the result of combining elements of Tony Buzan's mind-mapping, IBM's Bill of Materials Processing, Ted Nelson's information on Actor Languages and Vannevar Bush's paper "As We May Think".

Each of us has a different mix of information and experience, so the potential for fresh juxtapositions is limitless. The trick is to ensure that an environment is established where it's okay to dream and definitely okay to share and where curiosity and creativity are a continuous backdrop to real life.

Catherine Draycott, chair of British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) and the Wellcome Trust discusses how difficult it can be for image libraries within an organisation, including museums because there is often a need to generate a profit. She wants the industry and BAPLA to consider new models where there is an exchange between the academic community and the image provider, whether it is partnership or digitisation benefits or other ways of sharing revenue.

Wellcome now makes its images available under Creative Commons and a large percentage of the royalties goes to the creators. They have gone to the attribution model, because it is in line with the Wellcome's OA policies and the policy applies to the images on the Wellcome trust. If the images are for teaching, academic research and non-commercial publication the fee is waived.

Intelligent Television a documentary company that looks to make educational material more widely available, chief exec Peter Kaufman begins talking about screen based visual material, which is what a TV producer considers and so do information professionals. Gartner believe that paid search is a $15bn industry. The JISC digitisation strategy doesn't talk about free  and open access and focuses on business models and public private partnership and Peter Kaufman thinks that is a practical approach.

In the Q&A Draycott describes an idea of using the same metric as PR companies use to quantify the value of media coverage compared to the cost of an advertisement, to the re-use of images from an image library and how that may be useful for archive holders, especially as they are subsidising commercial organisations by providing the images.

Chris Batt, chief exec of MLA has a hard hitting presentation.

Libraries contain the raw material of the future, Batt says, and describes knowledge as being about learning, cultural identity, social development, and it has to be available to everyone.

"Understanding builds empowerment and cohesion and Batt considers this his aspiration. Our mission is to help people to take learning journeys, whether it’s the time of the next bus out of

Cardiff

or genetics. Being motivated will encourage people to carry on learning.

The only successful technology are the ones that are invisible, no one worries about how the TV or telephone works. Batt points out that presentation is the most important thing to the user and he shows and criticises examples of an archive page and the 24 Hour Museum page, both of which he states do not demonstrate to the user what they can do there.

Museums, libraries and archives have collections and customers, there role is to be the connections between the two. Collections are cared for by cultural heritage, education and research and they are passionate about it. Batt believes users though "don't give a toss" about whether these things are cultural heritage, education or research, they just want stuff they need.

Public Catalogues Foundation, could be a fantastic digital resource, it’s a collection of images of the publicly owned oil paintings in Great Britiain, county by country in the

UK

.

Batt ends on the statement, compared with fighting a war, the costs are minute and the benefits infinite. He believes the strategic e-Content

Alliance

is very important. Content in a networked environment is more important than institutes. An image of a little girl at a library hit home as Batt reminds every one that what they do now is important for her future. He wants knowledge as a utility, as trusted and as accessible and invisible as pure running water.

IWR is in the Welsh capital Cardiff for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digitisation Conference, which has been opened by Carwyn Jones of the Welsh Assembly.

The event is the launch pad for the digitisation strategy from the education group; and will also show case the work that has already been carried out and to analyse the role of JISC as the conduit to academic digitisation and what lessons the organisation  and academia have learnt so far.

Based at the St David's Hotel on the regenerated Cardiff Bay area, this gleaming white tower is an example of the new Wales and the new Cardiff, a country at the forefront of technology and the cultural landscape, whether its the location for Dr Who or ground breaking broadband and content strategies.

The conference has launched a blog for the event and is asking attendees and members of the information community to contribute to the debate.

The event has attracted leading members of the information community from universities in Manchester and Oxford as well as the Open University.

Private letters, manuscripts and business papers from the archives of one of the Victorian era’s most influential publishing empires went on public display in Edinburgh today, writes Laura Smith.

