Jason the Content Librarian

This week has been all about the upcoming AALL conference for me. It’s included meetings, projects, and extracurricular work. All of this is good, but it has been keeping me busy, and that’s way my blog posts this week are focused on the upcoming conference.

Today comes a small reward for all the hard work, we have released a new video on the AALL local arrangements committee blog. I’ll also embed it below.

Some people had started asking me if there were going to be any new videos. We actually taped some videos as early as February but had some technical difficulties. I ended up purchasing a personal FlipVideo camera for the video project. Scheduling difficulties caused delays also.

But earlier this week the gloomy weather broke, and on a beautiful day, Laurie Daley and I headed out to the Portland waterfront to shoot the video.

I should also note, that I decided to use a different video uploading service this time. In the past I used blip.tv for my videos. But I recently saw someone mention a service called Viddler. The nice thing about Viddler is that it allows people to comment on the videos. So if you notice those little dots on the video progress bar

You can hover over those dots to see comments people have left. I encourage people to leave comments on the video and give us feedback and ideas for future videos. For now, enjoy.

The information for the AALL no-host dinners, also known as the dine-arounds has been posted the local arrangements committee website. There are a lot of really great options for dinner.

Blogger and local law librarian Laura Orr is hosting a dinner at Dan and Louis Oyster Bar.

I will be hosting a dinner as well at one of my favorite restaurants, Oba. It’s a little on the pricey side, but I always like to take visitors to Portland there. It’s a lot of fun, described as Nuevo Latino cuisine. A great place for margaritas as well. Some reviews are linked to on the dine-around page, and on their website, including many that call it one of the best places to eat in Portland. It was also just brought to my attention that they have a whole menu of wheat, gluten free, and vegetarian options for people with dietary restrictions.

So be sure to send your email request in, and I hope to see you in Portland.

A column by Craig Ball in the April issue of Law Technology News, The Science of Search, argues that “lawyers need to learn more about the science of search as part of our legal and continuing education.” As someone tasked with educating attorneys about the science of search, I will say hear hear! But I do think this article bears closer scrutiny for law librarians and attorneys alike.

Going by this article, e-discovery may be an important area where law librarians can use their expertise and expand their roles in law firms. To hear some of Ball’s stories about keyword searching in e-discovery procedures, it seems apparent that some expertise is needed. While Ball argues that attorneys should learn what they need in order to carry out e-discovery searching, many attorneys might find that they have all the expertise they need lurking in the library. Laura Orr also took note of this.

I won’t fault Ball for failing to mention librarians. It is a shorter column, and his focus was not legal research or searching generally, but rather a lack of knowledge by attorneys. This point is brought home by a paragraph where Ball writes:

The notion that lawyers are unqualified per se to concoct keyword searches is likely to shake some sensibilities. Lawyers believe themselves adept at keyword search in e-discovery because they’ve mastered keyword search in online legal research.

Ron at Strategic Legal Technology recognizes that many law librarians would argue that lawyers have not mastered keyword search in online legal research. I’m not going to definitively comment on whether or not lawyers have mastered keyword searching.

But I will say that although I am all in favor of attorneys learning better searching techniques generally, it may be time to examine the role librarians can play in e-discovery. Clients of law firms may be best served when law librarians do what they do best, handle the searching; while attorneys do what they do best, practice law.

I’m something of a movie buff and I love to learn about what films are going into production, director and casting news, etc. One of my favorite blogs for this kind of news is FirstShowing. net.

Back in December they had a really interesting post about the viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight.

Now, I’m not what you’d call a fanboy, but I know my stuff. And I’ve been looking forward to this movie for awhile. But the description of the viral marketing campaign hooked me.

So when I found out that my help was needed in making Harvey Dent District Attorney of Gotham City, I knew I had to answer the call. And when I found out that the Harvey Dent Dentmobile was in Portland I knew I had to go.
 
So on my lunch break I visited the Dentmobile and took some photos of myself. I posted them to the Harvey Dent website, which required my name and address and some other information. Afterwards I received notification that my photo had been accepted, and posted on the Harvey Dent website.

A few days later, I received a Gotham City Voter registration card in the mail. It included information about where to vote, my Gotham City address and district and other such information.

About a week ago I received two separate packages in the mail. The first package was from the Harvey Dent campaign in Gotham City. It included a copy of The Gotham Times newspaper, and some campaign materials.

In a completely separate, unmarked package, I received a partially destroyed Harvey Dent campaign button. I will not spoil the reason why this may have been sent in such a manner.

The button, seen here, also linked to a website of concerned Gotham citizens who oppose Harvey Dent.

Needless to say that I now eagerly run to the mailbox a little like a kid, every day, to see if there’s something new for me.

Since these events there have been some additional things going on. The Joker character sent fans on a bowling alley treasure hunt, delivering more cell phones, and Alex from first showing had one special delivered. Other websites have cropped up, and yesterday’s press conference was interrupted by a hostage situation (yes I was listening).

