Librarian of Fortune

A Conference Manifesto

The demise of the Online Information Show, while not unexpected, is a reminder that the world of professional conferences has shifted dramatically. Attendance at many information industry conferences is down, and indications are that this trend will continue. The traditional conference is going away, because it is no longer serving its purpose. We are no longer willing to shuffle zombie-like from one conference session to the next, passively listening to speakers talk about what they know.

I am reminded of the iconic Apple Macintosh “1984” ad, in which a Big Brother-like figure is speaking on a large screen in a darkened auditorium. As he drones on, a runner emerges, throwing a hammer through the screen, shocking the spellbound audience and introducing them to the new age of liberated information technology. Fast-forward 30 years, replace Big Brother with any boring conference speaker, and you get the same desire for liberation of learning.

To the dismay of conference organizers, learning has become open sourced. Knowledge is not scarce; it is abundant and free. From online universities and MOOCs to MeetUp and Facebook groups, we are finding new ways to share knowledge and gain new skills that don’t involve several thousand people meeting together in a convention center. While I may not be able to throw a hammer through a projection screen, consider the following my invitation for the liberation of the professional conference.

We are active learners, not passive information absorbers. In any conference room, the speaker is just one brain among many. Engage all the participants; give us opportunities to share our perspectives with others. Encourage social media engagement, not just social media marketing.

Address what we care about now. Make the conference relevant to me today. Some professional library associations have their conference programming planned 12-18 months out. How can a conference be relevant when its topics were set a year and a half ago? Remember, you are competing with every other medium I can use to get new ideas and learn new skills. You have to earn our attention with what I care about today.

Lectures and panels are deadly. Attendees want to be provoked; we want to think, and participate. We are not paying a registration fee because we to hear “someone from Google”. We want to hear someone who will get us thinking differently. Bring in someone who will disrupt things, not just someone from a leading company.

No speaker needs more than 45 minutes, and after that, we want to start talking. Get speakers who can turn 45 minutes into an amazing experience in which everyone learns. Bring speakers are willing to challenge their audience, to get them to change their thinking and their actions.

Expect more from your speakers. Just because they know something doesn’t mean they are able to inspire an audience. Can they provoke comment? Do they invite participant involvement? Do they encourage learning from each other?  Will they interact with your audience afterward? What do your attendees say about how they benefited from the speaker?

Make it worth my while. We are paying several thousand dollars to attend your conference. We have to justify that cost and our time. We want something that we can take back and put into action. What did I get that I couldn’t get from YouTube or SlideShare? Who did I meet and talk with? How did this conference change how I think and what I do?

I have no illusions that the conference world will change dramatically over the next few years. The planners who understand today’s world of liberated learning will continue to create great conferences. The rest of them may want to look into other lines of work, as their jobs here are done.

Some additional thoughts on the death of handwriting, triggered by Ellen Naylor's comment in my earlier post.

I was mapping out a book chapter yesterday (The Reluctant Entrepreneur - watch for it later this year!), and found that the only way to do it was to use 3x5 cards spread out on my work table. I wonder if this is an artifact of being born pre-digital... another example of how we who grew up without the web will
always think and speak with an accent that digital natives don't have.

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.

Is there planned obsolescence for information?

I attended a talk last night by John de Graaf Dave Wann, co-author of Affluenza, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of SLA. He's a tendentious speaker; I don't like getting an hour of politics, even when I agree with the point of view. So I amused myself by looking for ways to relate his screed about over-consumption to the information industry. Yes, I'm an info-nerd.

One of Wann's topics was planned obsolescence. Having spent way too much time dealing with Intuit and its customer-hostile upgrade practices regarding QuickBooks, I couldn't agree more. But then I started wondering whether there was such a thing as planned information obsolescence. Are there instances where information is designed or presented in such a way that it has an artificially limited life span? By the end of Wann's talk, I'd thought of several.

• When data is delivered in a physical medium such as a DVD, it requires the continuing availability of equipment and software that can read data in that medium. The digital photos I took 10 years ago are still on Iomega zip drives, and I have neither the hardware nor software to read the disks.
• Business software is often complex enough to require some level of customer service and maintenance. Most software companies discontinue support for their products after a certain period of time, requiring customers to pay for extended service or newer versions of the software.
• Textbooks are notorious for being frequently updated, and consequently repaginated, requiring students to buy new editions rather than used copies.
• E-content subscriptions, in which the archive is only available as long as the account is active, turn subscriptions into rentals. 

Some of these issues can be circumvented by relying on open source software and open access publications. Yes, I now store all my digital photos in the cloud, and I download all the software I buy.

But it will take a radical change in the market to eliminate the financial incentive of information providers, in all their forms, to build obsolescence into their products. As with iDevices with their virtually unreplaceable batteries, sometimes we just hold our nose and, well, consume.

 

Information wants to be free... or expensive

I was reflecting today on Stewart Brand's famous quote, first said in 1985:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient [emphasis added]. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

What I found most interesting is that the "cost" of information is not inherent in the information itself but is specific to the individual recipient.

