So where do you stand on the great e-book debate? Is the digitisation of books as inevitable as the digitisation of every other as aspect of life in the western world in the 21st century? Or is an e-book ruining the experience of reading a book where there is as much physical pleasure as mental? Many find it hard to divide the love of reading from the love of books with careful readers finding the physical properties of the paper and the dust jacket as pleasurable as the mental devouring of the written word. It seems impossible that such experiences will be lost. However research suggests that those who are used to online are ready to embrace the e-book in a way that seemed unlikely just a few years ago. One reason why e-books may be on the cusp of being a serious proposition is that the technology has caught up with the initial hype and promise. Carrying around a thick book may have its disadvantages but that is still a better bet than being in possession of an e-book reader which doesn't quite have the right screen size, battery lifespan, lighting or weight.
Research commissioned by Nielsen Book showed that 3% of regular internet users were "extremely likely" to buy a dedicated e-book reader in the next three months with a further 4% very likely to make a purchase. The online survey generated 6,500 respondents and illustrated a widespread awareness of the device. The intent to purchase e-books was also measured with 9% of respondents extremely or very likely to buy an e-book within the same timeframe.
Whether you may have expected a higher response among such a digitally aware audience is a matter of dispute. Of course given the economic gloom and the lack of consumer confidence maybe this is not the best time to be selling a new concept to a fragile feeling buying and reading public. But perhaps what is most interesting is that Nielsen is taking e-books seriously enough to be developing a way of measuring the sales of e-books alongside the method it has for counting physical book sales. Comparing sales of e-books with their real life counterparts should be a good measure of how many of us are truly embracing the digital world.

Posted by P. Williams | September 26, 2008 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Electronic Document & Records Management, General | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

On the 25 June 2008, the Cabinet Office decreed that all government departments would have to encrypt important information held on discs, USB sticks or laptops in its wide ranging review of security practices. This conclusion could be either seen as a sensible approach to managing the vast data government holds or, less charitably, a statement of the obvious.
If it were a statement of the obvious, it wasn't quite obvious enough. Data handing procedures in government: final report doesn't seem to have been read, or understood, or acted upon by the Cabinet Office's colleagues at the Home Office or by suppliers to the Home Office. Less than two months after the tome hit the streets, the UK government is once again mopping up after at another hugely embarrassing loss of data.
Back in February I wrote on this blog. Data loss has become a running story over the last few months. Not so much is the question "Has there been a data breach?" more a case of "Who now?"
And that "Who now?" question keeps being repeated. It is hard to think of a government department which hasn't mislaid data. There is something of a routine to all this: government department confesses to the latest cock up. This is followed by emerging of embarrassing details. Opposition politicians express their outrage, experts express their opinions and inquires are set in train. And then another data loss comes to light (repeat above).
In this latest example, my thought processes go like this: so at one stage the data on 84,000 criminals was encrypted, that's good. And then it was decoded, well OK maybe that was necessary so the data could be used. Then the decoded data was put on a memory stick. At this point I want to shout: "What did you do that for?"
The Times reported this morning that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was furious. Who can blame her? The BBC reported that PA Consulting has searched its premises and looked at CCTV recordings in an attempt to recover the missing memory stick. If the security guys and gals at PA start by questioning everyone who has a pocket, wallet, handbag or briefcase that should narrow it down. Unbelievable (again).

Posted by P. Williams | August 22, 2008 Electronic Document & Records Management, General, Information Management | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Here's a timely reminder for all those high flying company executives who are off on holidays and can't quite tear themselves away from the thrill of work. As you pack the laptop or the BlackBerry ("Honestly darling I probably won't even switch it on and certainly not when the kids want to play") say to yourself: "Nearly 4,000 laptops go lost or missing in Europe's major airports every week." No, not a figure made up by a desperate hack in the midst of a silly season but the headline finding from Ponemon Institute for Dell. This statistic summons up images of piles of laptops strewn around arrivals and departures halls like so much modern art. How do we manage to lose so many?
And while the amount of kit that is getting mislaid is mind boggling, equally astonishing is that fact that the research claims that nearly half of the professionals surveyed take no steps to protect the data in the event of a loss or theft. Maybe that would be OK if the only information on there was the holiday packing list but nearly half reckon they keep confidential information on their laptops. It is hard to assume those two halves don't overlap so a fair amount of important info is sculling around the world's airports unprotected. The other astonishing statistic unearthed by this research is that 57% of the 3,300 laptops in the eight largest airports that end up in lost and found departments are never reclaimed. Is that because people want an excuse for a nice upgrade or maybe we're all too cynical to believe that something that is once lost can ever be found?
Whatever the lesson from all this is plain. While business travellers clearly need to carry the kit, if you are off on holiday think twice before you haul that laptop into the hand luggage. They'd be much safer locked away in the office and you would definitely have a better holiday. Enjoy.

