April Mentoring Meeting

We had our April meeting last week where we talked about the Library + Information Show (LIS), library visits and this weblog. I won’t record our discussion about the LIS as it pretty much duplicated my entry about it below (opens in new window). As far as the visits are concerned, it was really just a quick update on the actions that I have taken towards arranging library visits. The first one was this Monday (hope to get something written up soon) and I have two more scheduled for next week (May 3). I have also started trying to track down my counter-parts in other industry organisations but I haven’t really thrown myself into this task yet and so have only made marginal headway (actually, just one lead…) We also talked about my looking into a visit to the British Medical Association – I need to inject a bit of variety to my visits (mainly government and legal so far) and the BMA has a well established library service (and happens to be only a few doors down the road from me).

I have picked up a list of actions that I need to get organised before 17 May:

Action: D – post question to Listserv regarding ethics issues encountered in workplace (this one has been outstanding for some time now – oops)
Action: D – review PPDP and identify list of actions and create a schedule for their completion (don’t want to be rushing them through in August!)
Action: D – investigate library visit to the BMA
Action: D – set some deadlines to get portfolio of evidence together for: a)CCI work and b)NCSL work
Action: D – look into the Network of Government Library and Information Specialists (NGLIS)
Action: K – send NGLIS weblink

That’s pretty much it. Work towards Chartership is moving along smoothly so far and as a result, our meetings (since submitting the PPDP) are pretty efficient things. I think that starting in May, they will begin to get a little heavier as I concentrate on getting my portfolio of evidence and my statement sorted out…

CILIP? Cilip? cilip?

CILIP vs Cilip...traditionally, an acronym (initials to make a word - e.g. scuba, radar, modem) doesn't need to use capitals but an abbreviation (initials that are spoken as initials - e.g. DfES, PDF) is written using capitals. Now, I have always written CILIP in capitals but I think that I might be wrong here...it's actually an acronym and as a proper noun, needs an initial captial letter, giving us...Cilip. I also see that that is what they use themselves.

I guess I had better update the title of my blog!

Library + Information Show 2007

Yesterday, I went to the Library + Information Show (opens in new window) in Birmingham (at the NEC). It's on today as well but I have found that usually one day is enough at these sorts of things. I find that these shows can be useful and interesting but that it is essential to have an objective for the day (to which I shall return in a moment).

I attended a couple of the seminars and picked up some useful bits:

1. Panning for Gold - Maximising the Value of Your CV (presented by Suzanne Wheatley, Sue Hill Recruitment)
   
   Suzanne presented a few excellent suggestions that weren't new to me (like using action verbs and quanitfying things) but she also had some suggestions that I hadn't considered or found interesting:
   • 'Career History' is a more positive term than common alternatives such as 'Employment History'
   • If you're going to claim to be a high-level user of MSWord, for example, then make sure your CV (if it's in MSWord) makes full use of the software features (e.g. use Styles to format the content rather than modifying the 'Normal' style for the headings, using Tab instead of five spaces)
   • I have never included an 'Interests' section but if you're going to, be specific - if you like to travel, what kind of travel and where?
   • she also had a handy list of 'dos' and don'ts' but rather than list them all here, I will link to her presentation as soon as it is made available on the L+I Show website.


2. Blogs, Wikis, and RSS: Key Technologies for Information Provision and Gathering (presented by Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services)
   
   Karen's session was also interesting but I felt as though it was targeted at an audience with less knowledge and experience of blogs, wikis and RSS than I have. However, I learned about a few different services that I hadn't come across before (so it was still time well spent) including:
   • Omea (opens in new window) - a desktop RSS reader
   • RapidFeeds.com (opens in new window) - lets you embed RSS feeds in web pages
   • Karen had a list of links to library blogs and to blog search engines that I would like to have captured as well but was too busy listening! I will have a look at her presentation slides (and link to them from here) when they are made available on the L+I Show website

My objective for the day was to find someone who could talk knowledgeably about metadata and engage them in a conversation around the management of document- vs content-level metadata (opens in new window). Although I found a few exhibitors who understood what I was talking about, none of them had encountered the siutation before and generally, they had a CMS that used document-level metadata and then relied on content keyword searching.

On the whole, it was an interesting day and I met some interesting people, some of whom may prove to be useful contacts in the future (and one who has already suggested someone I ought to speak to at BT about their use of metadata). I don't think that I needed more than one day and to be henest, rather than doing a 10-5 day, I probably could have accomplished the same amount in an 11-4 day...but I'd have missed out meeting a few people (and on my glass of cava - thanks Bennett Software)!

When I grow up...

I want to be a Librarian!

Katharine Widdows has a blog (When I Grow Up I Want to be a Librarian! - opens in new window) where she too is capturing a record of her thoughts and experiences during her Chartership process. She and I have had a bit of a conversation about blogs and how best to use them in this process over email and I can't help but feel a new entry to my blog on the topic coming on.

Anyway, she has kindly provided a link to my blog from hers and I can see that her link (using Google Analytics - a tip from Katharine) accounts for about 3% of my visitors since 'going publilc' so thanks Katharine!

Folksonomies

This is one of those things that I am quite interested in but know relatively little about. It seems to me that given my area of work tends to focus a lot on metadata, I should have a greater knowledge about folksonomies; we are, after all, talking about metadata (generally subject metadata) assigned by members of the public. As a result, I decided to do a bit of research on the web to learn more. One of the many articles that I came across was a literature review (opens in new window) carried out by an assistant librarian at the Royal College of Music. In her review, Edith Speller outlined some of the themes and provided a long and helpful list of articles for further reading (it was a lit review afterall!). I have picked a few of those articles out and had a look and below are what I have learnt and some of my thoughts:

• I wonder how easy it is to get people to add their own metadata…if you look at the metadata assigned to music files, the data is partial at best and this is data that can be freely and automatically downloaded.


• With potentially an infinite number of “taggers” how can we hope to achieve consistency and accuracy? For example, do we use singular or plural nouns and what about the use of capitalisation?


• A major plus to this concept (over the dictated thesaurus or taxonomy) is that the terms that are used to describe or classify are chosen by the end users themselves and so, in volume, are going to be the right ones.


• The fact that there are so many different people potentially tagging items, the basic level of variation comes into effect. This concept refers to the level of detail into which an individual will go to describe the subject or format of the item (e.g. personal music player vs. iPod nano)
• The tags can be perfectly accurate and yet totally useless if they’re not at the right level for the individual’s needs


• Folksonomies are flexible and evolve with time to match current terms and concepts unlike fixed systems like the DDC into which librarians are continuously cramming new concepts and terms.
• The flip side of this flexibility, or the price of it, is that unless previously tagged items are reclassified, the items become lost and inconsistency creeps in making these items difficult or even impossible to find
• It could be argued that it something can’t be found using current terminology, it is likely that the contents of that document have been superseded…


• There is no active management of synonyms in folksonomies leading to reduced recall
• To mitigate this problem, some sights (e.g. Del.icio.us) make all tags used visible


• As for synonyms, there is no active management of homonyms (Apple the company vs apple the fruit) which leads to reduced search precision
• By searching using more than one term (Apple and music vs apple and pastry) limited context can be achieved and search precision improves


• My final thought on folksonomies is that users will need to ‘learn’ a slightly different vocabulary for each new database, at least initially. Over time and use, the differences could be ironed out and convergence could occur for those sights that appeal to a broad base of users.

I think that there could be a great deal of value in using a "folksonomy" approach to tagging content on the corporate Intranet. Rereading the points above, the benefits are ones that would be welcomed in that environment (e.g. terms chosen by ‘the people’) and the draw-backs are somewhat mitigated by the close relationship between the users (e.g. the use of synonyms and homonyms).

We are looking at our overarching IT, IS, IM, and KM strategy at the moment and attention will eventually focus on the very poor Intranet system that we are using. At that time, I think that I will suggest it!

