Category: Conferences

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Accredit where credit is due

I spent the last month immersed in an accreditation exercise for ALA as chair of a site team. No need to mention names but I come out at the end of this experience with determination to decline any further invitations. The process eats up the time of the chair starting several months before the visit and continuing at least one month after it as a report is prepared that covers the standards. Not only will this prove a time sink but you also risk annoying people with your editorial demands, lose money on costs that cannot easily be reimbursed, and have to explain repeatedly to Provosts and Presidents why you are leading a team of six people to visit a school with barely that many faculty members!

Ok, I exaggerate, but only a little. The process is bloated in my view and tends to place effort and emphasis in the wrong places. I was told we have to have six site visitors because there are six standards in this particular accreditation process (yes, it’s true!). I am told there will be a change in this real soon now, but let’s hope that doesn’t mean the introduction of another standard. My recommendation is that the process be reduced to one standard only: “Does this program meet reasonable standards of quality”? One reviewer should be enough, two for a check on bias, and the program could submit any evidence it liked. Yes, an idea that has no chance of success even if it would save on travel costs.

Accreditation is a hot topic in more fields than ours however. I noticed social work seems to be caught up in a similar set of concerns as shown in Stoesz and Karger’s 2009 article “Reinventing Social Work Accreditation” which opens with this humdinger: “Throughout its history, social work education has struggled for intellectual purchase.” It gets better….the last para claims “Professional education organized around political cliches has left social work education with a big dose of moral dudgeon but little else”. Food for thought indeed…especially as they can get away with site teams of 2-3 people in social work….Maybe they have fewer standards to meet? Someone should invite Stoesz and Karger to speak at ALISE!

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JCDL success and the summer of paper

The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries was held here in Austin with the School of Information as host, and by all accounts it proved a great success. Worries about attendance turned out to be unnecessary as over 270 people joined us for the week. The weather was hot, the venue cool, and Austin is a pretty fine place for conference if you are willing to walk more than a 100 yards from the hotel. I chaired the final plenary which was a panel conversation on the theme “Google as Library” with Clifford Lynch, Gretchen Hoffman and Mike Lesk. I had to cut off the questions as we just had too many for the allotted time but it was a lively, engaging gathering that pretty much summed up the conference: enthusiastic people, more projects and good ideas than you could capture, and nobody allowed to hog the microphone or pulpit for more than their allotted time (oh how so many other conferences could use a little time and speaker management). Gerhard Fischer and Chris Borgman also gave boundary spanning addresses that were better than I’ve heard at many recent conferences I’ve attended. If you missed it, too bad. For once, the lack of engagement that usually comes with attending a conference in your home town did not not affect me, I enjoyed not having to travel and being able to sleep at home at night.

Meanwhile, the school is bracing itself (collectively) for the most significant change since renaming ourselves in 2002, with the move to new premises at 1616 Guadalupe now imminent. I am having a massive clear out of my office papers for the first time in years (8 precisely, since I last changed jobs) and it is a reminder about how tied we all are to paper: books and journals are obvious but all those reports, letters, memos, scribbled notes of meetings and ideas, student papers, dissertation drafts, magazine articles, records, budget forms, rules and regulations etc….they certainly pile up in our lives and I don’t foresee a change in this no matter how digital I become. Naturally this reminds me of the line that the most successful applications of information technology are the printer and the photocopier — (or is it the fax?), paper-generators all. There is discipline to being organized that I am not sure I possess but also a human tendency to keep items rather than throw them away unless you have to or are certain you will never need them again. As I look around our school, I am reminded again of how we can preach about information behavior far easier than we can practice it.

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SXSW success story

While ACM trawls for attendees at its various conferences by offering cost reductions to registrants (a first?), and other conference organizers worry about attendee numbers, the annual SXSW bash here in Austin seems to be flourishing. SXSW is not your typical conference. In fact, it’s three conferences in one really, if you want to spend the week here but many people pick and choose. Attendance for the interactive and film components are up 20% and today the music part kicks off with more than 2000 bands arriving. As one long-time attendee remarked to a colleague in line at one of the events, ‘today the geeks leave and the freaks arrive’. Take that, SIGCHI. Sadly, few academics seem to have discovered this event, not helped I suppose by it’s occurrence every year during Spring Break, but hey, it’s 80f here in Austin and the town is practically student-free for the week – better than any beach right now.

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And on we go into ’09

Yes, I’ve been quiet for a month, lots of other things happening. Most pertinent, I’ve had something of a cleaning of my personal editorial duties and resigned in the last few months from three editorial positions (Interacting with Computers, JASIST, and the Int. Journal of Digital Libraries) and mitigated that somewhat by joining the board at the Journal of Documentation. Been trying to lessen the reviewing load which was becoming increasingly heavy with one of the above and it’s disheartening to see one’s rejections ignored or being landed with a new paper to review within hours of submitting a completed review — talk about punishing those who promptly do the work. We need a system that auto removes those who complete reviews for a fixed period so as to reward them.