The collection of papers from the family-owned publishers John Murray, which boasted Charles Darwin, Jane Austen and Lord Byron among its authors, was launched at the National Library of Scotland by Michael Palin.

John Murray, a descendant of the first John Murray who set up the company in 1768, sold the collection of 150,000 documents to the library for £31m earlier this year. He is the seventh generation of Murrays to run the publishing firm.

The exhibition uses interactive technology to showcase 11 main characters from the archive, including legends like Darwin and Byron and less well-known but significant figures. Members of the public will be able to see the letter in which Darwin pitched the idea for his Origin of Species.

Among the lesser-known authors to feature is Maria Rundell, whose best-selling book on cookery, medicinal remedies and household management caused a publishing sensation in the early 1800s and became a bible for Britain’s 19th century bourgeoisie. Mary Somerville, who was known as the ‘Queen of Science’ and was one of Murray’s most successful scientific writers, also features.

Martyn Wade, National Library of Scotland librarian, told the BBC: “It is wonderful to see the results of several years’ hard work from a large number of very talented and committed people coming to fruition in the form of this exhibition.” Palin described the collection as a “goldmine”.

The library used a combination of lottery money, funding from the Scottish Executive and its own fundraising to buy the John Murray Archive from 1768 to 1920. John Murray is now owned by Hodder Headline publishers.

Link to John Murray Archive:
http://www.nls.uk/jma/index.html

Richard Charkin, chief executive of publishing giants Macmillan is a regular blogger and in between discussing the extremely odd sport of cricket, he does deliver some nuggets of golden insight into the information industry. Today, perhaps its weather related as even this cricket hater can see its not the day of willow on leather, is one of those days when he delivers just than insight.

On the 22 June 1957 Nature, part of the Macmillan stable published the below analysis of the effect a new technology known as television is having on published information:

"Far from causing a decline in reading, as was once predicted, it is now becoming evident that television has led to a greatly increased sale of books dealing with topics which have proved popular on the screen. This is perhaps most evident in archaeology, but it is becoming noticeable in other fields too. The growing sport of undersea swimming has reinforced the demand for books about sea life, the publication of which has received a further fillip from the film and television successes of Hans Hass and Jacques Cousteau. We cannot blame the publishers for trying to satisfy this demand, but we can blame them for publishing books seemingly written in haste merely to profit from this fashion.”

Charkin rightly points out, "The messages are clear and still relevant. New technology does not necessarily kill old technology and can in fact enhance it." Perhaps  the information sector is jumping too quickly to blame Web 2.0 for the changing shape of information. I shall put these questions to Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amatuer, a polemic on how Web 2.0 is destroying our cultural and economic foundation, tomorrow.

Users of Apple Macintosh computers and open source operating systems may be prevented from using BBC information and content once the public broadcaster's iPlayer is launched later this year. The Open Source Consortium (OSC) is threatening to take its complaint to the European Commission.

OSC believes that by developing the iPlayer with computing giants Microsoft the BBC is forcing people to use Bill Gates' operating system. The iPlayer will allow searchers to download and watch BBC content on their own computers for up to 30 days after it was first broadcast. 

A statement from the BBC in response to the OSC complaint said, "The BBC aims to make its content as widely available as possible and has always taken a platform agnostic approach to its internet services". OSC though believes the iPlayer will only work on computers that use the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The BBC has opted to work with Microsoft because of the digital rights management (DRM) technology it has to offer which allows BBC information to be downloaded, but cannot be copied to a DVD and will automatically delete after 30 days.

OSC has taken its complaint to the BBC Trust, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Ofcom, the telecoms and broadcasting  regulator. It said its next step is to take the complaint to Europe.

Microsoft is also a key partner for the British Library.

Recently I was lucky enough to be part of a discussion panel organised by the City Information Group (CIG). The discussion centred on the future role of research and information professionals in the face of new networking technology, all dubbed Web 2.0, and how this technology will affect the working lives of information professionals.