I’m not sure whether or not this campaign will be effective. It certainly is generating a tremendous amount of buzz, and that’s never a bad thing. The question is whether or not people will see the movie, who would not have seen it otherwise. I would have seen it anyway, being a big fan of most of the Batman films, and Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale anyway.

I do hope it is successful, I’ve been enjoying my participation and would prefer to see these types of interactive marketing activities as opposed to the more standard marketing fare. Although I suppose it all depends on the movie, the fan base, the context and how it’s pulled off.

Tags: marketing

Sports fans among you may already be following the controversy involving the status of bloggers covering the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, and their ability to enter the team’s locker room after games.

The story is basically that back in February a blogger named Tim MacMahon, who blogs about the Mavs for the Dallas Morning News, wrote a post in which he discussed a website called FireAvery.com (Avery is Avery Johnson, coach of the Mavs). The night after MacMahon wrote that post, the Mavericks decided to indiscriminately ban bloggers from their locker room (Mavs claim this ban was unrelated to the post), using what some think are suspicious reasons.

One of the interesting facets of this whole situation is that Mavs owner Cuban is himself a blogger. Cuban’s take on the original ban, and MacMahon’s take appear on their respective blogs. Last week the NBA decided that Cuban could not ban all bloggers from the locker room. So Mark Cuban has acquiesced, somewhat. He will now decide which bloggers are to be credentialed after they post a comment on his blog.

ESPN’s True Hoop blog has a nice FAQ of the situation (from before the most recent developments).

Generally teams can credential or not credential anyone they want. The real controversy has come because Cuban appears to have banned bloggers as a convenient way of banning a blogger he was unhappy with, despite assurances from himself and the team that this wasn’t the case. If it had been a “traditional journalist” the banning would have sparked much outrage in the media. As it is, the only debate it has sparked seems to be the question of the status of bloggers compared to traditional journalists and other media types.

Different teams have handled the situation of sports bloggers differently, although most teams seem to credential certain bloggers, giving them the same access as the regular press corps. Late last year I found out about an interesting experiment by the New York Islanders called the blog box. I found out about this because an old friend of mine, The Islanders Outsider, was chosen to be part of the blog box.

But all of this raises many interesting questions. Obviously not every blogger, sports blogger or otherwise, can be credentialed for any media event they want to attend. Besides the various logistical issues of such a thing many people would start blogging, and some probably have started, solely to gain access to previously off-limit events. So organizations with high blogger coverage, like political parties and sports teams, must decide on their own criteria for credentialing bloggers.

But this can lead to sticky situations where some organizations could ban or reward bloggers based on their coverage. There are of course some policies that could get around this. The professional sports leagues could set some guidelines. For example, the NBA could say something like ‘if you credential reporters from one organization, you must credential bloggers from the same organization.’ This would allow bloggers associated with news organizations, like Henry Abbott of True Hoop on ESPN, to enjoy the same benefits as any reporter from that organization. Of course that suggestion may destroy the whole spirit of blogging.

There are also questions of passion and objectivity. Most sports bloggers probably blog because they are fans of a certain sports team. But journalists are generally expected to operate with some objectivity. How does a blogger, who blogs out of a passion for or love of a team, moderate that when blogging for a traditional news organization or when gaining access to a team’s locker room. I’m not sure if I could have held my tongue if I had been allowed access to the New York Jets locker room, with access to Herm Edwards, or Paul Hackett, or any of the other coaches Jets fans have had to endure over the years. Maybe bloggers should be considered a media entity of their own, separate but equal to journalists.

I guess the bottom line is that this is an interesting situation to keep an eye on. I could be wrong, maybe it’s just a minor bump on the road of web 2.0. But it could also be something of a microcosm of the fight between old and new media, traditional journalists and bloggers, me and the New York Jets.

Longtime readers of this blog might remember that one of my goals this year has been to come up with a comprehensive personal information management strategy, and to blog about it periodically. Towards that end I am currently reading the book Personal Information Management edited by William Jones and Jaime Teevan.

The book is fantastic, and I am going to post a more thorough review of it after I’ve finished reading it. As any good book will do, it has gotten me thinking about my own personal information management habits, and as always looking for solutions to managing my personal information.

Serendipitously, this very week, Robert Ambrogi blogged about a product called Evernote. Evernote is an application which allows users to store various types of information in a single location. I did not contact Ambrogi directly, but still managed to score an invite to the new Evernote beta (I have some invites available as well if someone out there would like to take a look). The great potential for Evernote is that there is a desktop product as well as the new web-based service. Supposedly these services will synchronize allowing you to install Evernote on multiple computers, synchronize with the web version and have all your notes available anywhere. Is this the solution I’ve been waiting for? Stay tuned to find out.

I think that my own information management might have to be task or project based. This is because I have some projects coming up which require me to create documents, collect emails, bookmark web pages, create calendar appointments, notes, and collect other information. Ideally I would like to attach all these information types to the project they’re associated with.