I’ve also made a resolution not to write for anyone but myself, meaning I am declining all requests for papers or chapters and taking total control over what I want to write — it might surprise you but many academics spend their lives writing on demand, so now, at 46, I’ve decided to stop saying ‘yes’ unless I really want to do it — ditto talks. Well, that’s the New Year resolution at least.

Naturally ALISE took up a large part of January and now we are set for the iSchools Conference, and you can appreciate how the annual schedule is getting increasingly overloaded. I recommend fewer conferences and stricter reviewing, but then how would the business end of academia cope? There’s a conference for everyone and at anyone time I suspect everyone’s at a conference. Ah knowledge….

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ICKM 08-ASIST 08

I spent the best part of the last week in Columbus OH (decent weather, so-so food and service) at two back-to-back conferences, International Council for Knowledge Management (ICKM) and the annual ASIST bash. ICKM was an enjoyable new experience for me and while the schedule was punishing with 8am keynote addresses and almost as many parallel sessions as delegates during the day, I learned that KM is really struggling with the exact same problems as any other discipline of the information field. I spoke on Friday and used the occasion to push the “information accelerates discovery” message out to a new audience and I found them very receptive, being inundated afterwards for copies of my slides (which always makes me a little nervous, but….).

What I learned in two days convinced me that KM has more substance than I’d previously acknowledged, but also the same turf and status battles. Apparently some now argue KM is dead, replaced by Web 2.0 (as if!) and it’s time is over. Well imagine, a world where we don’t manage knowledge! I did learn some interesting tidbits such as the positive correlation between pharmaceutical firms success and their willingness to share info with their competitors (though I note with this that it’s correlational only — success might breed openness). The literature on KM seems difficult to get one’s arms around as it morphs into technology studies quickly or uses lots of terms you know to talk about slightly vague activities in organizations, but I’m working on it. There seems to be no end of stories of the KM role being handed to one person who is told to ‘get on with it’. Still, the complementary nature of KM to the information world in which our students reside suggests to me that we must look more seriously at this domain, and I intend to do so. Suggestions welcome.

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SCIP and run

I spent last week at the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ (SCIP) Annual Conference in San Diego. Now talk about a group with identity problems. However, unlike certain other info-professions, these folks are quite happy with ambiguity. The conference also seems to have some money since they waived registration costs for speakers, have real food for lunch rolled into the costs, and the exhibition space offered more freebies to attendees than even seasoned ALA-attendees could carry. Clearly there is a cultural difference at work in this conference. Unlike many others I attend, the sessions here were much more interactive and people spoke succinctly and to the point. In a lunch time session entitled “What happens next?”, a group of us were called on to answer a series of questions, some prepared, some new, and the moderator managed to keep all participants on point and on time. There was no occasion to feel one voice dominated or one person had not given any thought to his or her answers. Now if this had been an academic group, you can only imagine, but the SCIP folks seem fast thinking, direct, and time conscious. The product of this session will find its way in to Competitive Intelligence magazine in due course.

A session on Appropriate Theory for CI, led by France Bouthillier, provoked further interesting exchanges, mostly by audience members who claimed not to be too bothered if CI was a field or not, or if it had any theoretical basis, or if it even had a future in academia. At least, that was the tone at the start of the discussion but it became clearer as the session progressed that people did care but had perhaps not felt the need to address these concerns head on. The audience here seemed to be a mix of people with degrees in business or LIS but there were also pharmaceutical engineers, English literature majors and IT professionals in fine voice. No easy resolution was attained but the door has been opened and more than a few participants seemed eager to walk through and continue this conversation.

So just what is competitive intelligence? Even these participants could not agree but rather than get heated about it, they seemed to enjoy the fact. As Cormac Ryan said from the floor” “We all seem to be in violent agreement on this”.

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CLIR workshop on Future of Academic Libraries

Am just back from a very interesting workshop at CLIR where a group of about 20 people discussed the future of academic libraries, launching the discussion with a set of prepared essays from eight of us. Too much was discussed across the day to cover here, and there will be a summary of the event produced by CLIR, but here’s some of what I took away:

1) All academic libraries are facing tremendous change and there is concern with the role and mission of such entities in a world where the myths of everything being available on the web drive the understandings of university administrations and students.

2) While everything will likely be digitized in a decade or so, the provision and preservation of high quality curated collections remains a great unknown. The question of controlling the preserved collection (in house or outsourced?) was thought to be crucial to ensuring longevity of access and quality.

