Information World Review articles from December 2005

Information World Review archives from December 2005

Government set to transform info. Major re-think of how government bodies handle information will increase data sharing, finds Tracey Caldwell.
December 6, 2005... The government has launched a new information strategy focussing on increased digitisation and data sharing between departments. Public sector information professionals will be trained to hone their supplier skills, basing information...

Amazon to carve up book delivery.
December 6, 2005... Byline: Mark Chillingworth. Academic publishers have endorsed a new initiative from online bookseller Amazon, which will allow users to buy books in parts as small chapters or pages. "Amazon Pages will give customers unusual...

PA switches on spin cycle. Press Association launches subscription service for political news coverage.
December 6, 2005... Byline: Mark Chillingworth. Sound bites, debates, Prime Minister's Questions, filibustering and crucial votes from the Houses of Parliament are now filed and searchable on a new resource from PA Business, an information supply division of...

Report gives idea of FoI Act impact. One year in, government-funded survey finds that Freedom of Information Act has given Councils a few headaches, writes Kim Thomas.
December 6, 2005... Byline: Kim Thomas. Local authorities have reported mixed experiences in implementing the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, according to a new report from the local government improvement and development agency (I&DeA). The report,...

Telegraph to search local. Newspaper group integrates local business search tools with news content, writes Kim Thomas.
December 6, 2005... The Daily Telegraph newspaper is the latest media organisation to sign up a partnership with InfoServe to provide a local business search facility, delivering business contact information alongside its news coverage. InfoServe provides web...

Editor's View.
December 6, 2005... THE HEART OF GOVERNMENT With our annual pilgrimage to Olympia upon us, it's time to reflect on the opportunities and challenges that currently face the profession. The Terrorism Bill now before Parliament is an undoubted threat to...

BIS emerges as Dialog goes Scientific. Thomson news services morph into Business Intelligence brand as Dialog name merges into scientific division.
December 6, 2005... Byline: Mark Chillingworth. Business information from the Thomson Corporation will now be focused on its new Business Intelligence Services division, as Dialog becomes a Thomson Scientific brand. Clarifying the new strategy and division at...

Gloucester's councils get deeper links.(Gloucester Electronic Partnership)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Byline: Kim Thomas. With the deadline for implementing e-government (IEG) on 31 December, Gloucester Electronic Partnership, an IT initiative of the county's local councils, has adopted Open Objects KBroker search software to help it...

Archives site upgraded for FoI.(National Archives to use a content management system, Freedom of Information Act)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Byline: Tracey Caldwell. The National Archives is to streamline access to its archived documents for information professionals and other users by implementing a content management system (CMS) to manage its 7,000-page website. The...

Academic authors favour peer review over open access.
December 6, 2005... A massive 96.2% of academics support the system of peer review for publication of scholarly articles, according to a new survey from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER), based at University College,...

LOCKSS are key to joined up journal pilot. JISC and CURL partner to secure long-term journal access with pilot project based on US LOCKSS system, writes Tracey Caldwell.
December 6, 2005... Libraries stand to lose access to e-journal back runs if they cancel their subscriptions, or the publisher goes bust. In a bid to protect these information assets, JISC and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) have joined up to pilot the...

Indexed web improves search. Web search technology enters new phase as enterprise search vendors rush to index the internet and improve search results, writes Mark Chillingworth.
December 6, 2005... Leading enterprise search vendors have started to release "indexes" of the internet, in a move they claim signals a new phase for web search technology. UK-based Autonomy and US specialist Convera have announced web indexes, which will be...

Napier University intranet opts for Diagonal Solution.(Freedom of Information)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Byline: Kim Thomas. Napier University in Edinburgh has overhauled its intranet to make it more manageable and easy to use. The university has been struggling with a "variety of intranet sites", using different technologies, which were...

WK scotches takeover talk.(Wolters Kluwer N.V., STM and Thomson and Reed Elsevier)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Wolters Kluwer has denied continuing rumours that it is in takeover talks with the two giants of STM and business information publishing, Thomson and Reed Elsevier. In a report in the Financial Times, chief executive, Nancy McKinstry, said...