My  hat  goes off to the information professionals at the event who put their hands in  the air and admitted they didn't fully understand the technology and the issues it presented to their working lives. It's a brave move in a busy room full of your peers. But it is OK to admit you don't understand the full complexity of the Web 2.0 plot. I left the conference feeling that almost everyone, apart from my colleagues Euan Semple and David Tebbutt, is a little shaky on some areas of Web 2.0. I too feel out of touch with RSS and FaceBook.

The problem with Web 2.0 is that there are so many different iterations of this technology, blogging, wiki encyclopaedia, virtual worlds created by users, social computing networks and image systems for sharing videos and photographs.  Is it any wonder that information professionals are, despite their deep natural understanding for information issues, lost in a virtual Sargosso Sea. 

At first I was worried that the attendees didn't fully understand this technology, but as the evening progressed I was re-invigorated to learn that on the whole, information professionals do want to learn and engage with this technology. And that is good news, because if the information community does not, it will lose out, because the next generation of information users will interact with information in a way so radically different from the way we do.

The first step along the rocky road to Web 2.0 is admitting what your level of understanding is, and I have nothing but admiration for those information professionals that admitted to a packed room that they were not part of this next generation, because by doing so, the information community can step back and take a look at what is required to fully embrace the technology and the all important information professionals.

There's something inevitable about libraries joining the Google Book Search library digitisation programme. Not so long ago the announcements were grasped with keen interest, now they excite as much interest as yet another series of Big Brother with, oh how shocking racism breaking out!

Of course, there is a colossal gulf of difference between the sad navel gazing of Big Brother and its assorted misfit viewers and contestants and the digitisation of 12 research libraries. Yesterday's announcement by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation is without doubt important to the organisations involved and the users.

But as each institution joins the Google project the tipping point between Google becoming the standard interface to the vast bulk of research information comes ever closer. And with each announcement we accept it as the norm. Recent deals have improved though, whether through a greater sympathy for the information community by Google, or, and more likely increased deal making savvy by the collection owners.  This recent deal, which will add 10 million copies of material to Google will include books in and out of copyright and the statements are very clear from the off, those titles still in copyright will be protected. The prickly issue of how publishers know whether their title is held by a library and will be digitised has still not been resolved though.

"This library digitisation agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education," said Lawrence Dumas, provost of

Northwestern

University

. I can't help feeling it’s a case of the major university libraries are part of this Google juggernaut, it cannot be beaten so institutions feel that they might as well join it.

In a wide ranging conversation Forum host Euan Semple asks the panellist what their assumptions and predictions are for the future of Web 2.0.

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer of Sun Microsystems begins with the idea that a something starts out as a wild idea and then becomes less contentious as it is discussed through comments, and wiki tools, you get the feeling that he sees this as the concrete that will ensure the foundations of Web 2.0 are strong.

Phipps describes Atom as the thinking man's RSS and he thinks forums, blogs and wikis will have Atom feeds. Semple adds how you have lots of little things that no one pays any attention to within an organisation, but then it builds up. Phipps responds that all of Sun's tools have tagging tools that do just this.

Nick Ward, media analyst with Panmure Gordon & Co, takes on the debate about where will Web 2.0 go as a business. Phipps finds it difficult to believe the profits of these companies will be difficult realise. So far for these companies to be floated on the stock market would be difficult and points to the fact that Last.fm and Friends Reunited were bought by large existing vendors, CBS and ITV respectively.

Thomson-Reuters deal is a sign of businesses having to restructure.  The city is sceptical are worried whether the ad supported model for the likes of Myspace really has legs to it. I simply think the whole issue of the business model for these and the loyalty towards general social media sites will struggle and it’s the more specialist ones that will triumph. There are a lot of B2B businesses that operate through jargon and barriers and they will have a great deal to lose through transparency from Web 2.0, law firms and broker firms are amongst those that could be threatened.

People want the name of a very big bank like UBS in on a deal so that if it goes wrong they can say, "well we had the best people in the world on this," but I would argue there are a few years while the barriers to remain up.