Posted by P. Williams | August 1, 2008 Electronic Document & Records Management, General, Information Management | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Evidence is mounting that professionals are seriously embracing online professional networking. Let me point you to two signs - involving the legal and the accountancy profession on both sides of the Atlantic - that may indicate a trend. The IT Faculty of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW) has launched a new professional development portal called IT Counts to help institute members to keep up to date with IT issues that impact their working lives. The ICAEW hopes to roll out more interest-based communities to its 132,000 members. You may have heard of IT Counts because it won Incisive Media's inaugural Web 2.0 innovation awards a few weeks back.
More recently a US-focused survey found that almost 50% of attorneys are members of online social networks and over 40% believe professional networking has the potential to change the business and practice of law over the next five years. The Networks for Counsel Survey conducted by Leader Networks and commissioned by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell claims to be the first survey to examine social networking practices among the legal profession.
Leader Networks noted that the legal profession is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies so attorneys' readiness to use online networking tools represents a significant shift in behaviour. LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell certainly thinks that the legal profession is ready to embrace social networking as a serious work tool. It is looking to take advantage by launching a global network for the legal community later this year. This research was part of an exercise to assess what exactly lawyers wanted. Up to now social networking usage falls among older professionals but these guys aren't daft. If they see the benefit they'll learn.
Many professionals say they are finding it increasingly difficult to do the meeting and greeting necessary to find and keep work. Online professional networking tools offer the promise of an efficient and effective way of making and keeping contacts, especially in a global context. The professions are beginning to see that these online tools are now fit for a serious business purpose. It looks likely that online professional networks are coming of age.

Posted by P. Williams | July 18, 2008 Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, General | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

By Phil Muncaster.

Autonomy has just announced a new e-discovery solution to increase its presence in this burgeoning space. When it bought archiving and e-discovery vendor Zantaz last year, the firm clearly signaled its intent to expand into areas related to its core competency and heritage of enterprise search. And while it`s still best known for the latter - and while it continues to make oodles of cash providing big name clients like the BBC, Boeing and Coca Cola with search technology - the e-discovery space represents a massive opportunity, as firms look to overcome the challenges presented by an increasing raft of legislation and industry regulations.

In the US, of course, e-discovery has been driven mainly by the recently updated FRCP - Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - which lay down aggressive new rules for the discovery and presentation of electronic records as evidence in US courts. E-discovery, archiving, retention; they're all bound up in this area and with strict penalties for the destruction of evidence also part of the new FRCP, the stakes have been raised significantly for firms. Not that this is just a US problem either - just as SOX was felt in other countries, so the FRCP could have an impact elsewhere, including this side of the Atlantic.

This new hosted solution features technology to accelerate the time it takes your legal bods to review electronically stored-information and classify it according to its status, and also to review the information and make an early assessment of the related case. As you'd expect from Autonomy, which I guess prides itself on being able to scale in the enterprise search space about as far and beyond what any organisation needs, the technology can process terabytes of electronically-stored info without blinking - in over 100 languages and 1000 data types. The filtering of information in such massive data sets can make it easier to gain visibility into that information, says Autonomy.

It remains to be seen whether this being a hosted solution causes any hesitation among enterprise buyers - after all, it's meant to dig out the most sensitive of sensitive documents; will firms prefer to keep this sort of capability in-house? In its defence on the security front though, Autonomy maintains that because all elements of the solution are maintained by a single vendor, this reduces the risk of data becoming lost or corrupted, and makes the whole process more auditable. Let's see what happens; e-discovery is certainly here to stay though, and you can probably expect more big name vendors on the content management scene trying to get in on the action with "holistic, end-to-end solutions".

