Wi-Fi Zone Finder Portal Program Launched by Wi-Fi Alliance

Wi-Fi Alliance — MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — (MARKET WIRE) — 03/18/2004 — The Wi-Fi Alliance announced today that it is launching a new Web portal program on March 29th to promote public awareness and use of Wi-Fi ZONE hot spots around the globe. Partners that join this free program will be able to offer online visitors access to the official Wi-Fi ZONE Finder directory of public hotspot locations that use Wi-Fi CERTIFIED equipment. This program’s goals are to improve the user experience and provide program partners with an easy way to offer Wi-Fi

From Library Information Technology Association (LITA)

Tech Trends for Libraries

XML

RFID

Copyright

Metasearching

OPACs and User Behavior

Policies and Technology

User Interface Design

Digital Rights Management

Personal Information Management (PIM)

Stephen Abram in his talk at Computer in Libraries 2004, pointed us towards an interesting October 2003 study, Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour by Jannica Heinstrom, Abo Akademi University, Finland.

Dimension of Personality & Level of Trait

Neuroticism —-> Hi Level Sensitive, Nervous vs Low Level Secure, Confident

Extraversion —> Hi Level Outgoing, Energetic vs Low Level Shy, Withdrawn

Openness —–> Hi Level Inventive, Curious vs Low Level Cautious, Conservative

Agreeableness -> Hi Level Friendly, Compassionate vs Low Competitive, Outspoken

Conscientiousness –>Hi Efficient, organized vs Low Level Easy-going, Careless

How does personality influence searching behaviour?

Sample Conclusions

Neuroticism was related to preference for confirming information, concern over time spent on searching, difficulties with relevance judgement, and insecurity with database searching.

Extraversion was related to informal information retrieval as well as preference for thought provoking documents over documents which confirmed previous ideas.

Openness to experience was related to broad information seeking, incidental information acquisition, critical information judgement, preference of thought provoking documents instead of documents which confirmed previous results.

Check out the link for more details.

Featured Roy Tennant, California Digital Library; Mary Lee Kennedy, Consultant & most recently Director of Knowledge Networks at Microsoft; Stephen Abram, new VP, Innovation Initiatives, Sirsi and in-coming President of the Canadian Library Association.

Each speaker had a theme for their trends:

Roy talked about the golden age for digital libraries based on the following trends: standards & protocols, XML which is now part of our infrastructure, and the crisis in scholarly publication which is brining institutional repositories to the forefront.

Mary Lee focused on “getting personal” or “it’s all about me!”. She discussed instant messaging which is immediate and builds trust networks, personal portals which brings different applications into one space to improve relevance, and content integration which allows just-in-time content to be embedded in applications that support workflow processes. The latter delivers information and content at the point of need and where clients make decisions.

Stephen, said “its all about people”, and focused on people and what they do — work, learn, and play. He talked about workflow integration (IM conversations, link resolvers and more), massive archives and digital repositories, nomadic use of devices which allow us to contextualize, learning on the run, visual display, and he finished with some information on personality and searching. He referred to our world as an information ocean, not a highway, one where we explore the space and context is king.

From our colleague,

Marydee Ojala, live at Computers in Libraries, DC

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

OK, that title’s a bit misleading. What I really want to talk about is the sessions that were about blogging, not actually blogging the sessions. First of all, there was a terrific pre-conference workshop given by Steve Cohen and Jenny Levine. I poked my head in while they were talking about the differences among the various search engines designed specifically for finding information on blogs. Another time when I listened in, they were intently discussing RSS feeds. I wish I’d been able to hear the entire workshop.

This morning (Thursday) I caught Michael Angeles, Information Specialist, Lucent Technologies, talking about the intersection of Knowledge Management with blogs. Some of this was a repeat of his article in Library Journal, but some was not. He sees libraries as uniquely positioned to be both aggregator and disseminator. I liked his road map to internal blog creation and his characterizing blogs as “guerilla information architecture.” I’m not sure about his phrase “the techno social life of blogs.” Tying how (and whether) to establish blogs within an organization, he rightly pointed out, requires that you understand the culture of that organization.