3) The staff needed for the transformations and challenges ahead are not likely to be supplied by typical ALA-accredited programs — indeed a show of hands among the library directors in attendance suggested that none thought the accreditated degree mattered when seeking intelligent and able employees for academic libraries.

4) The Library as Laboratory metaphor was used to convey how academic libraries might better fit with the mission of the 21st century university. This points to the library partnering with faculty and academic computing on experimental projects aimed at delivering cutting-edge services to the academic community. Yes, the term ‘libratory’ was coined (mea culpa, but I could not resist).

5) Better determining the boundaries and possibilities of relationships with the commercial sector (this was a contentious one)

6) The need for collective action (more than collaboration) was deemed vital, meaning that several leading academic libraries would need to find constructive ways of working serioulsy together on more than isolated projects to advance the concerns of academic libraries going forward.

7) Libraries are caught up too much in concerns with products when they should be concerned with processes. For example, there is the danger that emphases on repositories will result in a new emphasis on this as a ‘collection’ instead of on the act of curating digital resources into the future. Our own discussions of the process often seemed to end up with products, emphasizing the difficulties we all face in breaking out of this track.

There was much more and Chuck Henry and colleagues are to be congratulated on facilitating this event. I learned a lot but was also delighted to find so many like-minded people seeing the same problems and opportunities. More to follow, surely.

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IA Summit 2008 and the Third iConference

Registration is closing soon for what must now be the 9th summit (not bad for an idea that was supposed to be the basis of a one-off hot topic meeting for ASIST in Boston in 2000). I’ve not attended the last couple due to an over loaded conference and meeting schedule but I always enjoyed the sheer energy and irreverence (though not so much the occasional irrelevance) of the gathering. The theme this year is Experiencing Information (hum, where have I heard that before?) but it’s sure to be well-attended as usual. Of course the danger of any innovative grouping is falling prey to the standard behavior of conferences. The iSchool community is now running its third annual conference in UCLA next week. I wonder if there is something inherent in intellectual groups that demands the conference structure as a means of establishing a shared reality? Can you be a discipline without a conference? If you have a conference are you a field? No wonder interdisciplinarity is difficult, it just adds to your calendar!

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Aaron Marcus at the iSchool, ASIST 2007, it’s culture time

Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, but he presented an interesting mapping of the general characteristics of cultures (too often for my taste reduced to ‘nationality’) and sample web sites one finds in government, university and large company websites that represent said culture. Fascinating work, but more needs to be done.

The ASIST 2007 conference in Milwaukee this week was also a relatively lively affair. Keynoter Anthea Stratigos from Outsell presented a fast paced look at the world and I believe surprised many of us with the statement that China was fast becoming the leading English-speaking nation in the world. No reference provided but if it is even close to being true, what are the cultural implications? If nothing else, why do relatively recent listings of countries where English is spoken, even if not recognized as an official language, seem to make no mention of this? The best I can do to track this comment is back to the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who apparently predicted that Chinese speakers of English would outnumber all other English-language speakers in the world by 2025. Sound bite as science?

I also had a chance to talk with Tefko Saracevic and Don Kraft about changes they had seen in submissions to their respective journals (Information Processing and Management and JASIST). Tefko noted that he witnessed as many submissions in the last few years as he had received in the 15 preceding years, a fact he attributes to the emergence of information research in China and India. Could the day come when American and European scholars will compete to submit to Asian journals? If it happens it will seem inevitable and obvious with hindsight, but will it happen? One suspects there are many forces at work here, only some of which we recognize. In the meantime, this submission glut has pushed up the rejection rates for these journals to record highs.

I took part in a panel on Digital Genres that, despite its theme, drew a large and very lively audience at 8.30 am Tuesday morning. This really was a panel (not an attempt to sneak papers past reviewers) to which each presenter was limited to 3 minutes and then had to answer questions. Before we knew it, the audience got stuck in and took us on a tour of the problems with definition, the lack of appreciation in the field for earlier work, the absence of a well-informed archival perspective, the value of genre in searching and the emergence of genre in the digital realm. This was the hightlight of my conference sessions but of course, I am biased.

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CoLIS papers published

The special issue of Information Research with the Proceedings of the CoLIS 2007 conference in Sweden has now been published. There’s a lot of interesting reading here but let me point to a couple of papers I like. The Talja and Hartel piece examining the concept of user-centeredness in the information literature is a worthy contribution and should be required reading for those who wish to understand the emergence of this defining orientation within our field. Also, David Bawden’s paper, Information as self-organized complexity, provoked a lot of discussion at the conference itself and is now available to all.