Oxford Open's OA results reveal low uptake.
December 6, 2005... Oxford Journals has released the first results from its optional open access model, Oxford Open. The Oxford Open initiative, launched on 1 July 2005, gives authors the option of paying for using the author-pays model or traditional publishing....

IBM enters reputation management market.
December 6, 2005... IBM has entered the reputation management market, with the launch of Public Image Monitoring Solution. News aggregation service Factiva is partnering Big Blue for the programme, an ironic twist, given that Factiva originally planned to enter...

Stafford Borough fast tracks EDRM revenue system.(electronic document management used by revenue collection service )(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Stafford Borough Council's revenue collection service is looking to cut back on paperwork and make cost savings from a new electronic document management and workflow system. The system was provided by local government specialist, Comino Group....

Xrefer signs Omnigraphics as Publishing Partner.
December 6, 2005... Xrefer has signed an agreement with US reference publisher Omnigraphics to add the third edition of Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary to the XreferPlus Ready Reference service. The dictionary contains information on...

Swets forms strategic alliance with Vivisimo.(Swets Information Services)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Swets Information Services has launched SwetsWise Searcher, a new federated search engine application. US enterprise search specialist Vivisimo's metasearch and clustering technology has been adopted for Searcher. SwetsWise Searcher makes it...

Singularity enters Tower for a BPM partnership.
December 6, 2005... Tower Software is to partner with business process management (BPM) application provider Singularity. The deal brings together the Singularity Process Platform with Tower Software's EDRM solution, TRIM Context, enabling the two applications to...

BL opens up to Microsoft. Bill Gates gets a foot in the door at the British Library, with both parties looking to generate new revenue streams, finds Mark Chillingworth.
December 6, 2005... By inking a digitisation deal with software giant Microsoft, the British Library (BL) is looking to explore commercial opportunities previously unavailable to libraries. In an exclusive interview with IWR, Alistair Baker, Microsoft's UK...

Springer makes a leap in healthcare.
December 6, 2005... Byline: Tracey Caldwell. Springer Science and Business Media has strengthened its presence in the UK and US pharmaceutical publishing market with its acquisition of healthcare group the Current Medicine Group (CMG). CMG is a leading...

IBSS signals a new French revolution.
December 6, 2005... From the French Revolution and the Student Uprising in the 1960s to last month's nightly riot-fest in its cities, France has been an intermittent hotbed of political turmoil. So expect to find a lot of interest in the journal article...

Market Watch - Bridges for digital divide.(United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... The second phase of the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society took place in Tunisia a few weeks ago. It was attended by participants from 173 countries, together with representatives from organisations such as Wikipedia and...

Terrorism bill poses threat. The government's Terrorism Bill puts libraries, librarians and free speech at risk, according to an alliance of the industry's professional bodies.
December 6, 2005... Byline: Mark Chillingworth. Unions, professional associations and the British Library have demanded that the government amend the Terrorism Bill (currently before Parliament) in a special meeting with Home Office officials. An alliance...

AUT strike call secures SOAS subject librarians.
December 6, 2005... Members of the higher education trade union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), voted to strike over the redundancy of two subject librarians this month, but both threatened...

Google re-brands Print initiative as Book Search.
December 6, 2005... Google Print, the book search tool launched last year that enables web searchers to discover and see inside printed books, has been re-named Google Book Search, according to the company's own blog. Jen Grant, Google product marketing manager,...

Fretwell-Downing Informatics sold to OCLC PICA.
December 6, 2005... OCLC PICA, the European division of the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), has acquired UK-based library automation vendor Fretwell-Downing Informatics (FDI). The acquisition will enable OCLC PICA to break into the UK academic market for...

Major archives awarded top status for collections.(Museums, Libraries and Archives Council awarded libraries)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... The Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Council has awarded 38 libraries in the UK its Designation Status for their collections, which will help them raise funds and increase access. Designation Status is given to information collections that...

