Michael Geist at UBC: “E-Publishing and the Law”

Yesterday evening I attended a lecture at UBC’s St. John’s College by Michael Geist, hosted by the Canadian Journalism Federation, on “E-publishing and the Law”. Dr. Geist spoke about what he referred to as the “new normal” - for knowledge, creativity, and public participation - that is being shaped by the internet and related technologies, and how the law and public policy needs to reflect that.

His talk covered a lot of issues: copyright reform, intermediary liablity, net neutrality, access to information, and more. I did take a bunch of notes and planned to try to summarize the talk here. Then this morning I discovered the whole thing had been liveblogged by one of the attendees. There is also a video posted on Dr. Geist’s own blog of a similar talk he gave at Osgoode Hall a few days earlier. So rather than waste time reading what I have to say about it, I strongly encourage you to go and read the liveblog and watch the video for yourself. A whole lot to think about.

Speaking at Langara

I have two speaking engagements this month at Langara College. On Thursday I will be representing LTAIG as part of a panel discussion on the benefits of association membership. Other panelists will represent the British Columbia Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, the Special Libraries Association, and the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries. This is an annual session for first year fieldwork students in the Library & Information Technology Program. This will be my third year as a panelist. It wasn’t all that long ago (2003) that I was a first year student listening to the same discussion, so it’s kind of cool being on the other side of it.

On March 18th I’ll be back at Langara to speak to a second year class about working as a webmaster at my firm. The class is in the midst of learning about developing library websites. While the websites I manage are not quite ”library” sites, I’m looking forward to tying the work involved in managing them to my library technician training. I will be speaking alongside Joyce Wong, who manages Langara’s Library website.

Micro-blogging for law libraries

There’s a cool experiment happening over at law.librarians. Using the Prologue template on WordPress, law.librarians is a collaborative micro-blog that allows contributors to publish short entries - in this case for sharing resources, posting news, asking questions, and generally chatting about issues relevant to the law library community.

The concept of micro-blogging has been popularized recently with the success of Twitter, and the “status updates” feature on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Steve Matthews on law firm SEO

Steve Matthews, founder of Stem Legal (and former Knowledge Services Director at my firm) was interviewed for this week’s LexBlog Q & A on Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) for law firms.

SEO is a topic that I’m just starting to wrap my head around, and it’s through the expertise of people like Steve that I’ve been able to understand it at all.

Check out the full Q & A over at Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyer’s Have Blogs.

Microsoft sets sights on Yahoo! Inc.

Microsoft has made a proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. It’s all just speculation at this point; according to Download Squad, Yahoo!’s Board of Directors is evaluating the offer, while stock in the company initially jumped 60% in reaction to the news.

Stay tuned… (Yahoo! press room is here, Microsoft press room is here).

Update: Yahoo! rejects Microsoft’s proposal; reportedly in talks with AOL and News Corp.

The results are in!

The results of the 2007 LTAIG Salary Survey were published (finally!) last week. This is the fourth survey conducted by LTAIG since 1996 (and the third since 2003).

Here are just some of the highlights:

• We had 322 respondents in total, 261 of which were from British Columbia;
• Just under 57% have completed a formal Library Technician training program;
• Most respondents have at least some college or university education outside of formal library training. 35% have obained a Bachelor’s degree, while 3% have a Masters degree;
• 87% said they are currently working in a library. 60% are in permanent, full-time positions;
• 39% of respondents indicated they work in academic libraries, 35% are in public libraries, 23% are in “special libraries” (including government, legal, corporate, medical, media, non-profit or “other” libraries), and 12% are in school libraries;
• Support staff in special libraries earn the most on average, with law library technicians topping this list at just under $24 per hour; public library technicians average just over $21 per hour; and academic library technicians earn an average of about $20 per hour.

The full results are available on the LTAIG website, at: http://www.bcla.bc.ca/LTAIG/page/2007survey.aspx

I would be interested to hear some feedback from techs and assistants, both in BC and elsewhere. How do the results compare with your own experience?

Get ready for OpenID

It may soon be possible to log in to all of your various social networks, blogs, email accounts, and other websites under one ”universal login standard”. Currently dubbed OpenID, users will be able to create a single username and password that can be used on any website that supports it.

InternetNews.com reported today that Yahoo, with nearly 250-million registered users, is the latest company to endorse OpenID. The company joins AOL, LiveJournal, Plaxo, Technorati, WordPress, and several others who are behind the initiative so far.

OpenID is also supported by the DataPortability Workgroup, which now includes Google and Facebook. To my knowledge, Google and Facebook have not publicly supported OpenID themselves (please correct me if I’m wrong); by joining the Workgroup it seems they could be headed in that direction.

With so many websites requiring users to login, and so many of these sites offering cross-platform interoperability (think Facebook’s zillions of third-party applications), OpenID seems to me a logical step toward simplifying users’ experience on the web.

Naturally, there are some concerns, mainly to do with privacy and security, and these will need to be dealt with before OpenID can work in the way it’s intended. Nevertheless, expect to hear more about it in the very near future.

A little holiday reading

In case you’re looking for a bit of light reading over the holidays, the December issue of LTAIG News was published last week. You can find this latest issue, as well as all past issues on LTAIG’s brand new website (more on that later).

This issue features a very interesting report on three of India’s largest libraries, the latest snapshot survey results, a film review, an interview with LTAIG member Meagan Huculak, and lots more.

Happy reading, and all the best in 2008!

Dispatches from a Public Librarian

My brother, who is a big fan of the literary journal McSweeny’s, introduced me to the “Dispatches from a Public Librarian” feature on the McSweeny’s website a couple of years ago. Dispatches is written by Scott Douglas, a public librarian in California, and “include(s) stories about strange patrons, strange tales, and otherwise just strange things.”

I’d almost forgotten about it until yesterday when I stumbled across this hilarious entry about the author’s (alleged) experience attending a recent library conference.

Dispatches is now on my blogroll. Check it out! 

Wuts ur reeding levil?

Saw this on Stephen’s Lighthouse.

No idea how this is measured, but basically you plug in your blog’s url and it tells you what reading level it is.

I entered Steve and Emma’s blogs as a comparison, and apparently both are ”Highschool”, even though I think their’s are more sophisticated than mine. So it’s hard to give it much weight. Still a fun little exercise for 4:30 on a Friday though.