Today's issue of Science carries a story about a new invention from IBM called Magnetic Domain-Wall Racetrack Memory. It works by storing data in a permalloy nanowire, a thousand times thinner than a human hair. It promises to increase reliability and speed of storage while slashing the amount of energy needed to power it.

The storage density can be hundreds of times that of today's best flash memories. And, because the wires can be made to loop from the surface of the chip, they overcome the well-known chip density restrictions of Moore's Law.

Without wishing to demean the technology, the storage wire acts like a chain of magnetised buckets. The read/write wires switch the polarity or copy the state as the buckets are propelled past using tiny electrical currents. Everything happens at the atomic level.

At the moment disk drives store information cheaply but, because they are mechanical, they are relatively slow at reading and writing. Flash memory is fast at reading but slow at writing. Both have reliability issues over the long term. IBM claims that racetrack memory will be inherently stable and durable.

An MP3 player that can contain half a million songs sounds ridiculous, but it gives an idea of the potential capacity of one of these devices. Because they will use a fraction of the energy of conventional disk drives while providing both speed and reliability, they appear to offer significant environmental benefits in all storage situations.

It's a shame we're going to have to wait seven to ten years for them. But, by going public with this development, IBM has just fired the first salvo in a new storage war. Others will be clambering to get in first with high density, highly reliable and energy efficient devices.

This can only be good news for people like us whose lives are so information-centric.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Peter Wiley the chairman of international scientific publishing giants Wiley declined to discuss the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) anti-OA campaign today. Wiley, a former journalist and a published author, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair and celebrating the company's 200th anniversary.

With an extension of the hand Chairman Wiley handed the issue to Stephen Smith, Senior VP for Europe and International Development. "Our general view of OA is, it's another business model," said Smith.

Both men were keen to point out, rightly, that publishing is an expensive business and agreed that greater clarity about the role and importance of peer review and the publishing process would benefit the sector right now. Something critics have said PRISM is preventing.

"OA fees are going up," Wiley said, expressing concern that the new sector is unsustainable, in his only comment on the subject.

Wiley would be drawn on authors understanding of the publishing process, saying that in academic and trade (novels etc sold in bookshop) there is a "lack of realism about the publishing process".

But as they celebrate their 200th birthday, Wiley doesn't look or sound like a threatened beast.

PRISM is the Association of American Publisher's controversial lobbying group that is claiming that open access (OA) publishing is a threat to peer review.

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.

IWR has been keeping an eye on the Free Our Data campaign which the Technology supplement of daily newspaper The Guardian has been running. We've been watching it and supporting it. Now Charles Arthur, editor of the Technology Guardian supplement, has asked IWR and its readers to join the campaign.

"The more people and organisations we have on board, the better our chances of success," he said. The campaign seeks to make data which the public has paid for freely available, which will then stimulate new information resources for information professionals and the public alike to use.

The campaign uses a blog as its central repository and communications point, so its easy for all of us to add more information to the cause. So if you know of examples of government information costing you or your organisation, despite having already paid for it once through your taxes, let the campaign know. "If everyone joins, it would be sort of hard for the government to ignore," Arthur adds.

The campaign, which has been running since 2006 ,has highlighted some interesting disparities in

Whitehall

's information policies. Ordnance Survey (OS), known for its maps has been revealed to charging British citizens repeatedly for geographic information that is already funded by the public purse. It has been revealed that local authorities pay the OS for map information during the planning application process, planning authorities also pay separately for the same map information. During the campaign it has been revealed that a total of eight separate payments arrive at the OS as part of a planning application.

There are bound to be many more cases like this and it would be great if Information World Review and its readers can be part of a campaign to make the information we already own more easily available.

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.

Nature Precedings, the new online service that allows scientists to publish unpublished manuscripts, conference papers and presentations onto a central repository has been warmly welcomed by The Cluetrain Manifesto author David Weinberger, but some information professionals disagree.

Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature describes Precedings as a place to reveal papers before they are reviewed and published in journals, which he describes in an open email to the scientific information community as "relatively slow and expensive".

He describes Precedings as a "complement" to journals. He believes the problem with pre-prints and conference papers is that they are not "easy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution – or funder specific) and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system)". With Precedings Nature aims to offer a central global repository where material is easily discovered and citable.

"This is very cool," Weinberger says on his blog. "From CC to  DOI, it hits all the right notes." Because the service is from Nature, Weinberger believes the launch is a "big deal".

But Monica McCormick of North Carolina State University Library commenting disagrees, "why are you so enthusiastic… there are a large and growing number of university-based repositories". She believes that these repositories are easy to find and can be cited. "Nature is jumping on a bandwagon built by university libraries and scholars, and disingenuously claiming that their service is better. They have their undoubtedly high reputation to attract attention to their efforts, but how is Precedings genuinely distinct from hundreds of other digital pre-print repositories?

But Weinberger disagrees, "When one of the premier journals des this, it signals a new level of acceptance." 

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.

Climate change and biofuels are closely connected and currently in the midst of a great deal of debate. Two new information resources from Nature and Biomed Central may just clarify some of the facts. A recent investigation at IWR demonstrated that businesses' looking for good information on climate change are faced with scant goods at present.

Nature Reports Climate Change is a new website from the Nature Publishing Group. It launched its Reports range last year focusing  on Avian Flu following the wide interest in the issue and its widespread news coverage. Nature Reports aim to provide free access to the "science behind the news", the company states. The site will cover economic, political and social implications of climate change. Nature claim that the information is accessible to all levels of readers including scientists, students and journalists.

