Information Research Weblog

IDC reports that for the first time in four years, Sweden has slipped from top position in its ranking of countries on an Information Society Index for 2003.

	Country	ISI Score
1.	Denmark	963
2.	Sweden	958
3.	United States	938
4.	Switzerland	929
5.	Canada	925
6.	Netherlands	919
7.	Finland	911
8.	Korea	904
9.	Norway	899
10.	United Kingdom	870
Source: IDC Information Society Index, 2004

So Tony Thatcher's (oops, Freudian slip, I meant, of course, Blair's) much vaunted drive for Britain to be the leading state seems to be going nowhere very fast.

And with the dismal news of a probable Bush victory in the US election (how can more than 50% of the American electorate not realise what a disaster this is?), I assume that the monkey will be intent on dragging the US back to some stone age condition. After all, the Information Society isn't in the Old Testament, is it?

This, apparently, is what eBay considers to be good customer relations.

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Dear valued customer [Really? After what follows you want me to believe this?]

We regret to inform you that your eBay account could be suspended if you don't re-update your account information. To resolve this problems please click here and re-enter your account information. If your problems could not be resolved your account will be suspended for a period of 3-4 days, after this period your account will be terminated.

For the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account. Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay.

Regards, [!!!???] Safeharbor Department eBay, Inc

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Actually, I have never bought anything through eBay, and, after this lovely morsel, I never shall!

24,550 science and engineering doctorates looks like quite a sizable number, but it is worrying the Americans – that figure is for 2002 and it was well down from the peak of 27,300 in 1998. Of course, the numbers need interpretation: How many were from the Ivy League institutions? How many were from institutions where the standards are open to question? Still, it seems a fair number.

The reason for the concern is that part of the problem is that US students are opting out of science and engineering for the more lucrative fields of business and law, and that fewer make the necessary grades for acceptance into science programmes. That seems to mirror the situation in the UK, where the decline has been noticed for much longer.

I wonder how long it would take either government to opt for one of the suggested solutions?

Weinstein would boost wages for graduate students and scientists funded by national research institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation--positions that are likely to be protected from the shift of tech work overseas.
'Pay scientists the six-figure salaries the market is demanding', Weinstein said, 'and you will watch people come out of the woodwork in droves'.

The solution seized upon by the universities is the same as in the UK—import foreign students—but for different reasons. In the US, the driver is the need to keep the labs going, while in the UK it is the need to keep the institution solvent as successive governments have starved the universities of resources. In UK universities the proportion of foreign students in post-graduate courses and doctroal programmes is so high that, if the market collapsed tomorrow, even more universities would be bankrupt than at present (and a significant number are already technically bankrupt - that is, they lack the resources to pay off their debts, even if they were to close down and sell all their property, etc.

The item that stimulated this can be found at ZDNet

Hello everyone - you've probably wondering where I've been this past month. Well - three weeks of it was holiday in sunny Italy - continuous sunshine and mid-30s temperatures for three weeks is difficult to come by in the UK! The other week has simply been catching up with things, three days at Leeds University Business School - my current UK employer - and one day of interviewing on a project on the provision of broadband access for disadvantaged groups in the community.

I had pretty well decided to draw a line under the Weblog, since it isn't really fulfilling the original intention of providing a forum for the discussion of the papers published in Information Research - instead, I've simply been drawing attention to things that might be of interest to the IR readership. Keeping that up, however, is more trouble than it's worth, since it rarely evokes any response.

The interesting question is, 'Why do discussion groups in the information science, information management, information systems area rarely provoke discussion of substantive issues?' The mailings in lists like LIS-BAILER, ASIS-L, KNOW-ORG and others consist generally of announcements of conferences, occasional calls for help with a project, student e-mail questionnaires, and the like. But how often does anyone address research issues? Pretty well never is the answer - take a look at the archives:

• ASIS-L
• LIS-BAILER
• KNOW-ORG

Is it that people are simply too busy? Or is that the research is generally solitary, with little in the way of a team approach, or has the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise in the UK provoked such paranoia that people are unwilling to share ideas any longer?

Whatever the answer, it's not really worth trying to provoke interest, since the interest seems not to be there to provoke.

I'll keep the Weblog going, but, in future, I shan't be trying to make regular postings, but simply post something when it seems more than marginally interesting.

I imagine that most readers of the log are aware of the World list of departments etc., in the information field that I maintain. It is a continuous problem to update the links and I use Xenu's Link Sleuth to check them once or twice a year, as well as occasionally putting out a mailing to remind people to check their links and let me know if they need updating.