This is yet another way of saying that the role of info pros has to be not just providing information but making sure it will be seen as valuable to each client. Is it distilled? Is it easy to read, repurpose and share? Is it customized and formatted in the way your client wants?

Want more thoughts on how to turn "free" information into "expensive" information? See the slide deck of a presentation I gave in July at the AALL conference: From Search to Insight: adding value where it counts, and other slide decks at BatesInfo.com/extras.

 

Who judges what "good" search results are?

I had a great conversation with Chris Sherman at Web Search University about search results, which brought up to me an enormous disconnect between SEO and info pro communities. (Gee, what a surprise!)

He and I were comparing Google results for a particular search technique. Of the first 10 results, the second and sixth hits were spot on. Since it was a somewhat amorphous topic, I expected to have to wade through a lot of stuff to find what I was looking for. Two good hits from the first 10 was pretty good for me. Chris labelled those results as a #fail, since 80% of the results weren't useful.

My response: It's a question of precision vs. recall. Search engine marketers consider results with less than 90% relevance to be a failed search, because the precision wasn't high enough. Info pros, on the other hand, are often more concerned about recall; we want to make sure that we find as many useful resources as possible. For a difficult search, 10% or 20% relevance is just fine.

And this comes back to my ongoing theme that we info pros are far more data-tolerant than most people. Wading through page after page of search results is just fine with us, as long as we find something useful. And we often forget that our clients are far less data-tolerant than we are. One of the biggest challenges of info pros is limiting our results to the depth and breadth that our clients need. We want to keep digging deeper, and to send our clients all the fascinating information that we found, forgetting that this may be doing the client a disservice.

For more on distillation and making information more user-friendly, see my talk on adding value at BatesInfo.com/extras

 

 

Show people WHY before you tell 'em HOW

Last week, I heard a great presentation at Computers in Libraries by Tasha Bergson-Michelson, a Search  Education Curriculum Fellow at Google. One of the first things she asked the audience was whether anyone remembered the specific search techniques they had learned the day before. Very few hands were raised.

That got me thinking about the disconnect between presentations that are intended to transmit skills and those that are intended to provide insight. The latter, if done well, are always memorable; one of the reasons I love Twitter is that I can tweet insights from a presentation so that I find them later. A presentation that teaches skills – search techniques, for example – can often devolve into a recitation of features. “Google does this. Google does this other thing. Bing does this thing...”

The challenge for speakers is to make the information in practical presentations sticky. Tasha and I both use stories to engage audiences. When Tasha is teaching children search skills, for example, she challenges them to find information on D.B. Cooper, or the curse of King Tut’s tomb using Google. Give them something fun to search and they’ll learn how.

Summary: show people why and then they’ll pay attention to how

Seth Godin to publisher: Buh-bye

Tuesday's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about Seth Godin's decision that, going forward, he would solely self-publish. He no longer needs a traditional publisher like Penguin Books. Notably, Godin defines "publishing" far more broadly than a traditional publisher; he plans on distributing his content in a number of media -- audiobooks, apps, podcasts, PDFs, print-on-demand, etc. As long as some version of it appears in Amazon.com, it's on the same virtual store shelf as any traditional book.

As for the value of publishers, Godin comments:

Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don't know who reads their books... What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers.

I wonder if we're seeing the beginning of a disintermediation between the content creator and the content user, similar to the old one between library users and high-end digital information.

There's still a role for content aggregators, but perhaps a far different one than in the past. In an environment in which we content creators interact directly with our readers - in multiple settings, no less - any intermediary (publisher / news aggregator) has to show its tangible value to both the originator and the user of the content.

If publishers can't find new ways to create a market for an author's content, and if more successful authors shift to Seth Godin's model, we may get to the point where print publishers are seen as the vanity press and high-quality self-publishing is the new professional standard.

As someone who has had 6 books published by traditional print publishers, I have seen the transformation of a manuscript to an edited, indexed, laid-out publication. It is a sight to behold, and certainly something I couldn't do on my own. And there are other ways that I can distribute content directly to my readers.

Traditional publishers have all the tools needed to create vibrant communities for their content providers authors. Can they, in essence, get out of the way and help their writers make direct connections with their readers? Can they expand their vision of publishing to include the media in which ideas flow most easily, if not freely?

Does information want to be free?

For your beach reading, don't forget to bring along my latest EContent column, Divas and D&B Reports, in which I opine:

I never did believe that information wanted to be free ... just respected for more than its good looks. Apparently, no one else got the memo.
[...]
E-content, in and of itself, often isn't seen as particularly valuable. We can find the same material elsewhere on the web if we look hard enough, or we can find something else that we perceive as good enough. For information-and access to it-to be priced profitably, the value of the content must be readily apparent.

WWMEBD, or, where's the info profession heading?

In April, I was invited by the SLA student members of the GSLIS program at Simmons College to host a conversation about where our profession is heading and how to position ourselves most effectively. I had a fabulous time, and met some LIS students who are going to be great assets to their employers.

You can listen to my presentation and the Q&A here. And yes, there were actually signs on the hallways pointing the way to WWMEBD. Obviously, it's time to start ordering wristbands...