Cilip Event: Chartership and Beyond

Yesterday, I attended an afternoon seminar/workshop that looked at Chartership and specifically, at the portfolio element. Basically, there were two parts to the afternoon.

Part 1
The first was a presentation from a Cilip representative (his presentation slides are available on the Cilip website – http://www.cilip.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/337A6104-A074-4A13-B4E7-433C36F5DCE4/0/charter05i.ppt. He looked at portfolios from three perspectives:

• Why do we need them?
• What should they contain?
• How should they be organised?

Why do we need them?

The long and the short of this section was that it was a means of presenting evidence from the individual's potentially multiple jobs against the assessment criteria. He went on to present additional situations where it could be useful to have this portfolio (e.g. appraisals at work and job interviews).

What should they contain?
I was reassured to see that what we were told our application should contain matched very closely my diagram below in my entry from 16 March. Rather than list those components again, here are the additional remarks that I felt were worth capturing:

• The contents table is really important and must be easily navigable
• Your CV can be up to 4 sides of A4 and is a good opportunity to present those things that have had to be culled from the portfolio
• The PPDP is submitted both early on in the process and as part of the application as it is a living document and things may have changed; it can be backdated and it might be worth carrying out a lifeline exercise to help highlight the key events and themes
• The evaluative statement discusses the criteria and directs the evaluator to the relevant pieces of evidence in the portfolio; it should be evaluative and NOT descriptive

We then looked at what goes into the portfolio itself:

• Certificates
• Staff reviews
• Articles you've written / published
• Project briefs / reports (include your contribution only if it‘s a particularly large document)
• Personal reports on contribution (e.g. meetings, events, visits)
• Training (and evaluation of it's effectiveness)
• Evidence of work-based learning (e.g. enquiry replies, publicity done, letters/memos, guidance notes, testimonies)
• Relevant our of work experiences
• Webpages
• A/V materials
• Skills audit
  • www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/ILS/recordingilsskills.html
  • http://ltssolweb1.open.ac.uk/safari_guests/start.htm?s01t01p01

How should it be organised?

This section didn't take long to cover and was really a reminder of how they would like it to be presented. The key points that I picked out were:

• Divided into clearly marked sections
• Comb binding is preferred
• Write in 12pt font
• Submission must be in triplicate but one copy can be electronic (I'm not too sure how that would work without scanning in quite a few things and even then, sorting out the pagination would be quite a challenge)

The presentation concluded with a few "words to the wise", the most useful of which I felt was to "think evidence" and be ruthless keeping it in relation to the criteria.

Part 2
The second part of the session was a more interactive session where we were asked to think about a few different questions, discuss them with our colleagues and then share them with the rest of the group (your good old "think / pair / share" format). I won't record my responses because it was just meant to be a session to get you thinking about the process and how you would proceed in the short, medium and long terms:

• What do I need to do right now to progress my application?
• List 3 or 4 items to be used as evidence and how they meet the assessment criteria.
• Consider the gaps in your skills and outline the plan for addressing them.
• What areas does your work fall into? Consider whether these could be used as a structure for your application that could be x-referred to the criteria.

Assessment

So that is about it. I had a mixed response to the session. Much of what was discussed in the first part covered aspects of the process that would apply to someone just starting out and as I'm 6 months into it and have submitted my PPDP already, those bits weren't very helpful (e.g. how to register and how to get a mentor). I attended a Starting out on Chartership event about 2 or 3 years ago when I originally registered for Chartership but then had to put it to one side for a while. It is recommended (in fact, I think it used to be required) that candidates attend one of these sessions and that one 2 or 3 years ago counted so I didn't look for another one. I wish that I had gone to a session like this when I picked it back up again, though, as a reminder – it would have saved me quite a lot of stress.

On the other hand, some of the sections made me feel a better about what I was doing (e.g. the contents of the application, as I mentioned above) but more importantly, when it came to discussing what goes into the portfolio, two things really sank in as being important and relevant to me:

1. It's a lot of work and I need to get on with some of the aspects, like library visits.
2. I need to focus on being more reflective in my different documents and less descriptive.

So on the whole, I guess those two lessons being pretty valuable ones made it a good use of my time and I now need to show that I have learned from them.

Metadata: document- versus content-level

We have now created and agreed a working model (for lack of a better term) of a metadata schema. This schema has been integrated into our workflow software and it is this way that the metadata will be gathered. Clearly, as we use it, tweaks will need to be made and the workflow software is flexible enough for us to do so.

We are also trying to introduce XML content-level metadata and to date, we have managed to get a series of templates agreed. These templates are tightly controlled in terms of their structure so introducing XML from a structural perspective should be straight forward and we’re evaluating a couple of tools for ensuring that the XML tags are correctly applied.

Software Challenges
The biggest problem that we’re having with the software that will enable the move from templates in MS Word to XML encoded content is the fact that much of the writing is fulfilled by external suppliers and this raises licensing problems. They aren’t insurmountable but it will require a flexible software vendor, disciplined suppliers and fair bit of negotiation to agree something.

Document- and Content-level metadata: relationship
So if the XML metadata is focussed mainly on document structure (e.g. this content is the Introduction, this content is the Methodology, etc.) how does this relate to the document-level metadata which looks at subject, relational and bibliographic aspects of the document? The two are mutually exclusive to some extent but how relevant is the document-level metadata to the content? Should it be captured and accompany the content? I don’t really know the answers to this these questions and they’re the easier ones!

At the moment, I think that the best solution would be to include within the content-level metadata a reference to the document(s) of which it forms part. Someone could then move from content-level to document-level metadata if they wanted to see subject, relational, or bibliographic data. Of course, the minute you reuse some content, say a “Findings” paragraph in an “Introduction” paragraph, that structural element changes. So the structural element needs to exist within the context of a document of origin / reuse. But wait, because here is where it starts getting really tricky…

If we want to assign subject metadata at the content-level will we have to double our work? I can’t think of any other way...the subject of a particular paragraph will not be the same as that of the document as a whole.

Also, how do we manage bibliographic metadata at the content-level? For example, the first time a paragraph is written (probably as part of a larger document), the author associated with the paragraph and the document are one and the same and is probably pretty easy to establish. What do we do when the paragraph is combined with paragraphs that are also taken form other documents and ones that are new? I think that one can argue that the author of the individual paragraphs is clear but who is the author of the document?

Conclusion (resignedly)

The more I think about it, the more I think that we are just going to have to manage two levels of metadata. At the point of creation, the content- and document- level metadata are the same but as content is reused, two distinct and different levels of metadata emerge. To be honest, it would be a big step forward if we were to introduce structural metadata at the content-level and as this presents the fewest or simplest (not simple, mind you, simplest) challenges, I think we will pursue this objective and reassess where we go from there.

March mentoring meeting

Last night we had our monthly mentoring meeting. This was a bit of a regrouping and reassessing meeting having been focussed on finishing and submitting my PPDP.

Agreement review
The first thing we did was to review the mentoring agreement. As per our originally submitted agreement, we reviewed it at the six-month mark and agreed that it still reflected the way we were working and that we were both happy with the way it was going. This whole conversation took about 10 minutes but it was useful as a prompt to make sure that the relationship is working out from both perspectives.

PPDP submission acknowledgement
We then had a little chat about acknowledgement from CILIP on receipt of the PPDP. Not too long after Karen sent in the PPDP, I received a letter from CILIP acknowledging the PPDP and the mentoring agreement (which had been submitted some months earlier – I was a little surprised to see that in the same letter, but there you are!).

Library visits
With those two items on the agenda ticked off, it was on to the library visits that we had discussed. This was a slightly embarrassing topic for me as of all the actions agreed around these visits (identifying libraries, actually arranging and attending the visits) that remain outstanding are mine – [awkward/guilty feeling]. Reminded by Karen (and still feeling guilty), I committed to getting those all at least arranged by the next meeting.

