Falconer suggests charges for FOI requests

A leaked cabinet memo has revealed that the UK Government is seeking to nobble the Freedom of Information Act, a flagship piece of Blairite legislation, by making it harder for "serial requesters" to use it.

A memo by Constitutional Affairs department boss, Lord Falconer, to cabinet colleagues has been leaked to the Sunday Times. The paper reports that Falconer proposes to introduce charges to reflect the time it takes officials to read through requested files in order to ascertain they do not contain sensitive information.

There were 38,108 FOI requests in the act's first year of operation, 2005. But Falconer's memo suggest this could be reduced substantially - he says that officials estimate that a charging structure for major documents will put off at least 17% of people whose requests require a substantive response.

Currently, local authorities can charge £450 and central government departments £600 where an FOI request involves significant amounts of work in preparing a response.

Falconer also estimates that a further reduction of one-third could be made by introducing a blanket FOI charge for every request made, as currently happens in Ireland (15 euros per application).

In seeking to curtail its own legislation, by reforming it in practice, the Labour government may well be trying to outflank opposition to the FOI bill from those on the right-wing who would like to see the Act taken off the statute books altogether.

The Socialtext Wiki Goes Open Source

SocialText is an enterprise-focused wiki provider. Until this week, it has been offering either a hosted service or a 'behind the firewall' server appliance. Both fee-based. Now, it has added an open source distribution to the SocialText repertoire. This is currently in beta but can be downloaded (around 3MB) from SourceForge.

Implementation will only appeal to propellor-heads. It's not like slapping in a pc application. Socialtext Open is written in the Perl interpreted language and, providing you have the Perl modules and an appropriate platform, away you go. I'm not going to pretend to know the technicalities but it looks to me as if Apache and Linux are good things to have in place too. The documentation is pretty terse and tucked inside the download.

The important thing is that those who want to experiment with an in-house wiki, but don't want to hand over the readies to Socialtext, can do so. Socialtext itself has left out its enterprise management and enterprise integration tools from the open source, so that if you get hooked, you may want/need to spend the extra later on.

This is only the beginning of the Open Source development for SocialText. The Public Roadmap explains other moves in the near future which include the ability to use the popular MySQL database management system.

Just in case anyone is misled by Socialtext's headline: "Socialtext First Commercial Open Source Wiki", Ludovic Dubost, the founder of XWiki is making no secret of his outrage. See the first comment on Joi Ito's post if you prefer to read it in English.

Printed information works no matter the weather

Information World Review is a title about online information.  Yet the last two days of this week have seen IWR brought to a standstill by power cuts.  Broadwick Street in central London is home to VNU and a host of publishing companies, but little or no information flowed from this street due to EDF Energy equipment failing in the Soho area.

With no access to the publishing systems in our London office, I drifted towards the British Museum Great Court reading room, probably the greatest library and host of information in the world.  Sitting amongst the shelves and desks where the great Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy once worked, it was a sobering reminder that printed paper still has enormous power, whether there's a power supply or not.

Online information is undoubtedly the future and a powerful and productive medium, when all is working well, but yesterday's events also highlighted that if a power supplier fails to provide a basic level of service, then the online information world will fail in its service.

In the heat of summer and with our power supplies returned to Winter of Discontent service levels, a book and a library are reassuringly reliable.

Gadget survey also points to information needs

A survey released today shows that students are gadget crazy and own a wide range of digital technology that enables them to access information, including PDAs, MP3 players, laptop computers and state of the art televisions.

The survey, carried out by an insurance company focussed on how much students spent on technology and luxury goods - £2,900 pounds, up a thousand over the last decade. But the results also indicate the changing information usage patterns of students. Two thirds of those surveyed own a laptop computer, over half an MP3 player and six per cent a PDA. All three of these devices perform information access and management tasks. The survey also found that 48% of those surveyed own a DVD player and 12% a wide screen television.

For academia this means that lecturers, e-learning suites and librarians need to look at a wider range of information resources than web based content and books. A fact backed up by the survey, which found that 40% would spend more on clothes than books.