This desire has led me to take a much closer look at Personal Brain. A few years ago I managed to get a license key from a vendor at a conference, and tried out Personal Brain. At the time it didn’t really fit into how I was working. But my new desire to link information objects to tasks or projects has forced me to take another look, thinking that Personal Brain might be the best tool for that type of organization. I should note that there is a free version of Personal Brain that you can download if you’re interested in trying out this really interesting software.

On a somewhat related note I will one day have to blog about getting a little more out of vendors at conferences. At the SLA Leadership Summit in January I managed to get a free book from a bookseller who was at the bookseller’s convention at our hotel.

But I digress. I have also thought about trying our MindManager, or one of the free mind mapping packages available on the web. I might still try this, but I’m a little wary of mind mapping software. The examples of mind maps I’ve seen look to be a little more hierarchical, and I am not necessarily sure I want my information objects organized that way. This is one of the reasons I have some problems with just using a simple folder system like what’s available on Windows.

So that’s where I’m at right now, as always I will keep you updated with my progress.

Update:

Web Worker Daily also had a nice post this week about Evernote. WWD focused on Evernote’s ability to scan text in images. So if you upload an image that has text in it, later on you could find that image by searching for the text. This sounds fantastic, and I did notice the feature when I first logged into Evernote, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out with my own photos yet.

Robert Ambrogi has written a great article over Law.com called Online Legal Research Revolution.

He discusses the recent release of free legal research tools like AltLaw, PreCYdent, and The Public Library of Law, all partially powered by the release of federal case opinions by Public.Resource.Org.

These developments have already raised some interesting questions for the future of legal research, and here are a few of my questions which I think will be interesting to watch:

• How will Lexis & Westlaw remain relevant in the coming years as free services catch up? Lexis and Westlaw aren’t going away any time soon. At the very least they both offer collections of content which simply can’t be found elsewhere. But seeing free services chip away at what would seem to be their bread & butter (case law), certainly raises questions about the future of these large legal publishers.
• How will these free services add value, and maintain authority to compete with Lexis & Westlaw for the hearts and minds of attorneys? Lexis & Westlaw have over 100 years of service to the legal industry behind them. They have an authority which is almost unquestioned by attorneys. In addition, these new tools will have to begin adding value to their services, including full Boolean searching, complex field searching, and maybe even Shepardizing/Keyciting services to become truly competitive.
• How will the retirement of the baby boomers and the rise of digital natives affect legal publishers? The history and authority of Lexis and Westlaw may not mean much to digital natives who have lived their whole lives in the age of the PC and online information. Despite hooking them in law school, digital natives may not have the same loyalty to the traditional legal services, which could bode well for these new online ventures.

 Interesting times we live in…

I have not had time to write full posts on all these items, but think they’re important enough to note.

• Nick at Binary Law posted a great summary of a discussion about law libraries going on in the blogosphere. The discussion is over a report of firms downsizing law libraries in the Birmingham Business Journal. As Nick notes, the truth of this depends on your definition of law libraries. As I have mentioned in the past, law firm librarians are going to have to expand into new areas of service (like KM, CI, and Personal Information Management) to remain relevant in the future.
• Steve Matthews had an interesting post over at SLAW about Google’s internal applications. The original post he links to at Google Blogscoped has a detailed description of all the internal applications covered at a KMWorld Magazine web seminar. Some of these projects look really cool. I particularly like the concept behind Google Ideas where employees rate each others ideas and suggestions.
• Dennis Kennedy posted about competitive intelligence this week. He put together an interesting roundtable discussion of CI, available at Law Practice, which is a must-read for anyone interested in this service in law firms.

March 6th Newsweek put out a story called Revenge of the Experts. The gist of the article is that the current trend of user-generated content is on the way out in favor of a renewed interest in expert-vetted content.

Although there’s been some debate on this (see the comments on the post at the Lost Remote blog), I strongly disagree with the Newsweek article.

My own problem with the article is that it perpetuates an old concept that expertise must be arbitrarily decided on by media outlets, and those are the only experts who matter. In this case I use the term media outlet loosely to refer to any organization that produces content. The article cites a few expert-generated content providers (About.com, Mahalo, and BigThink) who are doing some interesting things. But the days when a publication like Newsweek, or websites like these could force an expert on it’s readers without question are over.

The internet has its own way of deciding who is and is not an expert, and mainstream media is going to have to deal with that.

Thanks to LibraryStuff for the heads up.

Just saw this noted in Read/Write Web.

The United Nations has released a new website called UNdata. UNdata, also known as the UN data access system aims to provide UN statistics to the global community free of charge.

While I haven’t had a lot of time to explore this yet, it looks great. This could be a great new tool for librarians to access international statistics from a reliable source. The advanced search allows you to narrow down statistics by country, source, and date. You can also browse country profiles and source profiles, which could become an excellent source for international industry information.

I look forward to seeing how this develops and seeing what others have to say about it.