Academic institutions, that one might hope would do better, appear to be just as bad as everyone else in changing URLs - all it needs is a new Vice-Chancellor, Rector, or Principal to arrive on the scene and, inevitably, there is some (usually pointless) 'reorganization', as a result of which the URLs are thrown in the air and come down we know not where. My favourite hate is the database-driven list of courses that is structured first by date, then by subject - with the result that the URLs change every year.

It's easy to avoid this: all one needs is a 'redirect' instruction in a meta-tag and the user can be transferred from the old URL to the new one painlessly and I can find out when this has happened by using Link Sleuth. Given the number of Web-based directories that are not well-maintained this would result in thousands of hits resulting in satisfied instead of frustrated users.

In some places (nameless to protect them from shame) the public relations department has taken over the Website completely, producing a structure that is supposed to be geared to the needs of different kinds of potential users, but often ends up satisfying none of them.

The silly thing is that it isn't too difficult to produce an architecture for a university site - they all have more or less the same structure of faculties and department, with separate research institutes in some case, and other, fairly arbitrary elements tacked on. External users generally want to find a department, a course, a research group, a person, the library, and possibly the Vice-Chancellor's (Rector's, etc.) office - but the number of sites that make it difficult to find some of these is legion. Finding the University Library on the Sheffield site, for example, used to be a serious problem until (presumably because of numerous objections) a 'quick link' was put on the top page. Individual departmental sub-sites reveal the same kind of problem - sometimes there are links to the staff list, sometimes not.

And why do US universities (and those elsewhere influenced by them) use the term "Academics" to mean the organizational structure - click on Academics on any of these sites and you can get an entire mish-mash of topic headings from the simple 'Schools and departments' to a strange list (in another nameless institution), which includes guides, resources, and journals. According to the good old OED, the use of 'academics' in this way in the USA is a relatively recent coinage (1974) - the rest of the world uses 'academics' as the plural of 'academic', a noun meaning a person employed to teach or research in a university.

There's been quite a gap between the last posting and this one - but no one seems to have complained :-)

I've been in Barcelona for the past week - part Spring break, part participating in a meeting. In this case, the meeting of the European Association of Science Editors, where I was invited to speak on 'Information seeking behaviour and the digital information world'. I found it rather difficult to put something together for a different kind of audience.

The programme was an interesting one, with, in addition to my own, papers on 'Beyond electrification: innovative models of scientific publication' by Stefan Gradmann of the University of Hamburg; 'New models for publishing and academic initiatives from a librarian´s point of view' by Ingegerd Rabow of Lund University Libraries; 'The Virtual Health Library, an Approach to the Access and Dissemination of Scientific Information from Latin America and Spain', by Jorge Veiga de Cabo of the Biblioteca Nacional de Ciencias de la Salud. Madrid; 'Open Access Publishing: All Use is Fair Use', by Jan Velterop of BioMed Central and 'Long-term access and humanities scholarship' by Yola de Lusenet of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It's anticipated that the papers will be published in the Association's journal, European Science Editing, which is, itself, openly available, nine months after publication of the paper copy, so keep an eye peeled for it.

ISIC 2004 - is the leading conference in the field of information seeking behaviour and its April 30th early registration deadline is fast approaching.

If you would like to avail yourself of the 400 euro early registration rate, please log into our web site as soon as possible. Please note that payment must also be received by April 30th to complete your registration.

There are all kinds of games you can play with Google, including the well-known 'Googlewhacking'. I don't know whether I've invented this one, which I discovered accidentally.

It is very simple: just hit a few keys haphazardly, for example, "l;kd" in the search box of Yahoo and see what turns up. The aim is to put in something that returns nothing - which is surprisingly difficult! That combination, for example, turned up more than one and half million hits! Even entered as a phrase, it produced almost 20,000.

The string ";we[kear'k" resulted in 34 hits, largely as a result of the existence of an author called "K. Kear". However, as a phrase, it produced zero - so it can be done. Remember, however, that they entry of symbols should be haphazard, just let your fingers do the choosing.

For a different perspective on information systems I recommend an article in this week's New Statesman (immediate access if you are a subscriber, otherwise £1.00 for 24 hours access). It's not about information systems directly, but about the problems of a shortly-tob-be-released prisoner. To get accommodation, he needs his National Insurance Number, but to get that - yes, you've guessed it - he needs an address. As he points out - he's in prison, under his real name, his fingerprints and DNA on file - why can't the prison authorities simply confirm his existence and allow his number to be delivered to the prison? The prisons are run by the Home Office, the National Insurance system by a branch of the Treasury - joined up government? Given the regular failure of IT projects in government, I guess we'll have to wait a long time before anything is joined up.

