ASIST K-Blog Panel

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Power Strip

It might be a good idea if one of us brings a power strip to the talk, just in case ... That's the one piece of equipment I hadn't thought to bring.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Ives: New Tools To Link the Changing Workforce

Accidentally cross posted on my library blog! Bill Ives has gotten permission to open up access to his writings for KM Review. Free registration is required. Of specific interest to me is his newest one, Ives, Athey and Joost, "New Tools to Link the Changing Workforce," v7 i4 (Sep/Oct 2004)28-31. Just about every organization remotely related to aerospace is facing a crisis: the majority of the engineers are ready to retire. KM has long been touted as the solution to all our problems. Unfortunately, instead of a panacea, KM's become a money drain with small ROI and low participation (some places, not in my workplace, of course). This article discusses some ways blogs might work better for KM than the standard repositories. Maybe we need a combined oral history/storytelling/blogging software?

Thursday, October 21, 2004

We're on for November 4th!

The blog group meeting starts at 7 pm. I will be there early to set up and whatnot. Guess I need to figure out what I'll say ...

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Library Management: "Library Weblogs"

Gary pointed out that this journal is free to all this week. L.A. Clyde. "Library Weblogs." Library Management v25 n4(2004):183-9. DOI: 10.1108/01435120410533765
A few interesting observations:
  • only half of the blogs link back to the library home page?
  • only half of the blogs had a purpose statement?
  • the blogs aren't being updated regularly
  • libraries aren't marketing their weblogs through "claiming" at Technorati
  • institutional barriers to having library blogs?
I'm also interested in reading Harry Bruce, William Jones, and Susan Dumais. "Information behaviour that keeps found things found" Information Research v10 n1 (October 2004). http://informationr.net/ir/10-1/paper207.html. It looks like it prints to about 27 pages, so I'm planning to read it online.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

CFO Magazine: Blogging for Dollars

John Edwards (no, not that one) October 2004 "Once the domain of the disgruntled and demented, Web logs are being embraced by business executives." UGH! I don't feel particularly disgruntled so I guess that means I'm demented? This is aiming at CFO's so it really tells what our colleagues in corporate libraries and KM groups will be up against. oops. forgot to say that I found this via Topix.net

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Could you make the argument....

That k-logging increases opportunities for/ability to employ evidence-based practice? It used to be a medical thing, but now it's in libraries, education, and other fields. I don't really know enough about it to say but my thought process is something like finding and gathering "evidence" makes it readily available (not invisible) and sharable so that it is more likely to be used.

Monday, October 11, 2004

Does this make sense: PKM blogging in support of the berry-picking process?

Feedback requested, please! I have a half-formulated (or should I say half-baked?) idea. I was trying to map the PKM blog posting process to Kulthau's information seeking process (fairly successfully in some cases) and came to the idea that perhaps for many bloggers, PKM blog posting (as in the act of formulating and posting a single post, not the comprehensive idea of the blog in its entirety) is better seen as a useful supporting technology for Bates' berry-picking process. I had to look this up again since my notes are at home so I'll assume it's worth reviewing here. The article is: Marcia J. Bates. "The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the on-line search interface." Online Review, v13 n5 (1989):407-431. Basically, she proposes that instead of the classical linear model which moves from need to resolution, it's more like berrypicking where users find a little something, reformulate their search, look again, find a little something... the information is scattered (like our current state of affairs) and the search is evolving.
the query is satisfied not by a single final retrieved set, but by a series of selection of individual references and bits of information at each stage of the ever-modifying search.
So my assumption is that a chemist, say, is always looking for information on chemistry, but individual searches vary with project, changing state of knowledge, collaboration with internal and external colleages so over time the chemist can post the various things she finds in categories and then see a path or an evolution of thought. -OR- maybe to prevent berrypicking -- If she is searching to solve a very specific problem and runs across something that requires more thought or could solve an unspecified future problem, PKM blogging allows her to note, follow that thought a little, and move on with minimal disruption and also little fear of losing the thought. You should be able to hit a bookmarklet on your browser when you're in a database and have it add the doi and citation to the post automatically for future retrieval... but that's another topic.

Contentious: Arranging Ideas: Knowledge Management in Human Terms

by Amy Gahran, 7/16/04 She talks about the human part of KM as opposed to the big business where everything is done by the proprietary algorithm. KM in collaborative software as arranging ideas resulting in "structured thoughts." Going beyond links to get "(ideas, relevance, and insight) from raw data." In other words, km is not database building. She follows up in a later post.