Health sector - Don't let e-books give you cardiac arrest. Medical book publishers and information suppliers are beginning to make a big noise about e-books. But take up remains slow and, as Tracey Caldwell discovered, you might need deep pockets to take advantage of these exciting new developments.
December 6, 2005... E-books save shelf space, previously unwieldy tomes can be accessed and searched within seconds, and all the signs are that publishers are transferring large medical and health print publications onto electronic format. Librarians and...

Special report: survey results - What's really on your minds? This year's IWR readers' survey reveals growing anxiety over the corrupting effect of free internet resources on user attitudes, and management's failure to buy into information services. Bobby Pickering takes a closer look at just what's going on.
December 6, 2005... Diminishing budgets and lack of senior management buy-in for prioritising information services and strategies are among the chief concerns of IWR readers, according to our 2005 Reader Survey. Close to 60% of the survey's 765 respondents...

Special report: salary survey - Salaries perk up and promotion pays off. The 2005 IWR salary survey shows that salaries for information professionals have improved - although not by much. The figures confirm the gender gap and a huge differential between librarians and the rest, as Bobby Pickering reports.
December 6, 2005... On the whole, not a lot has changed in 12 months in terms of our readers' remuneration, with a sizeable proportion remaining on a very low wage. In last year's survey, 27.4% of readers who indicated their salary levels said they earned a basic...

Opinion - Blogs and wikis could blow the gaffe on you. You need to educate users and win their buy-in if you want to safeguard all the sensitive or confidential information in your organisation, argues David Tebbutt.
December 6, 2005... In all the breathless talk about new media, and I'm as guilty as anyone, little mention is made of regulatory and legal compliance. If wikis are used by a closed community or blogs made inaccessible to all but the cognoscenti, should...

Opinion - Big is still beautiful. The Big Deal is far from dead as long as it gives good value to institutions, says Steven Hall, journal sales and marketing director at Blackwell Publishing.
December 6, 2005... In October 2004 Jeff Gatten and Tom Sanville published an article in D-Lib Magazine entitled "An Orderly Retreat from the Big Deal - Is it Possible for Consortia?" At the time other commentators were also forecasting the imminent death of the...

Departmental mergers - Putting it together. When government departments merge, it means big upheavals for information departments. The creation of Defra in 2001 and HMRC in 2005 meant big management obstacles to overcome, as Jane Dudman discovered when she talked to movers and shakers at both departments.(Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs )
December 6, 2005... Government is never content to let things be and its own internal workings are no exception. Civil servants have come to live with almost constant change, as all governments tinker with the way in which they deliver services to their citizens....

Profile - Laying down the law. In his five years as information sheriff at the world's largest law firm, Paul Greenwood has run a dozen knowledge management systems out of town in the battle for the one true database. The top CIO tells Jane Dudman the story.(Clifford Chance)(Company Profile)
December 6, 2005... Running information systems for the world's largest law firm is something that Paul Greenwood seems to take in his stride. Greenwood is chief information officer at Clifford Chance, which means he is responsible for ensuring information...

E-learning - Step in time. Financial services firms use internet-based training to keep their staff up to date on compliance issues. Tracey Caldwell looks at how one sector is ensuring its workforce marches in step.
December 6, 2005... Compliance with a whole raft of new and emerging regulations is becoming a key part of the information professional's job. They have to ensure that the information produced and shared by their organisation and its employees complies with all...

Collaborative content - The Wikipedia phenomenon. Wikipedia is a rapidly expanding encyclopaedia of communally assembled information, but can information professionals really trust the knowledge that is being put together here? Or is the world now embracing a new form of knowledge repository that undermines many of our sacred principles? Marcus Austin gets deep inside the wiki concept of collective wisdom.
December 6, 2005... Wikis are a fast-growing phenomenon, but they're certainly not without controversy, particularly in the media and the academic world. Wikipedia, the big daddy of all wikis, seems to polarise opinion more than most. So what is a wiki, and...