Posted by dgriffin | June 23, 2008 Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Promises like pie crusts are made to be broken. Or maybe we need to update that old saying to promises like data protection guidelines are made to be broken. I had made a half promise to myself that the best policy on the seemingly endless flow of news on data and information that had...whoops... disappeared was to ignore it. Maybe like unruly children various government departments, ministers and civil servants would just stop making embarrassing data breaches if we all looked the other way and pretended they weren't doing it.
But the events, hard on the heels of each other, of the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears having her laptop stolen so soon after south west trains were apparently overflowing with top secret documents was just infuriating and reignited the great data debate. What is puzzling is why so many people seem so slow to learn the lessons from the misfortunes of others about the necessity to take the most basic precautions to protect data.
I've got this image of the street value of juicy information falling faster than a stone as members of the criminal classes are overwhelmed by bits of kit and secret documents that they are trying to offload in dodgy pubs in Salford or near Waterloo station.
The situation has become so serious that after the Blears' laptop was taken (reinforced glass was smashed in the raid you'll be pleased to know, barely careless at all then) that, according to newspaper reports, Prime Minister Gordon Brown was forced to intervene urging ministers to enforce "procedures on the treatment of information".
Sounds like a good idea to me. And it takes a prime minister to tell everyone to follow the rules which they have drawn up.
The question which is intriguing me is what and how? As the habit of throwing sensitive data away is clearly a hard one to break, I want to know which government department will be the next culprit and how. I may call up Williams Hill and see if they are prepared to put up some odds. Is this a joking matter? No. Should we be taking this seriously? Of course we should and so should those who are losing the data. Come on boys and girls, it's time to stop. Promise now.

Posted by P. Williams | June 20, 2008 Electronic Document & Records Management, Information Management | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Civil servants are reeling in the wake of the horrific news that CDs containing the records of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) database have been lost, and the futher news of DVLA data being lost. The full cost to tax paying members of the public may not be fully realised for years to come.

This debacle is not only an example of incredibly poor information management, but also a sign of a wider problem in the UK, that you get what you pay for. Or in this case you don't get what you pay for. 

Information management is, or rather was, at the heart of British life. Travel to former colonies like India or Australia and they'll gladly inform you of the regimented behaviour towards information that led to government structures that have served the sub-continent and prison colony well to date. Yet, those standards have dropped.

An IWR reporter remarked as we debated the issue, how come information of this value was so easy to simply download and burn to a CD?  Technology preventing such blunders is not new and is a basic function of many information management systems.

Revelations of the missing information came a day after a report on the BBC's Today programme that the Driving Standards Agency and vehicle licensing body the DVLA employees take on average three weeks sick leave a year. Missing information and low staff moral are examples of a civil service that is poorly funded and poorly managed.

It is too easy to wag the finger of blame at civil servants, when in truth a much wider debate needs to take place.  As tax payers and child benefit recipients we are angry and worried, as information professionals we are dumbfounded that such lapses could have occurred.  What of our role as citizens?  Since the 1980s we've wanted a John Lewis service, but only paid Tesco value brand prices.  If you want John Lewis quality, you pay John Lewis prices.  On the high street this modus operandi fits well with the public, as they choose when they want quality and when they want to increase their spending. So why is it that we expect our state services to manage high level information on a low level budget?

This needs to be a debate about our society and its values, literally, as well as an improvement in information management.

Posted by mchillingworth | December 18, 2007 Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Ben Toth reveals how he keeps his information intake healthy and why blogging can be more valuable than social networks such as Facebook.

Q Who are you?
A Ben Toth, 48, domiciled on a farm in Herefordshire. I trained as a librarian at University College
London about 15 years ago. I used to be the director of the NHS National Knowledge Service when it was part of Connecting for Health. The best known service it runs is the National Library for Health (www.library.nhs.uk). Currently, I’m designing the enterprise architecture for the National Institute for Health Research (www.nihr.ac.uk). I’m also writing a book on Health 2.0, which will be published in parts later this year.

Q Where is your blog?
A You’ll find it at http://nelh.blogspot.com

Q Describe your blog and the categories on it
A It’s just a public notebook really. Its content tends to reflect what I’m working on, but it’s mostly about libraries, health and the web. I could use Microsoft Word to keep my notes. I could use del.icio.us. But a blog is more visible and more in the flow of the things I’m reading, which
are almost invariably on the web. A lot of the entries I make are just notings – highlight, right-click and
send to Blogger. I use tags but I’m not very strict about categorising things.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Since about 2001. Eighteen months ago I lost all my entries and had to start again.

