Librarian of Fortune

Typeface nerds arise!

Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal had an article on how the typeface you choose can have unexpected repercussions. Michigan requires that all ballot initiative petitions must have the initiative written in 14-point boldface. But when is 14-font not really 14-font?

Apparently, the same folks who have changed 2"x4" lumber into 1.5"x3.5", and 16-ounce packages down to 14 ounces are messing around with typefaces, too. The font used in a recent petition was 14- point Calibri, a typeface I find easy to read. Unfortunately, its characters are slightly shorter than other 14-point typefaces, such as Ariel Bold and Century Schoolbook Bold. The Michigan Supreme Court is going to resolve the matter.

Who knew typeface designers would have such an impact on politics?

Ready-to-use information graphics

[Guest post from Marcy Phelps, Phelps Research]

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Displaying data in a visual format adds impact and brings clarity where words and spreadsheets often fail. Charts, graphs, and maps make it easy to identify patterns, trends, and clusters and transform the numbers into insights. Rather than create my own graphics for my research reports, I often save time by heading to sources that do the work for me. Here are a few of my favorite sites for data in ready-to-use visual formats:

Eurostat provides options for customizing and downloading European economic, demographic, and other data in graphs and maps. After selecting a data set, follow links at the top of the page for non-tabular formats.

The Data section of The World Bank's website contains global statistics in map and graph formats. The By Country and Indicators sections include the most options for and the easiest route to visual formats.

American FactFinder offers mapped U.S. demographic data from the Decennial Census, American Community Survey, and other Census Bureau products. From the Table Results page, click the Create a Map button.

And keep an eye on The Data Visualization Gallery from the U.S. Census Bureau. Part of an effort to increase the use of visualization in making Census data available to the public, this site will eventually expand their coverage.

You can find more sources of ready-to-use information graphics at MarcyPhelps.com. Do you have any to add to the list?

 

Cloud computing - how 1960!

I had the great good fortune of being on a panel with Roger Summit at the SLA conference, and was struck with how innovative Roger was. When he invented Dialog, the idea of interactive searching and of documents being access remotely was completely new to the info pro industry. So I started thinking of how I would describe the new Dialog of 1966 in 2012 terms.

"Remote terminal access" to electronic resources is the cloud computing of the 1960s. Being able to query a database across the country, and then download the results, was revolutionary. In fact, early "downloading" amounted to issuing a Type command and advancing the teletype machine's paper to a new page.

Roger was asked what he would have developed had he been starting today rather than in the 1960s, and his answer was delightful. "Empathy software" -- a front-end to any search tool that would serve as a good, empathic librarian, ask the user some questions to discern the underlying question, then construct a query that would best extract that information. This seems fitting; he is imagining how to make an interactive search service more meaningfully interactive.

I don't see anything on the horizon that truly addresses the question of how to take a vaguely-formed information gap and find the underlying information need. IBM's Watson is perhaps the closest alternative, although it (he?) has a ways to go before it can be deployed within libraries and information centers.

Transparency - a radical policy

As anyone who has ever played Buzzword Bingo knows, the business world is awash with the concept du jour. If you hear about synergetic incentivizing to reinvent viral blogospheres while leveraging so-lo-mo platforms, you've gotten a dose of today's business buzzwords.

Recently, I have been reading more about trends to bring transparency into business, and I can hear the gears grinding in offices everywhere. "OK, I know how to synergize dynamic action-items and maximize back-end convergence, but how can I spin transparency?" Exactly. Unlike most other business buzzwords, the word transparency has a clear (sorry!), real-world meaning.

I was recently coaching an info-entrepreneur who was experiencing a slow time in her business. She got a call from a client who offered her a several-month project at half her normal hourly rate. As anyone who has run a business knows, she had several choices.

• She could take the job, resent that she is being paid half of what she normally makes, and hope that she can juggle any other projects in during evenings and weekends.
• *She could turn down the project and focus on finding clients who can pay her regular rate.
• She could be transparent with her client and negotiate a third option.

My client took the route of transparency. She told her client, "As you know, my normal rate is $XXX an hour. Right now, my workload is pretty slow so I am interested in taking on this project. However, I would like to revisit this discussion in two months. At that point, I expect to be busier with clients who pay my full rate, and I would like to have the option to renegotiate my rate for this project. I will work as many hours as I can in the next two months; you get my services at a discounted rate and I get a bump in revenue." 

My client got the project and now both she and her client benefit. has an incentive to give my client as much work as possible for these two months, ensuring that my client has a steady, if limited, income stream. My client has the option to continue the work after two months at her regular rate, and her client knows that she is receiving high-end services at a significant discount.

What would radical transparency look like in your setting?