Ballad in Plain E

The recent onset of Christmas advertising means one thing: commercials that make me want to throw things at the TV set. I saw an ad this weekend that just about made me lose it. The product being mongered is a rascally Teddy Rukspin-esque talking bear called TJ Bearytales Educational Toy: A Child’s Animated Storytelling Friend (TJ, we are informed, stands for Theodore James).

When the commercial opens, a young boy is lying on the floor of an immaculate living room, flipping the pages of a book aimlessly as he watches the animatronic bear gesture and tell a story. “With TJ Bearytales, he’s learning to love books,” a female voice narrates. The frame then shifts to the child sitting on his mother’s lap, and they both stare, captivated, at ol’ TJ . “He’s absorbed in the stories, and he’s using his imagination,” the narrator continues, in what I suspect is meant to be an earnest, proud voice. The spot ends with TJ singing “Sharing the gift of sto-o-ries” (made especially creepy by the fact that his mouth is barely moving).

There are so many things wrong with this ad, I don’t even know where to start. I guess I just find it sad that any parent would rather place her child in front of a robot to listen to (and “watch”) stories. Even sadder and more bizarre is why any parent would let a robot do the “reading” when she is present to do it herself.

Some of my favourite childhood memories involve being read to, unwrapping gifts of new books, and hauling loads of loans home from the public library. Similarly, some of the most memorable moments I spend with my young nieces involve reading to or with them. I love Christmas and birthdays because they give me an excuse to go down to Kidsbooks and browse until I find the perfect books. To equate giving the gift of reading with going down to a big box store and picking up one of these toys is absurd.

There is an abundance of wonderful, intelligent, funny, silly, and immensely enjoyable children’s literature that is both reasonably priced for purchase and freely available at public libraries. To suggest that the unpleasant task of “learning to love books” can be facilitated by a two-pound audio device swathed in polyester fur and a bunch of pages stitched, bound, and labelled “My Bear-riffic Trip to Outer Space” speaks volumes (pardon the pun) about how important society and advertisers think childhood literacy is.

I can’t believe that anyone would purchase the product, much less conceive of it. But then, would you expect anything more from a company that can’t even spell the word “school” properly? I thought not.

Something is seriously wrong with the way the site is displaying. Bear with me!

I’m moving in February, and hopefully to the West End, so yesterday, I took advantage of the beautiful, atypically rain-free fall weather and took a stroll down Robson then up (er, down – my sense of direction in Vancouver has never been skewed) Denman. Man, am I ever excited to be moving there – what a gorgeous little part of town. SO MANY SHOE STORES on Robson, Cupcakes on Denman, millions of Greek restaurants…but I digress.

As I strolled, I marked up a Google Map I’d printed out with annotations for amenities like banks, libraries, green grocers, liquor stores, etc. Doing this survey of the neighbourhood got me to thinking, “I wonder when A9 will get around to doing street-level photo-mapping in Vancouver?”

It’d been a while since I used the A9 maps–I think I last used it to check out the convention centre before heading out to Baltimore, which was back in June–but when I tried to go to the site, I discovered it’s gone. The service, which had only been available since January 2005, was discontinued on September 29th, 2006, as part of a series of service cut-backs. The service was fabulous: you could take a virtual tour of a city at street level, as if you were walking around, instead of being limited to an aerial view.

It was reported several places, all of which I managed to miss. According to the folks at ResourceShelf, Windows Live Local is working on the same type of service, but so far only SF and Seattle are mapped. A9 Maps had quite a selection of major cities’ downtown areas, which makes me wonder what they did with all that data–has it been sold or will it be reused at some point? Is there anyone else providing a similar service?

Big thanks to Courtney for telling me about A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette (tag-lined “A polite librarian is a good librarian”.)

In a conversation with several other techs about names for us non-librarian library techs, she mentioned this post, which in itself is hilarious and whose comments are even better.

Scanning through the archives I discovered it’s pretty much all solid gold. I was going to go through and mention a few choice posts, but I couldn’t stop myself from choosing every other one, so trust me–this blog is awesome…ly amazing.

