julia

Just a test post to see if i can update by phone

Digital versus Analog

I watched the last episode of Electric Dreams recently and was taken aback by how radically and swiftly technology has changed the way we live and work.

Much of my work over the past decade has been involved to some extent in using the web to either find information or to communicate and consequently I have spent a large part of it behind a computer. I used to work in a library but now work in an office and it looks pretty similar to the one in the TV show The Office, which I am reliably informed by Wikipedia first aired on 9 July 2001. I don't know when that became what work looks like, it just seems to have crept up on us.

I had a useful couple of years in full time education as a mature student, before which I was a library assistant and after which I became a Librarian. I seem to recall computers were around before I went to University but you usually had to do a bit of searching to find one and quite possibly need to ask someones permission to use it once you found it. Then in 2000 as a newly qulfied librarian I was plunked in front of a computer and I have had my view of the world of work obscured by a variety of monitors ever since.

I sometimes have a bit of ambivalent attitude towards all the technology. I love gadgets, but find the disposable culture of constant upgrades distressing. I love the fact that I can collaborate and converse electronically with people across the world. I hate the fact that in reality I find myself collaborating and conversing electronically with people I am sat right next too.

Application shall speak peace unto Application

Having finally got my facebook and (hopefully) my Google reader shared items to feed into tweeter, I am now trying to connect one of my infrequently updated blogs. So now I can update from just about anywhere, all I need is to think of something interesting to say.

Public sector blogging
Web 2.0 has been with us for a while now and is pretty much in the mainstream. Even my father has his own blog and flickr site . Not all areas of the public sector are fully up to speed it and it has been one of my frustrations that most social networking and collaborative tools out there fall foul of my organisations IT security thus thwarting my ambition to be a web 2.0 guru. However I think we are reaching a tipping point. There are a number of initiatives running that aim to give public sector workers some experience of web 2.0 and collaborative technology. These include:

The Communities of Practice platform
The Improvement Service and I&DeA have developed a Communities of Practice site to encourage local authority and government staff to explore the potential of collaborative technology. Staff can register and join existing communities of practice in which they can collaborate on document via wiki’s, upload documents, participate and forums and arrange meetings. There are a few hundred Communities of Practice set up ranging from open communities which have hundreds of members and anyone can participate in, to small select groups where membership is restricted.

There are a number of specialists who are setting up virtual communities. Such as

Government Knowledge and Information Management Network (GKIMN) have set up a virtual community for knowledge and information management practitioners in central government and public bodies.

The Government Communication Network (GCN) is a virtual community of professional communicators working in government.

I could go, and probably will later, but I am finally getting the sense that things are moving.

Ubiquitous Computing
Mike Underloy has an a fascinating post in which he looks forward to Web Work in a Post-PC World picking up on reports that PCs are losing their relevance in Japan. Apparently PC sales in Japan have been in decline for the past five straight quarters. Smart phones and a whole array of mobile devices make it easier for people to access and update Facebook and MySpace and pretty much everything. It is quite possible that better input devices will be developed before the next generation of nextgens evolve extra spindly fingers.

No two ways about it, the PC is doomed...and not before time either. Being tethered to a big lump of plastic everyday at work seems to be a big price to pay and much as I love all the infinte possibilities the web provides, I do begrudge spending so much of my time face to face with a computer screen in some cupboard of an office.

When I first planned my glorious career, I had anticipated that computers and mobile telephony would allow me to work more or less anywhere, therefore I would choose to work from a beach shack in some exotic locale. This is still the plan, though not yet the reality. The shape and form of future technology will impact on the way we lead our lives, so it makes sense to be at least mildly interested if not actively engaging. Which is all the more reason for using web tools like Google Docs rather having a Word document on your computer, or bringing carrying your files and applications on a USB pendrive using PortableApps. If it frees you from the leaden weight of the PC then the world is well and truly your oyster.

The beach awaits

Blind faith in web tools

There is a lovely story in today's Guardian about what happens when you place too much faith in what you find on the web. A group of Dutch journalists planning a trip to Israel almost casued a diplomatic row when they used the online translation tool Babelfish when the Dutch Consulate requested a preview of the questions that the journalists intended to ask.