Semple says he would pay to be part of high quality networks, the ad revenue can go, Ward reminds him that subs revenue model is very slow to develop.

Marc Monseau, PR person for drug giants Johnson & Johnson thinks there has to be some guidance, Phipps adds that Sun bloggers all have to go through some training. "I see that as being one of the advantages, you then have a well informed workforce and that has benefits," Monseau said. Ward believes because it is public, it can make people more sensible, it is self regulating. Semple reminds everyone that it is easy to consider Web 2.0 as geeky for teenagers, yet there is an audit trail, which is a corporate thing.

People are using Facebook to create and manage their own identity and it means they cannot be treated as demographics anymore. Phipps agrees, all of the internet's evils is because it doesn't have strong identity mechanisms and is looking forward to strong identity, which he believes will damage spam and other areas.

Sun has a lot of tools being developed for identity management. Ward adds that mass culture is no longer needed to make a profit, discussing the long tail. Instead all of us watch and read block-busters and absorb all its marketing, we can all indulge our individual tastes and there will be greater cultural diversity. He thinks it is already happening. Phipps responds that the long tail is also about monopolising niches, but Ward doesn't believe that its all niche businesses pandering to Rupert Murdoch, because it will be easier to make and distribute products and make a profit from them.

Adriana Lukas believes it is all about focussing on the individual and the organisation will follow.

Guidewire Group held its third Innovate!Europe event in Zaragoza this week. It's a forum where entrepreneurs and inventors from start-ups, early adopters, venture capitalists, angel investors and journalists can mix and mingle and hear what each other has to say during the conference and showcase. This year, it was held in the impressive Teatro Principal in the heart of the city.

Thirty start-ups strutted their stuff and goodness knows how many speakers and panellists shared their insights. Some was at the edge of IWR's radar, but a lot was of great interest. Innovate provides a glimpse into the future of our digital world. No-one can be sure which companies will succeed and which will fail, but trends are clearly visible.

One of the main themes this year was that of 'discovery'. Not in a conventional search sense but more in the emergence of interesting information as a result of what users get up to in the various social services to which they belong. The other major theme was mobile telephony, especially ways of getting the price down.

Sticking with the discovery theme: you know, from the blog and the forum worlds, that people willingly reveal all sorts of stuff about themselves that they would never give up to an 'expert system' or a clipboard wielder. They find the value of a social web service so high, they are willing to open up. They share clippings, videos, pictures, recordings and their own information and options. They gain by enhancing their reputation and from others' willingness to share their own discoveries and insights.

The service provider can automatically draw conclusions from its clients' activities and make recommendations of other material or people likely to be of interest. A bit like the Amazon system but applied to social encounters.

This page at webjam will give a flavour of what I'm talking about. It also introduces another Innovate theme, a new kind of employee: the community manager.

Every time I use Wikipedia I discover a new widget or facet to it that I really enjoy. I enjoy it because these facets make my user experience better.

In juxtaposition to this I have been talking to publishers about the changing shape of the market and how they do feel threatened by Wikipedia. To combat this, publishers are, rightly, publishing promotional material to educate students and users to skip the fast food Wiki diet and tuck into some healthy peer-reviewed material from the library.

All well and good, but as our attendance to recent conferences regarding greener business practices demonstrated, telling people to turn the telly off standby just doesn't work. Instead we have to develop integrated processes that subtly change their behaviour by meeting them where they want and making their existing behaviour greener.

I can't help feeling that our own community needs to do something similar. IWR doesn't want to rubbish the teaching of good information literacy, but we can't help feeling that this education and an improvement in the information should take place within Wikipedia.

Now, before you all shoot me down, let me explain. Wikipedia is a community, not just of those that put time and effort into editing it, but also the users. Therefore the best place to meet your perspective users, introduce them to your content and advise them on better information gathering practices is at Wikipedia. Information professionals and information providers should be playing a considerable part in improving the content on Wikipedia; you can cite their own content and generate leads and users from there.