Group test: social computing systems - Team working. Want to dabble in the brave new world of wiki services and social computing? Davey Winder casts his eye over what these powerful collaborative working tools can do, and selects six of the best for a closer look. Time for you to be a bit more social?
December 6, 2005... While RSS news syndication and blogging have hit the headlines in the information professional sphere (see IWR group tests in the October and November issues respectively), for the most, wikis have flown under the radar. But wikis have...

Sector update - STM publishers. The disciplines of science, technology and medicine (collectively known as STM) are moving forward at a furious pace. But keeping abreast of developments and theories is essential to research, innovation and theoretical advancement in business, medicine, healthcare, technology and academia - so IWR has put the main vendors in this sector under the microscope.
December 6, 2005... Blackwell Publishing www.blackwellpublishing.com Overview: Blackwell Publishing is an independent society publisher with offices in the US, UK, Australia, China, Denmark, Germany and Japan. Main titles: Blackwell publishes more...

Resources - Site review - The whole world in an ad exec's hands. The World Advertising Research Center is, just like it says on the tin, a global database of knowledge for professionals working in the marketing and media space. Bobby Pickering took a WARC on the wired side and returned with multiple downloads of inspiration.
December 6, 2005... The World Advertising Research Center is an online subscription service that offers strategic information, knowledge and "inspiration" to top-level marketing, advertising, media and research professionals. Based in Henley-on-Thames, the...

Resources - Book review - Marxism mires debate. Globalisation is unjust, unfair and threatens the existence of libraries, according to this controversial title. Mark Chillingworth feels cheated by its approach.(Globalisation, Information and Libraries: The implications of the World Trade Organisation's GATS and TRIPS agreements)(Book Review)
December 6, 2005... The big topic of globalisation and how it will affect libraries and information management is lost in the desire to promote Marxism in Globalisation, Information and Libraries. Globalisation has implications for every facet of life....

Resources - Book review - The case for convergence. What are the pitfalls and the pay-offs of bringing information and IT departments together? Tracey Caldwell learns the practical lessons of the trailblazers.(Managing Academic Support Services in Universities: The convergence experience)(Book Review)
December 6, 2005... Convergence is the key theme of Managing Academic Support Services in Universities. Editor Terry Hanson defines convergence as the coming together of library and IT services in academia under a common executive director. He introduces this...

Resources - Springer prime publisher of Arthritis Foundation book.
December 6, 2005... The Arthritis Foundation and STM publisher Springer have agreed a deal to co-publish the Foundation's noted book Primer on the Rheumatic Diseases. The two organisations will also look to develop a range of new products for the medical sector...

Resources - Embase.com opens up Dorland's medical dictionary.(service enhancement)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Biomedical and pharmacological abstracting service Embase.com now includes online access to Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary. The dictionary provides users with definitions of medical concepts. Lisette Clyndert, senior product manager...

Resources - Sage digitises 60 years of Human Relations.(Sage Publications Inc.)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Academic publisher Sage has announced that the backfile of the social sciences journal Human Relations has been completely digitised. Full online access to issues dating back to 1947 will be available on the Sage Journals Online platform at no...

Resources - Four clinical practices grafted onto Nature journals.
December 6, 2005... Macmillan's scientific journal publishing division, Nature Publishing Group, has launched four new titles in its Nature Clinical Practice range. The titles are Endocrinology & Metabolism, Rheumatology, Nephrology and Neurology. Nature Clinical...

Resources - Blackwell enters Annals of NY Academy of Sciences.(New York Academy of Sciences)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Society publisher Blackwell has reached an agreement with the New York Academy of Sciences to publish 28 volumes a year of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The annals contain reviews of presentations made at scientific...

Resources - Renal dialysis journal transplants to John Wiley & Sons.
December 6, 2005... Dialysis & Transplantation, the oldest journal covering renal transplants, has been acquired by John Wiley & Sons, the scientific and medical publisher. The journal, which is 34 years old, will become available on the Wiley Interscience online...