Action: D – arrange library visits by 19/04/2007

Portfolio
Our final item was one that we both had put onto the agenda – the portfolio. I was keen to run through the different components of the portfolio and talk about formats. Karen was keen to discuss the contents and find out how I was doing with assembling materials. This one is a lightly less embarrassing topic for me as I have actually made some, albeit tentative, steps towards pulling things together. I have created a table of the different sections of the portfolio (which match the different sections of the PPDP) and started to record evidence items against each. The idea is to help me identify gaps early-on. I have created a file of course certificates and have set aside copies of relevant documents that I have created in my current role that I will include. Where I am overdue is on the review of materials from previous jobs. I have always kept copies of pieces of work that I was particularly proud so will be able to pull a few things together but there are some pretty minor things that might be a little more difficult.

There are a few items that I might have to go through archived emails from previous jobs to find (not entirely sure that I should have copies of these archives but let’s just move on!). For example, in my current role, I don’t take meeting minutes. In my previous role, I used to have my team rotate chair and minute-taker at our meetings and so had plenty of examples. Another is personnel reviews to show line management experience. At the moment, the one position that reports to me is filled by a temp so no personnel reviews. In my last role, I had five direct reports so had many personnel reviews to write. Hopefully, a deep trawl of the files that I do have from previous roles will turn up some good samples!

In terms of components to the portfolio, I wanted to be clear in my mind what they were so here is the list with which we came up:

• Portfolio Table of Contents
• Evaluative statement (<1000 words, check formatting requirements)
• Detailed CV
• Organisational charts from all previous jobs
• Personal Professional Development Plan
• Personal Professional Development Log
• Weblog
• Portfolio evidence:
• from first job (1999 to 2003)
• from second job (2003 to 2006)
• from third/current job (2006 to present)
• Evidence of participation in mentoring scheme
• x-references to blog entries
• copy of mentoring agreement
• copy of scheme evaluation

I will also need to submit alongside my portfolio:

• An application form (must request this from CILIP in late August)
• Mentoring scheme evaluation form

I think that what I will do is base the submission on the sections identified in the PPDP and for each of these, provide the PPDP parts, the PPDL parts and the evidence. At the beginning of this ‘book’, I will have a ToC, followed by the evaluative statement, the CV and the org charts and at the end, I will have the evidence of participation in a mentoring scheme section.

So that’s it. For the sake of a challenge, I’m going to try to create a diagram to represent the contents and see if I can upload it to the blog…hopefully there is a diagram below!



Hmm - having some trouble with that...I think that worked...did that work? It would seem so!

Copyright statements

Currently, all of the publications that our Research and Development team publish carry a copyright statement that allows readers to reproduce the publication free of charge as long as it’s for research, private study or internal circulation within an organisation. It goes on to stipulate that the subject needs to be reproduced and referenced accurately and that it must acknowledge the company before finishing by directing enquiries for any other uses to the Head of R&D.

I’d quite like this copyright notice to be on the web as well and it is proving quite a struggle to get it hosted there. Within the metadata structure that we are implementing, there is a copyright element and I would like this to have to contain nothing more than a URL but there is resistance and I can’t get anyone to articulate why – I think that it just hasn’t been done before and the reason for doing so isn’t sufficiently obvious. One option for getting around this point is to go down the route of a Creative Commons (CC) licence . Doing so would enable us to mark our publications, record our CC licence in the metadata and be able to point to it on the Web. The question is, though, what is the difference between using a CC licence to protect our IP and the copyright statement that we currently use? Surely what I have described above would be defined as ‘some rights reserved’ rather than ‘all rights reserved’…? In fact, a quick bit of surfing leads me to believe that what we are after is a ‘Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License’.

I think that a little more investigation is probably required and probably a quick call to our solicitors to verify things before we commit to making this change but to be honest, the threat of pushing for a CC licence might be so much change that ‘they’ concede on the hosting of the existing notice and that would at least get me where I want to be.

Receipt of PPDP and Mentoring Agreement

A little more than six months after the date I registered my mentoring relationship with CILIP, I have received confirmation of receipt of the mentoring relationship form and my PPDP - I guess the PPDP submission stimulated that letter. The good news is that I won't need to chase it up with CILIP.

Modular Railway Induction

When I had my interview for this role, I made it clear that I had no knowledge of the railway industry beyond that acquired as a consumer. This, I was assured, was not going to be a problem. Aside from speaking to relevant people, I requested, and was registered onto, an industry familiarisation course at the end of November (2006). This turned out to be a two-day course aimed at giving participants an introduction to the different aspects of the rail industry and how they work (and the terms used to describe them). The course consisted of the following sections:

1. The Structure and Operations of the British Rail industry
2. Railway Documentation
3. Permanent Way
4. Structures & Clearances
5. Signalling & Telecommunications
6. Overhead Line Equipment & Third Rail Electrification
7. On-Track Plant
8. Planning Engineering Work and Line Blockages
9. Railway Safety Legislation

In addition, we were given a glossary of railway terminology. I was sorry that it didn’t include a section on Rolling Stock (along with its associated topics such as Vehicle/Track Interaction, etc.) as this would have rounded out the course to provide a complete introduction. Having said that, I think it would have to have been a three-day course if it were to include Rolling Stock because, as it was, we ended up running short of time and having to skip the On-Track Plant section.

The course consisted of a great deal of lecturing at the beginning and to be honest, I don’t really know what other way there is for covering those first two topics. I found the next four sections really interesting (sections 3 to 6), but then I have always been interested in how things work. Our instructor had set up at the front of the room a pretty large and comprehensive working model and we used this to illustrate the rest of the sections.

On the whole, it was a really good course and it was certainly very useful. I understand a lot more about the company’s role in the industry and how it relates to the rest of the industry organisations. I also understand the content of our research a great deal more and know what most of the terms and acronyms that are used mean (and for those that I don’t know, the glossary is proving pretty useful.)

Rail Industry Metadata Standard (RIMS)

Having done some research, it looks like there isn’t yet a metadata standard that is either designed for use or in common use by the rail industry. Although it wasn’t a surprise, it was a bit of a set back as it meant having to assemble a proposed metadata schema for the description of materials within the rail industry, engage in consultation starting with the R&D senior managers, and testing to validate it.

Building the metadata standard: the birth of RIMS
I have chosen to draw from the Dublin Core Metadata Standard (DCMS), and the Dublin Core Terms (DCTerms) to flesh it out a little. I have also drawn from the e-Government Metadata Standard (eGMS) to ensure that any public sector aspects are also covered. Now, the eGMS is based on the DMS and so far, what I have described would pretty much describe the eGMS. The rail industry, and our R&D work in particular, requires a little more granularity than the eGMS currently provides, something the Cabinet Office acknowledges by encouraging enhancement and refinement to suit different contexts. So I have also added some additional elements that are specific to the rail industry (e.g. asset type) and to our organisation (research topic). The complete picture is what we will consider to be the Rail Industry Metadata Standard (RIMS).

Identifying, assembling and building controlled vocabularies
Once I had a proposed set of elements, I set about sorting out the required controlled vocabularies. In my, albeit relatively limited, experience, this is the most difficult part. For many of the fields drawn from established standards, it was pretty straight forward (e.g. date formats us the W3C-recomended date-time format). For some of the elements that I had to create (e.g. research topic), it was also pretty straight forward because such lists were specific to the company and, in many cases, already in current use. Others from both established standards and the new set, however, were much more difficult. One such example is the asset type element – how granular do you go? For most of us, the term ‘locomotive’ is sufficiently descriptive but for our engineers it’s just too broad. My approach to these controlled vocabularies has been to put together a starting point and seek input and comments. So far, I have only engaged the R&D team and the lists have been heavily refined and accepted by them.