Of course, joined up action is problematical when we have politicians who can't do joined up thinking. Comedy show of the week was Tony Blair trying to justify his actions on Iraq - he seems to have a very selective memory. It seems that the famous "WMD" and the "immediate threat" to Britain that convinced the credulous MPs in the House of Commons (but no one else that I've ever met) were not the real cause - for Tony the real cause is now the removal of the oppressor. If this was his main attempt to regain voter trust, I don't think he's made it. It's positively embarassing to have such a hypocrite at the helm - and one who seems to think that the electorate is made up of unthinking idiots.

And now for something completely different: anyone interested in words will enjoy the Collect Britain site's feature on dialects. People are often astonished by the variation in accent in the UK, but remember the waves of invaders - Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Norman French - all leaving traces behind. Plus internal migration, of course - the Scots who moved to Ireland ended up with an accent that is neither Irish nor Scots, but Ulster!

Everyone is interested to some degree in food, so discovery (via The Scout Report) of the Epicurious (sic) site interested me, especially as it is suggested that this is the world's biggest source of recipes - 16,000 pages. Being in Oporto at present and, on Monday night having sampled a very nice dish of 'cabrito no forno' with a red Vinho Verde Espumante (which I didn't even know existed), I thought I would check on recipes. However, 'cabrito' as a search term returns nothing, 'kid' returns nothing, and 'goat' only returns recipes using goat cheese. Now some may have an aversion to eating goat, but the young animal is as popular as lamb in some parts of Europe - especially Southern Europe and I'm a little surprised that the publishers of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines have no recipes on file. Incidentally, the goat was delicious!

Many thanks, Tom. Almost as wonderful as my four week holiday.

Grahame

A Happy New Year to everyone - a little late. I'd expected to put up this message yesterday, but somehow the day got away from me.

What do information management and information technology hold for us in 2004 I wonder? The hot money appears to be on lots of money going into mobile data, but I have my doubts about how many people will actually be willing to buy Web services that pop up on the little 'phone screen. I suspect an attack of technology push.

I see that we have to call Berners-Lee, "Sir Tim" in future. I wonder why he bothered? Strange that someone responsible for what is probably the greatest technological 'leveller' - in the sense of giving practically anybody a voice, would accept a symbol of the British class system. Perhaps he was being ironic.

A ZDNet poll suggests that US 'Chief Information Officers' (i.e., IT Directors) forsee a slight increase in spending in 2004. That is, if Afghanistan or Iraq, Syria, Iran, or North Korea, or whatever turns out to be the next Christian fundamentalist target, doesn't turn nasty and lead to a rapid fall in the stock market.

Happy New Year everyone.

Yes, I know it isn't even Christmas Eve yet, but a number of things cropped up and this may be my last message before the festive season gets thoroughly under way.

Web site crimes

Jakob Nielsen has come up with his pet usability problems of 2003: let's hope they strike chords with the major offenders. I particularly felt sympathy with number 2:

2. New URLs for Archived Content

Archives add substantial value to a site with very little extra effort. Although more and more sites are archiving old content, most sites still fail to maintain good archives. Some sites treat archives as a separate site area, assigning pages new URLs when they move them from the main area into the archive. Changing the URL when archiving content causes linkrot. It also makes other sites reluctant to link to you. Although sites might consider linking to a current article, if they've been burned by linkrot in the past, they'll often pass you by because they don't want to bother with having to update their own pages when you move yours.

Help desk and customer service

This week's Fortune magazine has the first article I've seen on companies pulling their call centres back home from India because of reduced customer satisfaction. Funny, I was suggesting to someone just a couple of weeks ago that I figured the pendulum was bound to swing. The Fortune article tells us that Web.com and Dell have both done this recently. There's a comment that suggests that the 'one law for the rich' saying holds true:

"Not everything is moving offshore," says Amit Shankardass, solution-planning officer at ClientLogic, a Nashville-based call center outsourcing company. "Airline companies would not move management of high-yield customers offshore." Instead they practice, to follow industry jargon, "onshoring" or "nearshoring"—which means sending calls to Canada.

The Guardian gets it wrong - well, slightly, anyway.

Frank Miller - he of the wise words to the IR-DISCUSS list sent me an electronic Christmas card, which was so good that I immediately signed up to send them out myself. The artist Jacquie Lawson, together with a musician cum IT guru, designs interactive cards that are quite delightful. Jacquie was trained at the St. Martin's School of Art and lives in a village in West Sussex. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find one of her cards pictured on the back page of Guardian Media supplement (the tabloid bit) with the comment, to the effect that the card was from the USA. Very ambiguous - the sender might have been in the USA, but the server that delivered it was just down the road (well, relatively) from the Guardian offices in London. So - if you are interested in supporting British creativity - take a look and sign up. It's a modest subscription for such quality.