With students clearly showing a passion for digital living information providers need to reflect the changing information usage patterns of students, who will become corporate information users. Mark Thomson at the BBC seems to have understood this with his moves to make all BBC content available on all information platforms. The rest of the information sector needs to follow his lead and the patterns of these future users.

Springer launches new ebook initiative

Is the ebook set for a renaissance? Springer is banking on it over the next few years, having launched a new eBook initiative at the American Library Association (ALA) conference in New Orleans last month.

As a major global STM publisher, Springer is hoping to steal a lead on its rivals, chief among them Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer. It hopes to drive the expansion of the market with an all-inclusive book digitization programme and an open, less punitive pricing policy.

Springer publishes, in PDF and HTML formats, more than 3,000 eBook, eReference Work and eBook series titles on STM subjects each year.

It has now integrated its ebook offerings with articles from online journals on Springerlink. With easier access to the book text, researchers are expected to start increasing their citation levels.

According to an article in the International Herald Tribune, Springer is not expecting exponential growth in ebooks – it's still expected to be a slow burn with incremental advances over a period of time.

But the new pricing policy is significantly different – unlimited access within a university for a year collection ranges from 94,000 Euros for a small institution up to 285,000 Euros for the largest customers.

Collections are now being released by "copyright year", and a special offer is currently available to libraries – buy the 2007 collection, and get the 2006 and 2005 collections thrown in for free.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 and Voice Perfect

Nuance announced its Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 edition this week. It claims to turn the spoken word into text better than it's ever done before. Needless to say, Information World Review couldn't wait to get its mitts on it. In fact, I rather fancied writing this blog post using it.

So here's the Dragon version of me saying the above:

"Nuance announced its Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 edition this week.  It
terms the spoken word into text better than it's ever done before.
Needless to sigh information world review couldn't wait to get its
mitts on it.  In fact I rather fancied writing this blog post using it."

Good Lord! That's not at all bad. They were the very first words I uttered to it. It heard 'terms' instead of 'turns'. 'Sigh' instead of 'say'. (That's Estuary English for you.)

The only knowledge it had of me prior to the above was that it had scrabbled through some Word documents to divine my writing style.

I later gave it formal training by reading some prepared text and I had to make several attempts to get 'Nuance' right. After training, it seemed to prefer Muons, New arts or New aunts.

I wonder if it's good enough for transcribing telephone and conference calls? Wouldn't that be something? The potential certainly appears to be there.

If it all seems a bit hairy to put together, you'll be pleased to hear about Australia's Voice Perfect. Its Multi-Speak system does exacly that. As a meeting
proceeds, each person's statements are colour coded and time-stamped.

TFPL grows and benefits from acquisition

Recruitment specialist TFPL has benefited and grown from its acquisition by document management (DM) software vendor IDOX, according to Richard Pinder, Director.

TFPL has become two divisions of the IDOX parent company, with IDOX concentrating on its core strength, DM software for government clients. TFPL Information Solutions is the new division joining TFPL Recruitment.

The new Information Solutions division will build on the existing consultancy and training services offered by TFPL. "We have been report driven, now we want to be delivering results," Pinder said of the move towards getting involved with companies and helping them integrate new information management technology. "Most of our clients have bought an enterprise content management (ECM), Search or cataloguing technology and can't get it to work."

Pinder said the new division is in reply to a large amount of "confusion still around" about information management.

TFPL will not be leaving its traditional routes though, with recruitment and the EBIC conference still high on the agenda. Pinder, as of today, will lead the new Information Solutions division. He joined the IDOX group earlier this year from search and e-government specialist APR SmartLogik.

Global Insight newly energized in Europe

Market intelligence vendor Global Insight has been increasing its tracking of the energy sector in Europe, as well as coverage of environmentally-sensitive industries like the automotive and transport sectors.

A new Global Insight service, the European Regulatory Outlook for Alternative Fuels, provides management briefings for those responsible for developing automotive products or automotive-related services.