Q What started you blogging?
A I was helping my daughter set up a website as part of a Brownie project she was doing. I couldn’t use the National Electronic Library for Health servers and I didn’t want to manage Apache or pay someone to, so we used Tripod. Which worked, but it was difficult to use. And then I read about Evan Williams’ little project, which became Blogger, had a go with it, and haven’t looked back. It’s become a
habit, and I haven’t got tired of it yet.

Q What bloggers do you watch and link to, and why?
A These days I follow things through RSS if I can, so my blog-watching is mostly via a feed reader. The only blog I regularly visit is Dave Winer’s (www.scripting.com) because he’s taken blog writing to a level where the argument is developed through the day and so needs to be read on the page. I look at Techmeme (www.techmeme.com), but that’s not really a blog. I used to maintain a list of blogs
that I linked to through blogrolling, but I can’t see the point of doing that any more. The social web takes care of that sort of affiliation-showing much better.

Q Do you comment on other blogs?
A I don’t comment much. Sometimes I carp from the sidelines on e-healthinsider (www.e-health-insider.com), but I don’t think there’s much value in commenting or reading comments. That’s not to say that discussion isn’t valuable, but I’d rather read views as blog entries rather than comments on
someone else’s blog.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your blog presence?
A It’s the best way of keeping in touch with what’s going on, and keeping a blog maintains some
visibility to people.

Q How does blogging benefit your career?
A Blogging and RSS are really important for me professionally. They keep me up to date in a way
that nothing else can.

Q What good things have happened to you solely because you blog?
A Making professional contacts that I otherwise wouldn’t have and maintaining ones that might
otherwise have fallen off. In some ways blogging is more useful than LinkedIn and Facebook
as a social networking tool. But it’s really only a matter of time until traditional blogging gets divided
up between Facebook, Vlogging and Twitter.

Q Setting work aside, which blogs do you read just for fun?
A The Fake Steve Jobs blog was great (http://fakesteve.blogspot.com). And when I need a chuckle, I check out the Dilbert RSS feed (http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf ).

What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A The reliably interesting starting points on library matters for me are:
■ www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
■ http://orweblog.oclc.org
■ www.philbradley.typepad.com
■ http://tomroper.typepad.com
And Jon Udell is a first-class technologist who happens to like libraries (http://blog.jonudell.net)

Posted by mchillingworth | December 11, 2007 Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

We're used to offshoring work to other countries to achieve cost reductions or follow-the-sun working, or both. We're also used to having some of our computing activities and services hosted remotely through web hosts, Salesforce.com, Google, Facebook et al.

Some of these companies run huge data centres and they are concerned about continuity of energy supplies. Some are siting themselves near renewable energy sources, others moving to where they can get the stuff cheap or to locations where they can avoid declaring their energy consumption. (True, but you can do your own research on that one.)

Anyone who's a serious consumer of power is trying to find ways to get the consumption down. Hardware and software suppliers are having a great time selling virtualisation software, efficient new kit and clever new cooling systems. And, when customers have all done this and got themselves sorted out, they'll still find that the need for computing resources will grow and they'll have to find new ways to cope.

Well, with a hat tip to an announcement by Data Íslandia and Hitachi Data Systems, another possibility has surfaced. Why not move all the hosts to safe countries where natural energy abounds? The 'safe' is probably the main challenge. If you think 'solar' then some of the hottest countries also happen to be the least desirable from this perspective.

Iceland, on the other hand, has a rather unusual combination of plenty of renewable geothermal and hydro-electric energy coupled with a cool climate. It has a technically literate population and it is relatively secure. No-one seems to want to invade it, for example.

Data Íslandia specialises in providing disk- and tape-based long-term data archiving services. Yesterday's Hitachi deal is based on its data management services which will enable multinational organisations to address the management, compliance and environmental burden of exploding data volumes. Data Íslandia director, Sol Squires, says "virtualising six-month old information, which is effectively digital toxic waste, is a very poor use of resources." Customers will be able to offload stale data while still having real-time access to it.

No doubt there are a million political reasons why I'm wrong, but Iceland strikes me as an environmentally agreeable and secure place to house our national digitised libraries. Maybe our tax records too.

Posted by David Tebbutt | December 7, 2007 Electronic Document & Records Management | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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. 

Posted by mchillingworth | December 6, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)