My attention to the Weblog has been limited recently - mainly because of going here and there and starting to get the next issue of the journal ready to go, some time in January. Most recently, it was a trip to Oporto (or Porto to the locals) for one of my usual teaching stints at the Faculty of Engineering. The weather was certainly worth it - clear blue skies and temperatures in the range 15-18C. Today, by comparison, has been 4C and a lot of rain, with snow forecast for tomorrow - yech. So - what with that trip, coming not too long after a trip to Sweden, and the journal contributions to get into shape, the Weblog has suffered. Still - no one will be reading it over the Christmas holidays, I imagine - and no one seems to have missed it. Still - I'll get something going soon.

I still get requests for offprints of my 1981 paper, 'On user studies and information needs', so I've finally got round to digitising it. The diagrams have been re-drawn and there are one or two other small changes and corrections, and I may even get round to adding a commentary one of these days.

On re-reading the paper, while I worked on it, I was struck by the fact that pretty well everyone who has referred to it has missed the significance of Figure 2.

Tom

First entry in the waka competition is from Frank Miller, who chooses an information theme - appropriate, really.

Knowledge is beauty
And can often inform us
But it's not true that
Information is knowing
Why should that confuse us so?

A little light relief for Friday. The allocation of medals at the World Athletics Championships in Paris gave me pause for thought. Great rejoicing in the USA that once again, they topped the table, gloom in the UK at the lack of gold medals and, presumably, great rejoicing in Russia at its haul.

However - I got to wondering. Given the differences in population of these countries, how many medals might they be expected to win - all things being equal, which, of course, they never are.

The answer was quite interesting. I assigned 4 points to a gold, 2 to a silver and 1 to a bronze. Thus, Ethiopia with 3G, 2S and 2B scores 30 points. The total population of the countries in the medal table is 4,099,683,500 and Ethiopia has 1.49% of this population. If it was to win medals on the basis of population from which to draw competitors alone, it should have 5 points - in other words, it actually did six times better than would be expected. The USA - top of the medal table - only did 2.4 times better.

On this basis, the top ten countries would be:

1. St. Kitts and Nevis
2. Qatar
3. Bahamas
4. Jamaica
5. Belarus
6. Estonia
7. Trinidad and Tobago
8. Sweden
9. Lithuania
10. Greece

So let's hear it for the real winners! On this basis the USA would be 24th position and the UK in 32nd.

However, population doesn't tell the whole story - perhaps Gross National Income, indicating wealth, would be a better measure. Again, the points were assigned in the same way, but this time I simply looked at the difference between the 'predicted' points and the actual. On this basis, the top ten countries were:

1. Russia
2. Ethiopia
3. Belarus
4. Kenya
5. Morocco
6. South Africa
7. Sweden
8. Jamaica
9. Greece
10. Cuba

I hear you complain. OK - using the same method of comparison as with population, the top ten are:

1. Saint Kitts and Nevis
2. Ethiopia
3. Belarus
4. Jamaica
5. Mozambique
6. Kenya
7. Estonia
8. Lithuania
9. Morocco
10. Ecuador

Qatar would have been in there, but I couldn't find GNI data anywhere.

And the bottom ten? CANADA, MEXICO, USA, ITALY, GREAT BRITAIN & N.I., GERMANY, INDIA, BRAZIL, PR OF CHINA and JAPAN in 42nd position.

So - it's the old story, really: "it's the rich wot get the pleasure" while the real achievements of the poor go unnoticed.

The Onion's front page story may amuse.

There seems to be a buzz going these days on the applications of faceted classification - it's a little curious that in the days of search engines and the wide belief that they can solve all retrieval problems (even if the IR researchers do not claim this) the 'information architecture' and 'knowledge management' fraternity should be turning to a method I first learnt about almost fifty years ago. I even sat at the feet of Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan when he made his farewell tour of library schools in the UK. We had spent two days talking with him (conversation was his teaching method - he let you learn things, rather than trying to teach you) and by the time came for him to give a public address, he had lost his voice. It was a little curious to hear the whispered words of Ranganathan repeated in a strong Scottish accent by the then Head of Department! I still have the sheet of paper upon which he wrote the Five Laws of Library Science and then signed his name in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and, I think, Tamil. I went on to teach the subject for quite a few years - including following a number of well-known British teachers to the University of Maryland for a year because the Dean, Paul Wasserman, felt that there was more to classification than the schedules of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. The students in those years - between about 1965 and 1970 - were possibly the only ones in the USA getting that treatment.