European Regulatory Outlook for Alternative Fuels will provide background on underlying political debates and legislative developments that affect the industry across the European Union, with particular focus on six member states – the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.

The service will closely track the regulatory situation with regard to alternative fuels, providing overviews by the four main fuel types (biodiesel, ethanol, CNG, and LPG).

The service is offered under the generic title Sustainable Mobility, which is defined as providing for "the safe freedom of movement for people and goods in ways that use renewable sources of energy while creating no adverse impacts on the Earth and its environment".

Current projects include research into potential investments and/or initiatives that could reduce car-related CO2 emissions, and a paper on the likelihood of the various alternative powertrain technologies achieving technical and market success in the 2007/08 to 2025 timeframe.

The new initiatives come in the wake of the appointment of three senior energy sector experts – Scott Foster, Andrew Ellis and David Callanan – all co-founders of European analysis and forecasting firm ECON Energia.

All three have senior roles within Global insight dvisions: Foster is now managing director of Global Power, Ellis is a principal with the European Energy Practice, and Callanan is managing director of business development for the Energy Practice team.

Get at those holdings with LibraryThingThing for Firefox

Richard Wallis at Talis has written an extension for the FireFox browser which gets you to information in any of 50M (and growing) library holding records. It works in conjunction with Tim Spalding's LibraryThing service. I'd describe this as a social collection cataloguing system. You stick in some book details and the service searches a bunch of libraries and other sources and offers to 'fill in the blanks' for you.

You can be anonymous and just search for stuff or you can fully participate, adding up to 200 titles, tagging them, rating them etc. If you have more than 200, you will have to pay a modest annual fee.

Wallis' extension is called LibraryThingThing, a mashup which takes the ISBNs of the found records and checks with the XISBN web service to see if there are any more numbers. Then it looks at the Talis holdings database to list the libraries where the books can be found.

You choose a library, and the mashup then takes you, via the Talis directory, to either the book record in the library, to the library, to the collection or to the Silkworm collection entry in the Talis directory platform. In other words, LibraryThingThing gets you as close as possible to the record you want.

It costs nothing to add records to the directory of collections, which is run in a wiki-like way, so there are minimal financial and technical barriers to adding collection, library and service (OPAC) connection methods. This is intended to become a global, open resource, although it does have a UK bias at present.

And, just like the directory, the source code of LibraryThingThing is available for anyone to use and extend.

Blogging V Content Management

Over the last week I've been uploading the copy from the print version of IWR onto our website.  It has been a long and sometimes painful process.  In doing this, I couldn't help but compare using the content management system that websites require with the process of updating the IWR blog. My conclusion was that content management systems could face a serious threat from blogs.

Adding copy and images to Typepad, the blogging application IWR uses, is simplicity itself. I hope you agree, the blog is relatively easy to navigate. In comparison content management systems, and I've used a few, often come with a host of difficulties. 

Before every CMS vendor rushes to throttle me, I accept that a great deal of the complexity comes from the integrations and from the rules of the enterprise using them.  That said, blogging works because the application is simple, with fewer buttons to press the likelihood of problems are reduced. Blogging reminds me of one technological development that just won't go away - paper.

Paper works, its simple and reliable, blogging is simple, the applications that IWR has tried all seem reliable and provide the users, both content providers and readers with easy access.

For many organisations looking to publish or share information, blogging must surely be considered.

E-learning thoughts and direction

"Education has to face the fact that the world has changed, searching is part of our lives, we go to Google, and that is the world we have to prepare our students for," said Professor Paul Leng, head of the e-learning department of computer science at the University of Liverpool.

Last week IWR was invited into a round table discussion on the future of e-learning.  As ever with these discussions, you need to go away and think about what you've just heard before you can make any judgements.  A wide range of areas were covered including digital rights management, copyright and the failings of the current New Labour government (as you can imagine the latter could have gone on all day).

But the core discussions about information, search and learning were by far the most interesting. Professor Leng's comments ring true, but at what cost, do we leave publishing and books on the shelves to waste away?