Subject
My other challenge has been sorting out a subject matter controlled vocabulary and it is proving to be a somewhat daunting task. The Integrated Public Service Vocabulary (IPSV), recommended as the controlled vocabulary for DCMS Subject, treats everything to do with the rail industry as ‘Rail Transport’. Clearly, this isn’t going to be sufficient for our requirements. I started to have a go at this task in the same way as I approached sorting out some of the other controlled vocabularies but it has proven to be too big. At the moment, it’s on hold while I move the rest of the project forward with a space reserved for subject tags and start to look for other initiatives both here and around Europe that are working towards creating a controlled vocabulary of some sort for the rail industry.

Handling the metadata
There are basically two different ways of managing document metadata: you can hold the metadata in a table which includes the location of the document described and then use this table to search and retrieve documents or you can embed the metadata into the documents themselves and search that (In reality, the search software or engine will most likely create its own table of metadata as in the case of the first method but this is a temporary table that is understood to need regular updating so is not the source of the metadata). Each method has its strengths and weaknesses (e.g. the table is quicker and simpler to deliver while the embedded data means that when someone downloads the document to a local space, the metadata travels with it and isn’t lost).

At the moment, we are also in the process of introducing a business process management system (we are calling it the Research Management System or RMS). The RMS will allow us to store documents as well as manage their production and approval. As a result, it makes sense that we piggy back the metadata assignment on the RMS work meaning that we will be going down the table route. This isn’t my preferred option but it is the one that will mean that we get metadata gathered and stored sooner. Once that process in embedded, we can look at technologies that will enable us to embed that gathered metadata into the files so that users downloading them from our website take the metadata with them.

One challenge that remains, and for which we have a few options but haven’t decided on any one yet, is what we do with the legacy collection. It has been decided that past projects and their associated documents will not be uploaded into the RMS. So the RMS presents us with the solution for future publications but it doesn’t deal with the existing collection. It is most likely that we will upload the previous publications to a separated segment of the RMS which will store the metadata in the same way but there are a couple of alternatives solutions…more on this as it develops.

Where from here?
The next thing to do with this standard is to confirm that it works in practice which will be part of the embedding process for the RMS. We will then look to consult the rest of the organisation on the suitability of the metadata schema and its associated controlled vocabularies for wider use in the company. I guess you could think of our work as a bit of a pilot for the rest of the company.

I’d like to publish our schema and controlled vocabularies under creative commons and invite other organisations to comment on it or use it in their organisations.

PPDP on its way to CILIP

Karen has confirmed today that she has signed and sent over my PPDP to CILIP - yay!

Personal Professional Development Plan Submitted

This morning, I finalised my PPDP, bound it, signed it, and sent it over to Karen for her to sign before she sends it in to CILIP.

It feels quite good to have that first 'assignment' completed and submitted. Neither Karen nor I are sure whether there is any feedback or acknowledgement of it so in a couple of weeks, if I haven't heard anything, I might give them a ring to check that they have receiwed it and that they are happy with it.

February mentoring meeting

Although it hasn’t been long since our January meeting, Karen and I met up last night in order to go through the personal professional development plan (PPDP) draft that I had sent over to her earlier in the week. This thing needs to be submitted in the first six months of the process and my six months are up in a few weeks so it was important that we get together to go over it. Aside from a few changes to the content and layout (and shamefully, a couple of typos), it looks about ready to go.

I have used the CDL PPDP for CILIP Chartership Candidates document as an outline for the different categories in my PPDP. At first, I found creating the PPDP quite daunting. With nothing more than a pretty generic template to guide me, I was struggling to get my head around how to structure it and what to include in it. The CDL document, though, provided me with a structure and some description around the sort of thing that should be included under each heading and sub-heading. This really helped to focus my effort and to generate the content. I haven’t followed the CLD document completely; I have left a couple of sub points out, mainly because they just didn’t apply to me.

One of the most (worrying?) glaring blank spaces in the document is under the ethics heading. I just couldn't think of anything that I could put under that heading that fit with my role. We had a lengthy discussion about ethics in librarianship in general and then talked a bit about how that might apply to my current role. In the end, it looked like with the exception of anything particularly out of the ordinary occurring, I would need to fill that space with actions to the effect of discussing it, reading about it, and abiding by CILIP's code of conduct. That code states that CILIP will pursue disciplinary measures against professionals acting in breach of it. I'm not too clear quite how that would work and one of the actions for me coming out of our conversation was:

Action: D - to post a question about ethics and CILIP's disciplinary actions

So the plan is for me to make the changes that we talked about, agree the final version, print it out and sign it before sending it over to her to sign and submit to CILIP. I’ll feel a lot better once this first ‘assignment’ is completed!

January mentoring meeting

My mentor and I met again yesterday. We seem to be meeting every two months despite originally planning to meet monthly. This isn't proving to be a problem but there are a couple of things that need to get done that are coming up so we will probably use all of those monthly meetings in the coming months.

We reviewed my draft Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP) draft and discussed a couple of the gaps in it and how best to fill them. There weren't too many gaps; worryingly, ethics was one of them. The other gaps were around a lack of engagement with the profession. I think that my activities are a little thin on the ground here because I am one of those information professionals who works in isolation from others (in my case, I am surrounded by engineers...lunch time briefings and information discussions usually focus on things like the use of hydrogen fuel cells for heavy transport rather than library-related issues). So we have agreed a few actions to move the PPDP forward and to address some of the gaps:

Action: D - put PPDP draft contents into CILIP template
Action: D - create a parallel PPDP document containing after-the-fact analysis
Action: D - start work on long-term training plan
Action: D - make a list of libraries I'd like to visit and make some cold calls
Action: K - contact some colleagues regarding potential visits for me to follow up
Action: D&K - prepare for discussion on ethics at next meeting

And that's it...I am going to try to get the content transferred into the CILIP template today given it's a bit of a copy/paste job - perfect for a Friday afternoon!

Bounded Applicability

This is really a small one that I am putting in because it is the kind of thing that I will forget otherwise. Bounded applicability is a term that Dave Snowden uses to describe the limits that any tool, technology or method has. As the tool, technology or method approaches those limits, the cost/benefit ratio begins to become unappealing. Interesting but what’s the point? We tend to use the tool, technology or method more frenetically when really we ought to be recognising the "bounded applicability" of the tool/technology/method and step back to refresh our perspective.

Corporate versus Government

I read an interesting blog posting by Dave Snowden the other day about the context and uncertainties of government (opens in new window) in which he writes about the major differences between industrial and governmental environments within the context of trying to apply commercial models of practice to government activities. The article caught my eye partly because I have worked in both the private and public sectors and I think that the appeal of my CV to the public sector is that it contains private sector experience.

There is a view that in the competitive commercial environment, companies are forced to be lean and efficient while government, with no competition, has become large, wasteful, and inefficient. Dave Snowden’s entry talks about these different environments – government needs to be lean, efficient and effective because it is the only one that citizens have:

"Governments face a far more significant set of issues and problems than those faced by industry, and they face them over longer periods of time without the option of bankruptcy. Citizens cannot buy their services from another government, if their own fails. Neither can they insure against the consequences of a catastrophic failure of their state, they have to live with it. In addition Governments, to a greater extent than industry have to consider multiple interactions and interdependencies between initiatives and actions."

I think that most people would agree with Dave Snowden and what is interesting about this article is that it challenges the very tempting and automatic conclusion that therefore, government should apply the same models as used by industry to become the lean, efficient organisation; government’s unique position means many of these industry models are inappropriate. Consider:

1. the level of magnitude and the consequences of government action in comparison with industry
   
2. the fact that government de facto provides it’s [sic] own regulartory framework, while providing those frameworks to industry
   
3. as an entity it carries a burden of responsibility for failure, while industry is constructed on the bases of failure as a market mechanism
   
4. government operates as a unit of one, industry has many units within each market

The question is, then, who is developing government-appropriate equivalents to the industry models that have proven to be so useful there?