(OK, just a few:

Pencils, Supplying free

Tote bags, On hating

Signatures, Using email -although they missed the worst thing you can possibly do to your signature block: change it to Comic Sans

Caveman, Going )

Just stumbled across a nifty new site called Confabb, which launched a few days ago.

From the About page:

Confabb (confabb.com) combines an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience.

There are more than 16,000 conference loaded and ready to go. Intrigued, I looked up the SLA 2007 conference, and sure enough, there it was! (Lucky me got to be the first to sign up as “attending”.) I looked at the page for a conference called Web Directions North that my friend Laurel’s going to in February, and there were three people already watching that one. BCLA 2007 isn’t up yet, nor is CALL 2007. The categorisation tool is wonky, which they admit and claim they are working on.

Basically, each conference has a homepage with various tabs including details, sessions, speakers, reviews, discussion, photos, news, and events. You can sign up as “attending” or “watching” or “speaking at” a conference, and from there grab RSS feeds for each conference. In the press release, they suggest people will be able to use it to research past conferences – check out attendee ratings on food, swag (STUFF WE ALL GET!), etc. What’s really neat is that where available, the conference tag is listed, and users are reminded to use the tag in their blog posts and photos for ease of aggregating.

So far as I can tell, Confabb has huge potential to be a one-stop-shop for conference-goers and conference-would-goers. I love the idea of “watching” a conference that you can’t go to but are interested in.

It’s early days, so it doesn’t look like there are many users yet. I’m curious to see how well Confabb will do, and a little skeptical, in light of many conferences having their own sites and officials blogs, but still, it’s a very, very cool idea!

Our librarian, Susan, and I went to today’s CBA BC Legal Research Section lunch, where Steve Matthews gave an excellent presentation on KM in law firms.

After a Star Trek reference that I didn’t understand, Steve took the floor (phew! What is it with research lawyers and their nerdy tv shows? I thought library geeks were bad enough!). He said right off the bat that KM has a bad reputation for being a jargonny buzz concept, but that that you needn’t even use the term to implement it within your firm.

One of KM’s biggest goals is to get knowledge out of people’s heads and into a form that can be preserved and retrieved by others. Whether you call this “getting our resources in order” or something a little more specific, it’s all done keeping one idea in mind: get knowledge out there so that everyone can benefit, and therefore profit, from it. Law firms are, or should be, interested in KM projects for several reasons: attrition and retirement of lawyers (the loss of tacit knowledge), an increased emphasis on the “business of law”, the commoditisation of legal services, and the quest to offer value-added services.

Blogs are just one sexy KM tool du jour. Whether used internally for true KM purposes or externally as more of a marketing function, Steve sees value in both.

Great KM potential lies in the library catalogue. Imagine being able to annotate records on the fly, or to create reading histories. This reminded me of the rating system that Imagine Canada has in place on their web-based OPAC, which I wrote about in a FreePint article a couple of months ago. The OPAC allows users to rate an item and leave comments for others to see. Steve’s suggestion would be even more useful since the user base is relatively small and specialised, and has easily identifiable research needs.

Steve also suggested creating mash-ups of collections. For example, mash floor maps with user profiles and photos, or even library shelving diagrams enhanced with books’ circulation status. (In my wildest dreams!)

The first key to successful KM is a flexible set of repositories. KM is not advanced searching with a document management system! Ideally, KM repositories are separate from matter work product (i.e., they are not residing in and accessed solely from the DMS).

The second key lies in the way that you work with people–which aside from the obvious task of harvesting knowledge, includes selling the process and gathering usage statistics. The most useful tip for me in this section was that once you identify a potential for a KM project, you have a very small window of time to get it up and started before people start losing interest and enthusiasm. It’s essential to be nimble and able to create prototypes on the fly.

Steve gave lots of tips on best practices. He emphasised that practice group-based collections have been his most successful, since they deal with smaller groups of people with common goals and needs. He has experienced the “me too” phenomenon where one practice group sees a KM collection that’s been developed for another, and say, “Hey, we could do that too!”.

Quality control/vetting is essential, otherwise there is a great risk of GIGO. Steve suggested appointing “collection editors” to act as trusted sets of eyes.

In closing, he offered some tips on selling: start small, one practice group at a time. Remember that not all collections will be successful. Change from the “bottom up” is just as important, if not more important, than from the “top down”. KM initiatives must fit the culture of the firm. Celebrate and publicise small successes.