Wikipedia is in many ways a platform, it has a host of information within it, and it seamlessly leads users to other sources within and beyond Wikipedia, so therefore the information industry should accept and embrace Wikipedia. After all it would be a waste of time telling anyone not to use Google as the web search engine of choice today, Google is a platform and it has become a part of our landscape. Wikipedia has the same potential, IWR knows publishing houses in the business area that are updating entries for areas they are specialists in and have gained around 200 extra visitors a month from Wikipedia alone and the subsequent revenue.

Environmental issues are top of the agenda, so much so that even the Conservative Party has noticed them from deep within Notting Hill. To some of us, the affect of the environment is blindingly obvious, it is after all, well all around us. But business and politics have, until recently chosen to ignore the environment.

Now though the effects of climate change are beginning to affect businesses. Nothing gets attention more than a cost. Insurance companies must be beginning to wonder about how many Boscastle floods, or rogue typhoons in London and Birmingham their profit margins can absorb.

The good news is reaction is beginning to take place, but its not an easy issue to understand. Within the green agenda are many debates, these range from oil company sponsored "science" which denies many of the evidence based claims about climate change, right through to environmentalists campaigning against wind farms (sounds strange doesn't it) because they can damage bird migration routes.

When issues are too complex there is a danger that businesses will avoid them until it is forced upon them, which is often too late. Information, as we know, is the answer to these difficult issues, the trouble is, what information do you turn to in order to help your organisation go green?  The May issue of IWR tries to help by giving some pointers.

One of Germany's largest media companies, Bertelsmann is considering the acquisition of Thomson Learning, which the Thomson corporation put up for sale late last year because it feels the academic electronic content and text book publisher does not fit with its strategy.

Bertelsmann has entered into an agreement with Citigroup Private Equity and Morgan Stanley Principal Investments to form a fund of £2.5bn which will allow Bertelsmann to take a minority share in information companies with a view to an outright acquisition at a later date.

According to the Financial Times Thomson Learning is the first acquisition the new team has in mind. Bertelsmann already owns RTL Television, which Channel 5 is part of and the publishing company Random House. The media giant will add 500m Euros to the fund with the rest being supplied by the funding companies.

Tomorrow is the closing date for the 2007 Brit Blog Awards. No industry can exist these days without an award ceremony it seems. Sadly these awards, sponsored by web search provider Ask and organised by one of London's free newspapers has failed to recognise that blogging has taken off and offers a whole array of communities the chance to communicate.

There are categories for technology, sport, fashion, politics, arts & entertainment; travel, youth and weird and wonderful.

Perhaps because the organisers, the Metro newspaper and its parent the derisive Daily Mail have a poor track record at good news reporting there is no category for news, nor is there a category for business blogs, science and culture. Any one who has picked up either of these papers will be aware of their inabilities in these areas; and therefore it is perhaps sensible that they don't try to judge quality bloggers in these areas.

But the truth is, blogging has become a serious platform for creating, sharing and delivering information and if it is to have an awards ceremony, it needs one that has credibility.

Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the national funding body for scientific, technical and academic research has struck a licensing deal with British engineering and management academic publishers Emerald Group Publishing.

All registered students of higher education, faculty and research based government employees will now be given access to all Emerald journals online. The deal, negotiated by the Universitäts-und Stadtbibliothek Köln (USB)and Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaften (IZ) provides access to content published between January 1994 and December 2005. 

Under the terms of the agreement 339 universities in Germany will gain access to Emerald titles, which include popular academic journals Management Decision, the European Journal of Marketing and engineering  title Soldering & Surface Mount Technology.

Subscription management specialists Swets has launched two integrated versions of its SwetsWise product. SwetsWise now comes in two editions, one for end users and another for its traditional library user base, named Corporate Edition and Library Edition respectively.

Both systems mean users have a single interface for managing all aspects of subscription management. SwetsWise Subscriptions Library Edition replaces Dataswets Connect and manages both electronic and print subscriptions, provides downloadable online reports and status reports on e-licenses will be available soon.