Hello 2007

It has been over a month since I last posted an entry here. Since then, I have been in Canada for a few weeks relaxing with my family. In fact, truth be told, I haven’t been as active on the Chartership front as I would have liked since my daughter was born. It’s like we’ve entered this new dimension where time passes at incomprehensible speeds (except in the middle of the night when she just won’t go to sleep). I have been doing a little reading and concentrating on things at work.

However, it is now time to get back at it. I need to polish up my Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP) - actually, it currently consists of a bunch of hand-written notes so actually needs typing up – as Karen (mentor) is not-so-subtly hinting that she’d like to have a look at it. Fair request given I was supposed to have sent over a draft earlier this week.

I also need to sit down and go through all of my files on my home PC for the portfolio. This task has become urgent as the home PC fell over a couple of days ago for the third time in the last year. I keep fixing it and we keep limping along but this time there’s been a hard-disk corruption. Oh dear – I think that it’s time for a new one. I’ve had this laptop for six years so there are a few things that are antiquated about it (e.g. only has USB 1.1 ports and boy are they ever slow). Anyway, I’ve managed to prop it back up again at least enough that I will be able to get what few files are still on the hard drive backed up (about a year ago I started storing files on an external hard drive). A good opportunity to sort through things presents itself…

Learning from the Intranet

Our Intranet is not the best organised. It can be a little tricky finding some things (like the expense claim form…no, not under procurement… no, not under finance…no, not even under forms…there it is, under HR - ?). Each department has its own section and once you get accustomed to the menu and sub-menu relationship, it is possible to learn a lot about the different functions of the company.

My wider understanding of the different teams and their functions has already started to benefit me when I attend organisation-wide meetings (to better understand different people’s perspectives on a situation) and will no doubt prove invaluable going forward as I better understand their priorities and obstacles when it comes time to gain support for initiatives. Clearly, this relationship can’t be based entirely on what I have read on the Intranet, but it has certainly provided me with an excellent starting point.

Story triggers

One of the concepts in knowledge management that interests me is that of storytelling. I haven't really written about storytelling but it’s something that I read a lot about and it is one of my issues to read more about. One of the articles that I have read recently is “Stories at Work: Story Triggers” by Larry Todd Wilson and Pamela S Daugherty (1999).

In this article they identify a reservation that I have always held about storytelling as a KM tool and that is whether it is always the most appropriate format. Many articles about storytelling would lead you to believe that it is the panacea of KM but Wilson and Daugherty’s article proposes some “triggers” that indicate where storytelling is an appropriate format. So what are the triggers?

Trigger 1 – New or unexpected situations

• Are you working with an unfamiliar situation?
  
• Are you introducing a new concept or process?
  
• Do you need to communicate the latest “news” about a person, place, or event within the organisation, or to the world outside the organisation?
  
• Have you discovered a better way?
  
• Have you experienced an unanticipated outcome or response to something you did?

Trigger 2 – Situations that require engagement of feelings, as well as thoughts

• Do you need to facilitate acceptance of a new person within a group?
  
• Do you need to remove barriers to action?
  
• Do you need to persuade someone?
  
• Do you need to help someone overcome inertia?
  

Trigger 3 – A complex situation

• Are you dealing with a situation that contains many variables, or variables that track along several paths?
  
• Do you need to help others bridge the gap between theory and practice?
  

Trigger 4 – Is this a situation in which you need to help others understand “why?”

On the whole, I’d agree with these triggers as ones that would indicate an appropriate time to use storytelling as a tool – especially trigger number 2. But are there more?

Bruce, David. "Using Metadata to organise an online collection." Update Magazine 12 2006: 36-37.

Looking through my RSS (opens in new window) feeds this morning, I came across an article by someone with the same name as me. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be an article by me! I had been told that the article that I had submitted sometime ago (September or so) would be published either as part of the December or January issue of Update Magazine (opens in new window), CILIP’s monthly magazine for members. Okay, so it isn’t the Guardian but I’m pretty pleased all the same.

The December issue is currently featured as part of the main Update page: http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine (opens in new window)

As a more future-proof link to the article, though, here is its home in the archives:
http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2006/december/Bruce.htm (opens in new window)

Implicit Knowledge

Heard of explicit knowledge? How about tacit knowledge? If you are an information professional, the answer is almost certainly "yes"; these are pretty widely accepted and understood terms and concepts. But what about implicit knowledge? Initially, I sort of felt like I knew what this was but pretty quickly realised that it was a concept I hadn’t come across before reading "Implicit Knowledge Management: the new frontier for corporate capability". It’s an interesting article (if a little ‘salesy’ towards the end) that covers a few different concepts. One of the concepts is knowledge harvesting, the subject of my management diploma dissertation and the reason this document surfaced in an online search.

Implicit Knowledge
Let’s start with implicit knowledge. The article defines it as a middle ground between explicit and tacit knowledge; it is the tacit knowledge that can be transformed into explicit knowledge. It’s not the same thing as tacit knowledge, just captured because, as the authors point out, "not all tacit knowledge can be transfigured into implicit knowledge. There will always be bodies of know-how and experience that remain tacit."

The authors are quite right in pointing out that most organisations that claim to engage in knowledge management would point to systems or processes whose principal function is to capture and consolidate existing explicit knowledge. Few organisations (and none that I know of) are actively engaged in some form of tacit knowledge management. The closest they seem to come is the provision of mechanisms for individuals to share their tacit knowledge. This step is a big one but not the same as capturing it for use once that person has left the organisation. The goal of implicit knowledge management, according to the authors, is "to determine how much of the tacit knowledge in your organisation defies any form of codification, and to mine that which does not."

The last thing on implicit knowledge as a concept is that the authors flag it as not being an effective way to bring staff values into line with company ones. Mentoring and storytelling are highlighted as better ways of achieving that objective.

Codification of process logic or expertise
The authors also touch on the need for a codification process for organising that tacit knowledge that is made implicit. Their example is:

• Process: an overall series of related tasks resulting in a single business outcome or product
  
• Module: major sub-routines in the process, tasks grouped by a common theme – processes may have more than one module
  
• Task: an individual step taken in order to accomplish a module
  

In addition, they draw the distinction between the "cerebral inputs" to the tasks, distinguishing between "Guidance" (how to perform a process) and "Support" (explanations as to why tasks are executed in a particular manner).

Dimensions of knowledge harvesting
The article includes three case study examples of the application of implicit knowledge management, each of which is presented in terms of eight dimensions:

1. Focus – the rationale for the project
   
2. Find – the method for locating the tacit knowledge and is ‘codifiable’ (yes, I did make that word up)
   
3. Elicit – the process used to harvest the knowledge
   
4. Organise – the way in which the implicit knowledge was codified
   
5. Package – the format in which the implicit knowledge was shared / published
   
6. Share – the method for sharing / publishing the implicit knowledge
   
7. Apply – how the implicit knowledge was used
   
8. Evaluate & Adapt – the assessment process used to determine the success of the knowledge harvesting project
   

So why am I interested in this set of dimensions? Well, I think that they could prove useful if one ever had to assemble a business case and project plan for a knowledge harvesting project. The only aspects that I think are missing from this set of dimensions are: 1) something about target audience or intended users and 2) something about specific objectives and anticipated benefits. To be fair, the audience aspect may be picked up in a few of the dimensions above and the objectives one would probably be picked up under Focus but for the sake of evaluating the success (or lack thereof) of a particular project, these things are best made explicit.

…and finally…
Apparantly, Knowledge Harvesting is a service mark! How can this be? In my experience, it’s used quite freely to refer to the exact same concept that is service-marked…hmm…

The Long Tail

I have been reading about the shift that has taken place with the introduction of Internet retailing (specifically, The Long Tail) and came across the concept of "the long tail". This is a really interesting phenomenon that defines the Internet as a whole – "something for everyone".