Another fantastic presentation from Steve, who never ceases to stir envy in those of us who wish we had his madd KM skillz! Thankfully, he is also so humble and passionate about it all that we can’t help be inspired and motivated by his successes!

***

A 99%-unrelated question brought on by today’s lunch. When on earth did cookies get so big? Every time we get lunch at the office, or you have lunch at someone else’s, the cookies are huge! I’m not complaining; who doesn’t love cookies, especially the exotic ones like M&M and white chocolate/macadamia nut that you’d never buy or make at home. But seriously. Whatever happened to cookies that weren’t bigger than your hand?

There was an article in the November 1st National Post entitled “Law firms raise the bar: Legal partnerships are expanding their ranks with a wide range of professionals” (accessible here, though who knows for how long).

I came across the article because our managing partner is quoted in it, and I thought it was a great topic. In fact, I would have liked to see a longer article: there are so many people with different, yet important, skills working in law firms, and it would be fascinating to hear about their roles. Considering all the things that need to happen for a law firm to run smoothly, especially when time and accuracy are of the essence (which is always!), I think it’s a great thing that firms are increasingly seeing the value of creating specialised roles, in additional to the usual support staff.

Excerpts from the article:

“Law firms are no longer comprised simply of lawyers, secretaries and law clerks. They are taking a page out of the accounting firms’ handbook and expanding their staff to include a wide range of professionals, who are helping run the firm or advise clients.

[...]

Firms also are bringing in more non-lawyers…to add to the array of consulting services they provide clients. For example, national law firm Miller Thomson LLP runs its own consulting arm.

Managing partner Judson Whiteside says the firm has had everyone from doctors to former civil servants and environmental engineers on staff to assist in providing clients with advice. One of its adjunct services is research, leveraging its librarians to assist clients in conducting their own research or setting up libraries.”

Consultant librarians–what a neat job!

I feel extremely fortunate that in my job, I am encouraged to pursue professional development opportunities, and grow in my role, not just as someone who provides service to lawyers, administrators, and staff, but also in my career as a library technician and paraprofessional in general.

How cool is this? The University of Winnipeg has a library toolbar, from which you can search for materials in various media, initiate live help, and quickly access search tips and library tutorials. I know it’s not the first library to offer one, but it’s the first I’ve ever come across while using a library’s site. While I couldn’t get it running for Firefox (they’ve not updated it for 2.0), it’s working fine in IE6.

I generally don’t use toolbars at all – I don’t like how much space they take up and prefer to visit an actual website to do my searching – but judging by how much time my friend Aaron spends at the UBC library website for his coursework, I can see how this would be a huge timesaver for students.

Actually, the whole U of Winnipeg library site is pretty sweet. They’ve got a Flickr widget featuring random slides from their “Library Tour” slideshow, CBC headlines via RSS, and they’re using a blog to publish news, events, and new titles.

Serious props to the U of W library team!

We had an exciting day in our library yesterday: we held a party to celebrate the launch of our firm’s photo archive, which our department developed and will maintain. The archive consists of photos from various events over the past 30 years and has some pretty priceless shots, many of which celebrate the excess of the 80s. I am so glad I was still in elementary school during that decade, and at least had a good excuse for wearing Spandex (I didn’t know any better!).

To help promote the event, we got the firm’s resident band, which includes one member of the Research & Reference department, to play a couple of songs: “Kodachrome” in honour of the photo archive, and “Werewolves of London” for Halloween (I veto’ed “Monster Mash”. If I hear that song one more time, I’m going to go insane.).

This was the second time we’ve worked a band gig into a library event, and it is PR gold – people had been asking when the next one would be since about two minutes after the first one ended. We made a really cool poster to advertise the party, using the movie poster generator at FD’s Flickr Toys, and of course, we followed the golden rule of library parties and baked six or seven dozen Halloween cookies and cupcakes to lure people in.

Most importantly, we are receiving excellent feedback about the archive, and it got people in the door. The archive, which we built with CS/Textworks and access via WebPublisherPro, is very easy to use, and while the interface is nothing fancy, I’m looking forward to adding a few bells and whistles when I get the chance.