Resources - Palgrave Macmillan snatches crime books and journals.
December 6, 2005... Business and academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan has acquired three new journals and 21 books to increase its range of titles covering crime, risk and security. The titles, which include the journals Risk Management, Crime Prevention &...

Resources - Site review - Search tool users can trust. OUP's search tool equips your internet browser with a reliable fact checker. Mark Chillingworth gives Google a miss and fires up the future of reference.
December 6, 2005... The power of the internet is its ability to access information so fast that it can answer almost any question instantly. The weakness of the internet is whether those answers can be trusted. Whatever your opinion of the traditional publishing...

Resources - Book review - If you've got it, swap it! A ceaseless flow of case studies blunts the edge of this insightful and amusing study of how organisations can share knowledge, according to David Tebbutt.(Making Knowledge Visible)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 6, 2005... If you are involved in the exchange of knowledge in organisations, this book could be just up your street. In it, author Liz Orna describes the means by which we exchange knowledge as information products - or, slightly confusingly, IP. In my...

Resources - Training - Developing business classification by ISO 15489 - 7 December 2005, London.(TFPL designs a course for records management)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Training and recruitment specialist TFPL has designed a course for ISO 15489 records management classification. The scheme uses business processes and corporate policies for records retention. Developed over 10 years, it has solved many...

Resources - Training - Customer relationship management - 8 December 2005, London.
December 6, 2005... Cilip has brought in Terry Kendrick to host this one-day course on academic library customer relationship management. A former librarian, Kendrick has worked on marketing planning across the world since 1987. The course will outline how...

Resources - Training - Understanding and assessing information needs - 14 December 2005, London.
December 6, 2005... Understanding the information needs of your users is a necessity for information professionals, according to Aslib, which has put together a one-day course on how to assess information needs, the different assessment approaches and how to...

Resources - Training - Mobile learning: education on demand - 14 December 2005, Wolverhampton.
December 6, 2005... Mobile learning is the mobile equivalent to e-learning and this course from Netskills aims to provide information professionals with a full update on the emerging technology. The course costs [pounds sterling]175 and is held at Wolverhampton...

Resources - Training - Design solutions for e-learning - 10 January 2006, Cambridge.
December 6, 2005... This one-day course at the Cambridge University Computing Service looks at how to develop a personal e-learning product using the various online platforms currently available. Attendees will learn how to match their face-to-face learning with...

Resources - Training - Advanced supervisory skills - 18 January 2006, London.
December 6, 2005... Supervising staff is not as easy as it looks. Cilip has created a one-day course to provide information professionals moving into a supervisory role with skills in assertive communications and coaching. The course costs [pounds sterling]229.13...

Resources - Training - Information architecture - 15 March 2006, London.
December 6, 2005... After a morning with Aslib, attendees should be able to assess and improve the information architecture of their websites. This course will demonstrate how the structure, presentation, navigation and labeling of electronic content on corporate...

Backchat - Publishing mystery engulfs IWR.(Information World Review)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... Backchat feels it is now the right time to reveal that IWR has been caught up in an elaborate sting, not of its own devising. We have been the innocent and unwitting victim of a mysterious anonymous writer, who claims to be the possessor of...

Backchat - Sick of Sushi? You will be soon!(periodical publishing, services)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2005... We've never seen so many people get into such a lather over sushi, since George Bush the First revisited his dinner at an official Japanese banquet during his re-election year. But our email inbox was up to its eyeballs in Sushi on press day...

Backchat - Belly aching dance for us.(Letter to the Editor)
December 6, 2005... Thanks to reader Stuart Fulton for an email stimulated by a website featured in last month's Backchat. He writes: "Do you people really think there are 'cross-dressing male librarians' interested in the Luscious Librarians website? I hope, for...

Backchat - Flashback - December 1982/3. This month is the 25th anniversary of IWR's first edition. We delve into our backfiles to sample a couple of our earliest issues.(Information World Review)
December 6, 2005... In the beginning Information World Review started life as an "Occasional Newspaper Published by Learned Information" to coincide with the annual International Online Information Meeting in London each December. Issue 1 was published in...