Now the Weblogs buzz with the novelty of the ideas that Ranganathan first developed in his Colon Classfication of 1933 - yup, seventy years ago.

Links to chase down:

The Knowledge Management Connection - which is very keen to tell us that faceted classification is "Not just a library science technique", almost as though that would taint it.

Ranganathan for IAs

Faceted Movable Type

Ranganathan's rigorous analysis of the principles upon which all classification is based is contained in his 'Prolegomena to library classification' - but you can find a simplified version here:

A simplified model for facet analysis - I only put this one in because I get cited :-) (Only joking)

A tribute to SR Ranganathan, the father of Indian Library Science by Eugene Garfield - who also met SRR. See also Part II of the tribute.

Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?

Ranganthan ahead of his century.

Ranganathan and Facet Analysis - an unlikely source, perhaps, but he is creeping in all over the place.

You MUST check out this one!

I'm off on holiday on 15th until 5th July, so, unless we have some input from members of the list, the Weblog will be empty.

All you have to do to post to the log is address your message to irweblog-site@free-conversant.com and make the first line of your message "addToWeblog index" - just as this message has that first line.

Bye for now.

Tom

Off to Spain today - I was invited to be "Godfather" at a degree ceremony at the University of Murcia. Not quite sure about whether this means that I turn up in a black hat with a white band around it. Another hiatus in the log - unless others input.

For a quiet giggle see Majority Of Human Discourse Now Occurring In Online Product Reviews at The Onion.

A gap in the proceedings. I'm off to Amsterdam tomorrow to talk to a bunch of policemen about 'information overload' - back on Thursday afternoon, when I may have time to browse my sources for interesting items.

Quite a bit of discussion has been going on today on the IR-DISCUSS list - labelled by some as 'junk', but that's not everyone's opinion :-)

An item on the Spinster Librarian Weblog caught my attention - it's about library 'wish lists' that are posted on the Amazon site and it made me wonder - with Amazon now linked to, is it Bibliofind, or some other second-hand search site, surely it's pretty easy for Amazon to find the items???

I'm off to Dorset early tomorrow to celebrate David Streatfield's birthday (a big one!), so it's unlikely that there will be any entry in the log tomorrow or Wednesday, unless some brave soul decides to contribute...? :-)

Seeing that it is Sunday...

For the zaniest discussion on the planet at the moment I nominate the response to the item on Slashdot entitled Klingon interpreter needed in Oregon.

True - apparently: the CNN report says:

The language created for the "Star Trek" TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County.

This really got the geeks going on Slashdot. Well worth a scan, but only if it is raining and you have nothing more interesting to do.

I'm off to Loughborough tomorrow to talk about 'knowledge management' - again. The one thing I get out of these events is the fact that people want to believe in km - but when asked to distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'information', fail to do so. I wonder if tomorrow will bring something new?

Listeners to BBC4 radio will know of the 'Donald Rumsfeld Soundbite of the Week', but Hart Seely, writing in Slate, has realised that Rummy has been talking poetry all this time. One nice example:

A Confession

Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.

—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

Yesterday was a travel day, so I didn't get round to posting a message. From about 0 Celsius in Sweden, with a couple of inches of snow, I returned to +12 and sunshine - freak weather in both countries, you might say :-)

Here's a couple of sources that may interest people. One is the Newsletter of SCONUL, the UK Standing Conference of National and University Libraries. There's a wide range of topics in the current issue from institutional portals to e-learning. Thanks to Peter Scott's Library Blog for that one.

The other, which I think came to me through a mailing list, is Transformations: liberal arts in the digital age, published by the Associated Colleges of the South (Southern USA of course - not the 'South' generally! Again - mainly for college and university libraries, but, given the interest in technology, something there for others too. The journal doesn't appear to have an ISSN, and who knows how long it will survive? However, good luck to the venture.

Finally, for tonight, news just in from Slashdot - next time to get an insane desire to discover the relative dimensions of star ships, check out Zardalu.styles.net

Orwell's '1984' seems to have hit the USA, a few years behind schedule. The so-called 'Patriot Act' is causing problems for librarians, booksellers and ISPs - and they aren't happy.

Read all about it in the New Jersey Star Ledger, Yahoo! News and elsewhere

More in the Tri-Valley Herald

The Daily Review

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

...and more from an Alta Vista news search about the impact on booksellers.