BioMed Central  is to launch a new open access online journal Biotechnology for Biofuels. The journal aimed at government, scientific research and private enterprises  that are increasingly looking towards Biofuels as an answer to climate change and energy security issues.  Of particular interest to the journal will be research in to creating the fuel from cellulosic biomass.

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.

Freedom of Information campaigner, author and journalist Heather Brooke is, understandably getting hot under the collar regarding the recently tabled changes to the Freedom of Information Act and its latest development, the Trade Secretary claiming the Act is placing "good government at risk".

Alistair Darling, the Labour Trade Secretary has, according to reports in Scottish newspapers written to the Secretary for Constitutional Affairs detailing his concerns. Brooke describes the story in the Scotsman as something she would expect to see in a Kenyan or Nigerian newspaper, but not here in the UK. "Politicians are fighting off demands for the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act," she says of Kenya and Nigeria, although the same can now be said of our own Mother of Parliaments.

The Scotsman quotes Darling's letter as stating, "“If we are to live under constant threat of publication, this will prevent MPs from expressing their views frankly when writing to a minister. We need urgent advice on what the position is.” Brooke responds, "Politicians as delicate creatures frightened to speak in public? As if!"

Juxtaposing the intensive scrutiny that scientific information receives compared to politics, Brooke very cleverly shows what risks society would be placed under if scientific research information was treated in the same way as policy forming is. "Some one could determine (in secret) that his snake oil was the best solution to a problem (treating polio, for example) based on findings that only he and his minions could access. No data would be published so no one could challenge legitimacy."

Brooke states that this is exactly how Parliament works and argues, "It is only by debating the relative facts and merits of an issue that a superior solution can be found."

With the ink barely dry on the sale of Thomson Learning, the Thomson Corporation has succeeded, barring regulatory problems, in taking over news provider Reuters. The deal worth £8.7 billion will create the world’s largest news and financial data provider. 

The BBC claims the deal is not popular amongst Reuters reporters and some users because Reuters legendary independence is  now in question.

By merging together Thomson-Reuters, as the new company will be know, has leap forged market dominator Bloomberg, the US provider owned by the mayor of New York. Michael Bloomberg.

Reuters and Thomson believe the tie up will create £250 million in savings, although no specific plans on these savings have  been released yet. A statement did highlight that together Thomson and Reuters will be in a better position to compete with Bloomberg. Niall Fitzgerald, Reuters chairman said in a statement,  “The shared expertise and complementary strengths of these two companies makes for a strategically compelling and financially attractive combination.” 

Reuters, Thomson and rival Bloomberg compete fiercely in the financial terminal information market used by stock exchange traders.

Great Britain

’s Reuters is also famed for its news agency that supplies news coverage to the world’s newspapers and broadcasters. Bloomberg has 33% of the terminal market, according to analysts figures out in April 2007, with Reuters holding 23% and Thomson 11%.

The new company will be listed  on both the

London

and

Toronto

stock exchanges and will have an annual revenue of around $12 billion.

According to the BBC, the merger could damage Reuters standing as an independent source of news information. “For more than 150 years, Reuters has been one of the great independent news organisations. No longer,” said Robert Peston, BBC Business Editor on the Radio 4 Today programme. “Reuters’ independence has been guaranteed by the structure of the business, which prohibits any individual from owning 15% or more of the company.”

He went on to say that Reuters journalists are unhappy with the deal because the “prohibition is being waved for the Thomson family” which will now own 53% of the new larger business.

One clear winner is Tom Glocer who has led Reuters back to health and presided over the sell off of its half of the Factiva business. Glocer will now take over the helm of Thomson-Reuters when Richard Harrington, Thomson president and chief executive retires.

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.

As part of a review of commitments made to bolster nanotechnology in 2005, the Council for Science and Technology (CST) has said that the UK government has failed to provide adequate funding for research into the possible risks of nanotech as well as jeopardising the UK’s position as world leaders in the field, bbc.co.uk reported today.

The original report was commissioned by the government from the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering and was published in 2004; it highlighted the opportunities for nanotech as well as risks of the developing technology.

It was revealed that of £90 million spent on research and the promotion of commercial nanoproducts, in 2004 alone, only £600,000 was spent on researching the impact of nanoscience over a five year period.

The new review did get some recognition for making inroads in researching the measuring and minimising of workplace exposure to nanomaterials as opposed to the wider areas of environmental and health implications. However comments made by Professor Sir John Beringer, Chair of the CST review were critical “The government made a very clear commitment that research needed to be done to understand more about the toxicology and possible risks that may arise from some of the nanotechnologies, but there has been virtually nothing done by government to resolve this problem.”

Part of the problem seems that funding for this particular sector of nanotechnology has not been applied for by researchers, Malcolm Wicks, Minister for Science and Innovation believes this is in part due to the prioritising of “more pressing research” he said “Our focus so far has been on the areas which needed to be addressed first, such as the measurement and characterisation of nanoscale materials, and the exposure of laboratory and manufacturing staff,” One would think this was pretty reasonable when researching a radical new technology, however he went on to say, “Research is underway into potential health and environmental hazards but we are disappointed that few researchers wishing to investigate the implications to human health have applied for the funding that is available.”

Meanwhile the BBC article reported the CST review is critical of the strategy used by government in allocating funds, saying that, “rather than outlining a systematic research programme to examine these potential risks, the government has relied on a reactive and ad hoc funding programme that has failed to deliver”. Sir John commented further saying “The safe development of a new technology should not depend on whether an academic wins a highly competitive research grant”.   

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.