The long tail refers to the market for those non-mainstream products that traditional retailers cannot afford to stock. Your local Virgin Megastore cannot stock every album ever recorded; it simply hasn’t got the room to store them all. As a result, they choose those albums that they can be sure of selling at least enough copies to cover the cost of storing them. iTunes, on the other hand, just needs some server space to store its stock. Of course, there is a cost associated with this form of storage as well but it is far less expensive. As a result, iTunes can quite feasibly stock every album ever recorded (of course there are challenges associated with doing so – some are pretty esoteric for starters) but there is no disputing that they can offer consumers more choice. The market for those non-mainstream albums that Virgin Megastore cannot afford to stock but that iTunes makes available is the "long tail" and where this market becomes commercially interesting is when the "long tail" represents more sales than the mainstream products do.

Not only is Internet retailing a step forward in terms of consumer and retailer convenience, it has opened up a whole new way of satisfying each and every individual consumer’s preferences.

An interesting concept, certainly, and one with which any commercial information professional should be familiar but is there more to this idea? Could it change society at all? Ever notice how you see certain popular books being read by commuters around the same time? The Da Vinci Code is a really good example of this phenomenon. About two or three years ago, you could pretty much count on seeing one of the dozen or so people near you on the train reading that book (never mind the dozens of others you cannot see on the train who might also be reading it). These days, though, no one is reading it. It was pushed to the market through all available channels and consumers responded. So, given that:

• less-mainstream products are just as readily available as the mainstream ones
• Web 2.0 makes it possible for consumers to have a louder voice in recommending books/music/etc
• Internet retailing continues to grow and the ‘long tail’ phenomenon continues to have commercial appeal

I wonder if this means that over time, we will have more diversity in society – not everyone will be listening to the same albums or reading the same books at the same time…

PPDP-specific notes from November mentoring meeting

Coming out of my recent meeting with Karen, there are a few PPDP-specific things that I need to do / remember.

First, I need to add a few things under Training and Development Need:

• negotiation skills
• marketing skills
• industry-specific familiarisation course that I’m due to attend later this month

Second, I need to be open-minded about what my proposed actions can be. They can include:

• courses (the obvious starting point)
  
• gaining experience in a particular skill
  
• reading about a particular discipline or skill set
  
• having conversations with people on specific topics
  

Finally, I need to set up my training log. If the PPDP is the theory, the training log is the practice. There isn’t really a great deal of format exerted on this log by the Chartership committee but it needs to complement the PPDP. I think that I will record my entries in this blog and tag them appropriately to identify them as being a Training Log entry. Each entry will be in response to a particular activity specified in the PPDP (some activities are longer-term ones and will end up with multiple entries against them, others (like courses) will be fixed-term activities and only have one entry against them. My proposed structure for each entry is:

• Activity Objectives
• Outcomes
• Benefits Derived
• Reflection and Analysis

I think that’s it for now. Next week I hope to spend a bit of time on my draft PPDP and given that one of the activities that will be on it is a course that I’m doing later next week, I guess I’ll be starting that Training Log not long after!

My blogroll

As I mentioned in my posting "Bye bye Bloglines, hello Blogger (beta)", I still rate Bloglines as a RSS aggregator.

The people there are working on improving things and have added various features including the ability to make your personal blogroll public.

Ideally, I’d like to have my blogroll integrated into this Chartership blog but until I figure out someway of doing that (without entering each one manually), I’ll just have to be content with a link to it: http://www.bloglines.com/public/djlbruce

November mentoring meeting

Last Thursday, my mentor and I had our monthly meeting. This time we talked about a range of different topics (career development, CV formats, writing for publication) but the main topic was my Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP).

This is a document that is meant to be a roadmap of my intended continuing professional development (CPD) over the coming year. We are given a template to use for this document by CILIP and I had a quick go at filling it in but when I met up with Karen and we started discussing it, it was clear that I had hugely underestimated what was required here.

I was completing the template in a bulleted format but it seems that they (the evaluation committee) are expecting something significantly more substantial. Karen provided me with the detailed guidelines that are provided to civil servant applicants so I’m going to use that as a template.

Unfortunately, because the guidelines that I am following are quite new, there aren’t many examples out there to look at. We have agreed that I am will look into attending a Career Development Group (one of the CILIP special interest groups) sessions on the Chartership process (I have already attended one of these but it was a long time ago) and on the PPDP – hopefully they will have some useful examples for me.

Action: D – find and register for Chartership process seminar and PPDP information seminar

I also now need to go back and alter the project plan to reflect the fact that I am going to be spending a lot of time on the PPDP over the next month in preparation for our next meeting where we will have a look at my first draft copy.

Action: D – update project plan to reflect additional time required to complete PPDP

I will write a separate entry pertaining to some of the specific suggestions and conclusions that we reached regarding the PPDP itself.

Bye bye Bloglines, hello Blogger (beta)

Hooray! After a little research, I found that Blogger's beta version not only let's me update posts without altering their posting date but it will:

• let me set the posting date (so I can restore the original posting order and dates)
  
• allow me to create, assign and alter labels for individual postings
  
• let me restrict the readership of the blog to a list of invited guests
  

This is a big improvement and I have already started playing around with the labels function. It also lets me set a template for my postings so that I can make sure that they all follow the same standards without having to remember the settings.

So much better...

Having said that, I still rate Bloglines as an RSS aggregator - it just isn't as functional as I would like on the Blog front.

Bloglines software

So that's a pain in the backside. In my meeting with my mentor yesterday, we talked about assigning categories to these entries. I have just been through all of my previous entries to give them a category only to discover that it updates the original posting date to today's

I had to go back through all of the entries and add a tag for the original posting date and do so in chronological order (I had to guess at the date for one of the entries - Project Plan - and I guessed wrong so it appears to be out of order but in reality, isn't. Grr... too frustrated to go back and fix it.

The fact that I'm kind of making up the categories as I go along (folksonomy style!) and will almost certainly want to alter them at some point in the future means that I will have to go through each entry and update it even if I have no changes to make to it, just to maintain the chronological order. This is quickly becoming unsustainable. I think that I'm going to look into an alternative platform for this blog. This one is just too limited in its functionality.

Obliquity: delivering value in a sympathetic environment

I have just read an article originally published in the Financial Times (17 January 2004) entitled "Obliquity". What is "obliquity"? Well, that was what I wanted know. Here's how the article starts:

"Strange as it may seem, overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly. This is the idea of Obliquity. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people."

Sounds like an interesting take on strategy setting for businesses so I read on. It goes on to state that "Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them." Again, I'm interested because it shows an understanding of the concept and nature of complex systems.

From here the article goes on to give some examples of where companies have succeeded when they weren't focussed on profit and others that have failed when they were. Ultimately, though, the article is saying that companies are most profitable when they focus on delivering value to customers and not when they are focussed on turning a profit. This isn't sounding like anything revolutionary to me anymore, just good strategy setting. The reader is then presented with a life-equivalent regarding the pursuit of happiness which has been shown to be a by-product of social interactions and facing challenges that stretch us. Looking at the pursuit of happiness from a business perspective (happiness = profit), you could argue that again, the pursuit here is value to the customer (oneself) rather than happiness in itself.

At this point, I don't disagree with the article and I think that it's an interesting way of looking at business strategy but I don't feel as though I am being exposed to any novel ideas. However, the article then starts to contradict itself in a way. The first is a concession that obliquity is not a business panacea, concluding that on average, a concerted effort to achieve profit will result more consistently in the achievement of profit than the pursuit of some other goal but that those sucesses that do result from an oblique approach will, on average, be greater. This isn't shaping up to be a very sound business strategy, but wait, there's more... The next dent in the argument comes in the form of an example that argues that genes survive not because they want to survive but because they do what it is they do in an environment that happens to favour them over others. So does that mean that this on-average-greater-success is actually a result of sheer chance?