There were other sessions on blogs, but I’m not sure I’ll hear all of them. If you do, let us know what your take is.

From our colleague,

Marydee Ojala, live at Computers in Libraries, DC

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

Thursday’s keynote speaker, David Seuss, started his talk by saying he was the happiest person in the room to be at Computers in Libraries. Having sold his company, Northern Light, then bought it back, he certainly has reason to be delighted to be back in the library and information world. His talk about the Web of the future echoed one term from Cliff’s previous day keynote — “unintended consequences.” Seuss acknowledged the difficulties inherent in predicting something that’s unintended, but charged ahead none less. What do people expect from “The Google Age?” According to Seuss, that all information will be available to everybody with a common interface and be free. Essentially, this is impossible. Instead, Seuss thinks we need librarians to organize the Web, to put boundaries around specialized topic areas of information, and to create fragmented subsets of information. The ultimate future will be Personal Search Engines, engines that search content only for you. How this would work at a public library reference desk I don’t quite understand.

His final prediction was that there’s a bright future for complexity. In my opinion, there’s been a pretty stellar past for complexity as well, particularly for librarians.

Ten Years into the Web: The Search Problem is Nowhere Near Solved [ PowerPoint Slides ]

From our colleague, Marydee Ojala, live at Computers in Libraries, DC

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

In Jeff Wisniewski’s talk this morning on federated searching, he compared a library to a casino — patrons walking into the library have the deck stacked against them. Without prior knowledge, they can’t figure out how to search multiple systems. What works on EBSCO doesn’t work on ProQuest. We librarians are the house in this casino, and the house always wins. Or, as Jeff cleverly put it, “We built it, they came, they got confused, and left.” Federated search is one way to facilitate resource discovery, presumably without the patron losing at the slot machines. Jeff not only clearly explained federated search, he suggested a theme — “Libraries are better than you-know-whoogle — and some questions to ask prospectivefederated search vendors. His favorites: What can’t you federate? What is the largest implementation you’ve done?

This theme of libraries confusing their users was repeated this afternoon in Lesley Moyo’s discussion of Web site usability. Library Web sites still have a ways to go when it comes to usability. Only 40% of library jargon used at library Web sites is understood by users. So why do we keep throwing it in? She suggests we look closely at the organizational structure of our Web sites, but rely on site intuitiveness and consistency, which she thinks has a greater impact.

From our colleague, Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

Wow, it’s nice to see a full hall! In his opening remarks, Tom Hogan welcomed us to Computers in Libraries and noted there were over 2,000 people here at the Washington Hilton in cold and rainy/sleety Washington DC. That’s up 7% from last year. He also told us there were representatives from 12 countries outside the U.S. The South African sitting next to me was somewhat skeptical about counting Canada as outside the U.S. To her, North America is one large entity, even though it’s multiple countries.

Waxing philosophical, Tom wondered if, with cutbacks in library staff, we will be relegated to learning by reading the factoids that appear in hotel elevators. Librarians, he went on, believe that being smart and knowledgeable is enough to have their worth recognized by their institutions. But that isn’t sufficient. Information professionals need to be part of the solution and not rely on others to tell us how to do this.

Keynote Cliff Hanger

Cliff Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, gave the opening keynote. He talked of unexpected consequences resulting from new technologies and the changed expectations that people now have, again as a result of technology. He cited several interesting technologies, including geolocation “The Net knows where you are,” RFID with its privacy concerns, and spam “the end game in excesses in advertising.”

Perhaps most germane to CIL attendees were his comments on changes in writing. “We expect humans to read what we write, but not all readers are human.” He referred, of course, to search engine spiders, fact extraction programs, and inference engines that can generate hypotheses. Quite a lot to think about!