The email commenced "Helloh bud, Enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland," before posing a number of somewhat disturbing questions along the lines of "Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this".

It reminds me of the time when I used voice recognition software to translate my recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and ended up with a somewhat more surreal version. Sadly posterity has been robbed of this new and improved text, the file was lost in a hard drive partitioning incident, though I do recall the final line "So long lives this, and this gives life to fish"

The name Babelfish comes from Douglas Adam's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is such a brilliant idea, a creature that in breaking down the barriers to communication causes "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation" Perversely it is by not breaking down these barriers that the online version has caused offence.

There used to be a soap opera in ITV, Britain's first commercial TV company, called Crossroads, whose productions values were so low that the sets would visibly wobble when anyone entered a room. It is well remembered for the time one of its regular characters, a mechanic called Benny, popped out to get a spanner one episode to reappear again five years late with no explanation of what had happened in the intervening time – and no spanner either. Characters re-emerging with little or no explanation are not uncommon however, Sherlock Holmes came back after being killed off at the Reichenbach falls, Bobby Ewing emerged from the shower several series of Dallas after his supposed demise looking none the worse for wear. People do it all the time on the long running BBC radio programme the Archers, but no one bats an eyelid because they never saw them in the first place. So hopefully its no big deal really that my last post on this blog was five years ago. I'd like to to think that this is some kind of a record, but suspect it isn't.

It's not that I totally turned my back on social networking tools, there's my flickr presence for example (which may be possibly give some pointers as to why I have taken so long to get round to updating my blog), and I occasionally get round to entering details of my jogging on mapmyrun, I have 3 friends on BEBO, have been reunited with a few more elsewhere and I do have a wiki somewhere. I'd like to point out that if I don't look as fit in my flickr pictures as my mapmyrun training regimes suggests I should, I am still looking for mapmyguinnessandkebabintake.com

I have been moved to resume my blogging after attending day 1 of the Internet Librarian International 2007 conference. Stephen Abrams in his keynote address recalled the words of British Library director Caroline Brazier's who suggested that librarians are welcome not to embrace web 2.0 – provided they take early retirement first. Clearly we are living in interesting times and I no longer think it is possible to get the full measure of what is happening and what it means to the profession by merely dabbling occasionally. It is also a fabulous opportunity to learn by playing. I missed Phil Bradley's closing keynote, having zipped up on the sleeper to Edinburgh the night before, but fortunately his slides are available because they raise a number of issues which deserve consideration.

Other highlights included Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield, speaking about web 2.0 and the OPAC, The Impact of 2.0: lipstick, cowbells and serendipity in the OPAC. Brian Kelly, UKOLN, on barriers to blogging and how these can be addressed - The blogging librarian: avoiding institutional inertia and Helene Blowers presentation on the development of "23 things" Learning 2.0: it’s all about play!

I came across an interesting article in Information World Review on the subject of e-Government. The UK prime minister has set a target to ensure e-Government by the year 2005. It cites, as an example of some of the pitfalls to be encountered along the road, the case of the PRO 1901 Census site. This ambitious digitisation project, designed to make the entire 1901 census searchable and accessible to the public, crashed almost as soon as it was launched, due to higher than expected demand.
The article makes the point that e-Government is not easily definable. It takes many forms and will work across many platforms. Clearly there are technology issues, but there are also the human and information aspects
I came across an interesting article in Information World Review on the subject of e-Government. The UK prime minister has set a target to ensure e-Government by the year 2005. It cites, as an example of some of the pitfalls to be encountered along the road, the case of the PRO 1901 Census site. This ambitious digitisation project, designed to make the entire 1901 census searchable and accessible to the public, crashed almost as soon as it was launched, due to higher than expected demand.

The article makes the point that e-Government is not easily definable. It takes many forms and will work across many platforms. Clearly there are technology issues, but there are also the human and information aspects. There does seem to be a lot of investment in the technolgy side of this grand project, but is enough attention being paid to the other aspects?

These are interesting times for Information Professionals. The technology is available now to enable the sorts of projects that librarians have dreamt about doing for years, but do we have the opportunity to run with these projects? We have lots to contribute, but is there a seat for us at the planning meeting? I woul be interested to hear of peoples experience on this.