The conclusion that I reached as a result of reading this article was that the wildly profitable business achieves that profit through a combination of focussing on delivering customer value and a sympathetic environment. Well, it held such promise but in the end, right place / right time isn't a strategy that I would hang my hat on. I'll stick to delivering value to customers with a view to making a profit and the law of averages.

Company business plan

Business plans don’t normally grab the reader in the same way as an airport novel does and unfortunately, ours is no exception. Having said that, it is good to understand how/where our funding comes from (this determining who our customers really are) and to find out a bit about the other aspects of the company and what is planned for them. It was also useful to read about the priorities for my department as I could better see where some of the things that I have been asked to prioritise fit in.

Effective presentations and communication

This journal is more a record and reference for me than anyone else and as such, I wanted to include something about effective presentations. Although it isn’t a skill that is limited to the information professional’s world, it is a skill that we need and one that is relevant to developing my Chartership portfolio.

I am regularly called upon to make presentations in my current role (and in previous ones) so I have a lot of experience but I still feel like I could improve. As a result, I will almost always read an article published on the topic. In the last few weeks, I have come across a couple that have caught my attention. One was about effective presentations and the other about effective communication. In fact, once you have read about effective communication, you’ll see that in fact, good presenters are actually good communicators.

The first article (What has Al Gore and Edward de Bono have in common?[sic]) looked at a couple of presenters who the author felt were persuasive and the commonalities between their presentation styles.

1. They both presented facts, from memory, that meant something to the audience
   
2. They both told stories and included little details that added colour
   
3. They both used analogies and metaphors to convey their messages
   
4. They both enjoyed themselves and used humour when the opportunity presented itself
   
5. The were both relaxed and confident – something that I feel I can only be when I am talking about something that I know inside and out

The second (I Don’t Think You Get My Point: the 5 hurdles to effective communication) looked at barriers to communication and identified five obstacles, any one of which could prevent effective communication.

1. Your point must be explainable using language
   • This seemed obvious to me at first but the more you think about it, the more limited our language appears to be for the purpose of describing things that we experience (how do you recognise a good poem?). Add to that the fact that you must share a common vocabulary with your audience and the fact within that common vocabulary, there could be differences in connotation and you have a pretty limited ‘language’ to use.
   • Suggested ways of getting around this hurdle are to use metaphors and analogies (point 3 above) or to show your audience what you mean.
   
   
2. You must be able to articulate your point clearly and persuasively
   • Clarity can be achieved through effective explanation but the real challenge here is the persuasion element. The article refers to sermonising (talk radio, the pulpit, editorials) as reassurance not persuasion as it ignores your audiences current ‘place’ in their thinking.
   • Suggested ways around this problem fall into what I would call ‘human communication skills’ – empathy, attention, openness – and practice. I think that this roughly correlates to points 4 and 5 above regarding the presenters’ disposition.
   
   
3. Your audience must be ready to listen
   • They need to be at an appropriate intellectual and conceptual level and have an understanding of what is urgent and important before they are ready to receive your ‘broadcast’.
   • A suggested solution to this hurdle is to choose (and invite) your audience carefully
   
   
4. Your audience must be listening
   • In my experience, they are almost certainly not listening. They may not be playing with their Blackberries (though sometimes they are!) but they are almost certainly thinking about something they have to do on the way home, a phone conversation they’ve just had or something else that is more immediately relevant to them than what you have to say. You need to get (and hold) their attention.
   • Suggested ways of doing so include the use of stories, humour and facts (points 1,2 and 3 above)
   
   
5. Your audience must be able to understand your point from their frame of reference
   • "Frames trump facts". If your message isn’t communicated in a way that ‘fits’ with the audience’s perspective, it isn’t going to be properly received. This isn’t the same as the audience being ready to listen; this has more to do with the personal history and experiences of the audience which will colour anything that they hear.
   • The suggested way of overcoming this hurdle is to understand your audience’s frame and to explain things in their context.

So there you are. I think that both of these lists are true and when you look at them side by side, it is apparent that good presentations are actually good communications. Not that that makes them any easier to achieve!

DPA meeting

Had a meeting with the individual responsible for our compliance with the DPA. It was useful to meet him as I will need him to get involved in some of the things that I have planned regarding our e-newsletter subscribers and website users. I want to know who these people are so that I can get feedback from them on those publications that they access. I also want to be able to send them updates on our publications based on their jobs and interests.

As we should be, we are registered with the Data Commissioner and I have had a look through our registration. Looks like the plans that I have won’t require a change to the records but I’ll still need to run any DPA-related wording past this person.

Harvesting Knowledge: the exit interview

An information profession topic that is of great interest to me is knowledge retention and one about I would like to spend more time reading and thinking (Time to Think). I wrote my Diploma in Management extended essay on the topic, focussing specifically on situations of forced redundancy (with all of the additional complexities of motivation), and have been hooked on it since (helped that I aced the paper). Anyway, I now read pretty much any article that I find on the subject – especially if they pertain to redundancy situations as writing on this subject is very sparse (the focus tends to be on retirement – perfectly understandable given the developed world’s current demographics and the challenges that presents to the commercial world).

Anyway, I stumbled across an article called “Acing the Exit Interview: How to mine the data in your workers’ heads before the best ideas walk out the door”. It’s pretty brief but makes some good suggestions for getting the most out of an exit interview – something that applies regardless of the conditions under which an individual is leaving the organisation. It basically advised that:

• the right people conduct the interview
  
• you concentrate on particular employees
  
• the output is readily available to users
  

I think that this last one particularly important but the article (perhaps due to length constraints?) misses the point of tailoring that method of making the material available to the users who require it – interactive software may be a more engaging format but if the end users really need a checklist, give them a checklist!

Creating Controlled Vocabularies

As part of the Industry Schema metadata work that I am doing at the moment, we need to create a few organisation- and industry-specific controlled vocabularies. The last time that I did something like this (establish a metadata schema for an organisation), I don’t think that we did a great job of getting the controlled vocabularies sorted out. Obviously, it was pretty easy for the elements that used external ones (like the Integrated Public Service Vocabulary or IPSV) but for the bespoke ones, we just didn’t get our act together.

So, for this one, I am going to get my extremely knowledgeable colleagues to create a starting point at our next team meeting which I will then put in front of the section heads before getting input on it from key people around the rest of the organisation. Once we have the necessary lists sorted out for my department and the organisation as a whole, I will start to get in touch with other organisations in the industry to try to achieve some convergence on this issue.

Creating the lists and identifying the elements (and creating the necessary supporting documentation) isn’t proving to be the difficult thing. It’s getting everyone to agree on a set of terms…

DITA and the Dublin Core

One of the challenges that we are going to face in this metadata project is the mapping of the DITA schema to the document metadata schema that we choose to implement (let’s call it Industry Schema).

We have a Technical Writer who is eager to introduce a content reuse policy (something very much in line with my own objectives) and would like to use a metadata architecture called the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to do it. It’s basically an XML-based architecture that helps organisations create technical publications without having to recreate content. If you want to more, there is a pretty good Wikipedia entry on DITA and you could check out the DITA section of the Oasis website, the organisation now responsible for its maintenance (it started out as an IBM architecture).

My problem with using only this architecture is that when it comes time to create a composite document, how you know which bits of metadata should be used to describe the document? For example, it is entirely possible that each fragment has a different Subject and Creator. When assigning these elements of metadata to the composite document, I wouldn’t use any of the Creators as the Creator for the document nor would I use all of them – they would now be considered Contributors (at least in the Dublin Core Metadata Standard) and the Creator would be (I suppose) the organisation. As for the Subject, clearly a combination of individual components about certain concepts, when pulled together, do not make up a document that is about all of those separate concepts. So we need a document level metadata schema – enter Industry Schema.

I’m thinking that by creating a document that maps the Industry Schema to the DITA Document Type Definition (DTD) that we use, we can populate the DITA architecture based on the metadata associated with the original document.

When it comes time to catalogue a composite document, we will have to do so from scratch. This isn’t the end of the world; we’d have to do so if we weren’t using DITA to create composite documents so it isn’t like we have to do more. I just can’t help but think that the DITA metadata could be used to inform the Industry Schema metadata that we choose to assign. Is there a tool that we could use?

There is no doubt an article in here somewhere on the use and application of metadata at different levels of content granularity (document versus segment in this case). I would really like to speak to someone who has done this before…

How do you metadata?

Someone needs to write a book (toolkit style) on how organisations apply their metadata schemas. Maybe I should be that person. I can’t find a good resource with which to supply my boss that will guide him through the steps that I’m about to start dragging us through. There are loads of articles and books on the ‘what’ and a growing number of articles on the ‘why’ of metadata but conspicuously little on the ‘how’. I shall have a trawl of Amazon having exhausted my usual Web resources…

Time to Think

Sometimes I think that I could quite happily study forever. I have decided that I should be starting a list (I like lists) of things about which I would like to read more. Not necessarily things that are cutting-edge, brand-new, or even about which I am totally ignorant - just things about which I would like to learn more. I might start to include 'off-topic' (non-information profession) items as well (ooh, the only thing I like better than lists are categorised lists! so sad, isn't it?).

So here's a starter (I'm not introducing categorisation at this point!) and I will stick the date at the end of the item so that new additions are more obvious:

• complex systems and the management of knowledge within them (13/10/06)
  
• storytelling as a method for conveying knowledge (13/10/06)
  
• other Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. del.ici.ous; flickr) (13/10/06)
  
• knowledge retention in redundancy situations (13/10/06)
  
• effective presentation and communication skills (13/10/06)

Metadata Schema

One of the objectives that I have agreed with my line manager is to identify, or if necessary, to develop a metadata schema that our department, organisation and possibly even our industry, could use to organise our publications and documents.

Having had a look around, there doesn't seem to be any industry-wide schema in use and having spoken to a few key people in the organisation, there doesn't seem to be a understanding of what I'm on about let along something in use. So...

Today I have completed a draft version of our metadata schema and sent it around my team for their comments / questions / suggestions. The schema is based on the Dublin Core, DC Terms and the e-Government Metadata Standard. I'm quite pleased with it, though it still needs some work. For starters, there are at least two controlled vocabularies that I need to sort out. I might even have to create them. Hmm...although that's going to delay things a little, I suppose that, along with the final standard, it will provide me with more amunition for my portfolio!

R&D programme prospectus

In my experience, the first week or two of a new job seems to entail a lot of reading. I suspect that this is a result of a few different factors ranging from cynical ones (to keep new starters busy while those with whom they need to meet are otherwise occupied) to more practical ones (new starters – particularly in a new industry – have rather a lot of background to get caught up on).

One of the things that I read in my first few weeks was the R&D programme prospectus. The funding for the R&D programme is renewed every three years and 2006 was a renewal year. The purpose of this document was to demonstrate the value of the programme and to make the case for its continued funding. As it happens, it was successful (or I would likely not have a job with these guys).

From my perspective, it was a pretty useful document to read to get an appreciation of how our work fits into the wider context of the industry, something that none of the other inductions did.

R&D induction

This induction was a little bit like the company one but on a local scale. It was also a lot more personalised (not least of all because it was a one-on-one session) in that we focussed on my role and how it fit into the department. Having been here almost two months, now, we were able to discuss where things were going to go rather than day-to-day topics (e.g. processes). Earlier in the month, I had an induction with HR which covered a few personnel things and this department one picked up where the HR one left off as this was part of the official process that my line manager and I had not yet completed.

Like the company one, it was useful in terms of understanding the unique governance of the R&D programme (which is only managed by the company and is not funded by the company).

Chartership Group

Well, K fulfilled her action point from our meeting and got me invited to the next meeting. Unfortunately, it was roughly around the same time as my wife was due so I declined. Maybe I'm being paranoid but I was keen to be able to dash home at a moment's notice.

Well, that was a shame as she had the kid two weeks early! So now I'm a daddy (and thrilled to pieces about it) but have to hit K up for another invitation...

Publication in Library and Information Update

At my last job as Senior Information Manager for the Networked Learning Group at NCSL, I carried out a pretty hefty project of archiving some 10,000 documents. At the suggestion of one of the consultants that I employed to help with the job, I wrote a little article about the work and how we went about ‘putting theory in practise’, as they say.

The editor of Library and Information Update has agreed to publish it probably in the December issue but possible in the January/February one. I’m pleased:

• it is something that I can add to my CV (academic institutions love seeing that you’ve published)
• it raises my profile in the profession
• it will contribute to my Chartership application

It may also help me get more articles published. This is something that I enjoy doing but haven’t really spent the time or made the effort to do since I was working on my MLIS.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled for “Using metadata to organise an online collection for the education sector” in Update. Not the most pithy of titles...suggestions (you shouldn't need to read the article after reading that title to know what it's about)?

Web 2.0 and business

The concept of Web2.0, for those not familiar with the term, refers to a shift in the content of the World Wide Web from creation and publication to something more akin to evolution where readers can leave their mark. Blogs, for example, allow readers to post their comments meaning that the next time someone reads the blog entry, it is different to the last time. Wikis are another example. The best known is Wikipedia which allows individuals to update entries. I could go into the problems of allowing anyone to edit an entry – mainly authority and accuracy of the entry – but others (such as The Guardian) have already done so and done so better than I can.

What interests me is the use of Wikis in a business setting. Don’t laugh – why shouldn’t businesses use wikis? They have web pages, online purchasing, email, Intranets and bulletin boards. Wikis basically allow your organisation to generate documents in a truly collaborative fashion - a challenge with which many organisations struggle. The challenge then becomes how you protect that content with your content management system (CMS). According to an article in the August 2006 issue of Information Age, The impact of wikis on ECM systems, Gartner recommends “positioning wikis as an authoring environment only, and when the document is ocomplete a copy should be moved to a formal content repository”. While I can see the logic here, it seems to me that we’re back to Web 1.0 – create and publish.

How does a business protect content generated on a company wiki while maintaining all of the benefits that a wiki offers?

Company induction

Today, I joined a few other ‘new starters’ at a company induction. It was a chance for us to meet with one of the directors and have him take us through the company’s strategy, business plan, governance and structure. It was a pretty useful overview in that it helped me to understand how funding and reporting is arranged as well as knowing where the company is trying to go. Some of the others in the room had started this week. They seemed to be a little overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of the content of this presentation (especially around governance) and I think that it helped that I had already been here about a month before the session.

Corporate Communications

I attended the weekly Corporate Comms meeting this morning. It offered an opportunity to meet the team and to find out a little about what they are working on. After that, I had bit more of an in-depth meeting with a couple of the more senior members of the Corporate Communications team. We went over different things (publications processes, different projects that we would each like to talk about – a wide-ranging meeting that delved into some aspects of the company’s corporate communication function and just glossed over others).

One thing that I did learn is that we are no subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This struck me as odd (and frankly, a little wrong). I understand that the company, as a member-funded not-for-profit, like any other organisation that is not public, does not have to comply with FoI requests. I work in R&D, however, which is funded entirely by the government and managed on their behalf by my employer. Because the company that is managing it on their behalf (my employer) is not a public organisation, we are not required to comply with FoI requests. This seems a slippery slope to me and a bit of a loop-hole that unscrupulous individuals in government could use to spend public money, sheltered from public scrutiny. I will have to investigate this a little further to confirm whether it is indeed the case that we do not have to comply with the FoI.