That's another discussion, but this scribe left the forum feeling that we have hardly touched the tip of the e-learning iceberg yet.  So far the number of highly successful implementations are few. "People come to e-learning for the wrong reasons, they are driven by the technology," said Russell Beale, a research lecturer from the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Leng agreed, adding that IT does dumb down students, but in doing so the technology is replacing skills that are no longer needed. This is surely the ultimate thumbs up for search, humans are de-skilling because search works.

Search may find information, but it doesn't produce it, and we came away from the session realising that for publishers, online information providers and information professionals the role is changing, but no less important. The role has to change, because the way that students, who then become workers, find information has changed, as Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group explained. "You used used to go to the library and you quoted from the books there. Uni lecturers knew where the information you used came from. The books in the library were bought by the university, ergo they were a reliable data source."  That entire model is now almost entirely defunct.

But the term "reliable data source" will never go away, students and lecturers will always need these, and its for information professionals and providers to look at e-learning and student behaviour to ensure their future.

Enterprise 2.0 - SLATES for in-house collaboration

Enterprise 2.0 is the latest buzzphrase. It lifted off in April with the publication of the MITSloan Management Review (payment needed) by Andrew P McAfee. It's Web 2.0 behind the firewall. To define the essential components, McAfee coined the acronym SLATES: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and  Signals.

For a start SLATES is inclusive. It enables employees to create a body of knowledge, a sliver at a time, for fellow employees. It can be tacked on to existing systems, it's not a replacement for them. It's searchable Google-fashion: everything is completely indexed and links help raise the importance of the pointed-to information.

Anyone who alights on a page they like can tag it with one-word reminders of why it's useful. Tagging helps anyone find pages by commonly-used key-words, whether they appear in the body or not.

Extensions, in this context, are "if you like this then, by extension, you'll like that", the sort of things that Amazon and StumbleUpon do. And Signalling is the use of RSS to tip you off when something new of interest to you appears.

McAfee's SLATES acronym provides a handy checklist for anyone thinking of exploring this space.

Ask yourself, how restricting is your intranet? Can you only find stuff according to
someone's idea of what should be in the index? I won't even ask if it's
easily navigated. What about the content? Is it centrally-determined
and management led? How about being tipped off if anything of interest
changes? Maybe you have good answers to all those questions. My guess
is you probably haven't.

Time for a change?

Popular science and Ebay power

The latest issue of IWR features a bevvy of stories from the scientific, technical and medical (STM) sector.  We don't make any apologies for the STM dominance in this edition because this has been an exceptional month .

Browse through the news pages when it arrives on Monday and you'll see news on Author ID, Elsevier experimenting with new publishing models, OUP revealing the figures of its open access programme, the RCUK statement and information professionals concerned about the number of journals launched by Nature Publishing Group. And now the latest news that Cambridge University Press has acquired CABI's journal range.

Scientific publishers, like the authors and readers are at the cutting edge of new developments, but with today's news that Ebay is developing tool to enable bloggers to build links between niche communities they write for and products for sale shows there are new issues on the horizon for the information sector. The Financial Times reports that Ebay is developing the technology that will enable bloggers to shape a marketplace.  The story adds that MeCommerce, an existing service of the same model, links book shop Barnes & Noble to bloggers. 

With information professionals and members of the online information community already keen bloggers, these developments could be a major opportunity, creating new revenue streams for quality information, collections and services and ultimately driving up the web awareness of quality online information.

Just where is education and e-learning going?

IWR is rolling its sleeves tomorrow for a a heated debate on the Future of e-learning. The round table debate has been organised by IWR's parent company VNU and includes a stellar cast of experts. Attendees include the Open Rights Group, Tata Interactive Systems, De Montford University, search engine providers and government agencies, so its likely to be interesting with debate swinging from copyright, to outsourcing and search.

Looking into the issue in preparation, I can't help but wonder if the issue is not so much about the future of e-learning, as the future of learning? Information professionals have seen their roles and departments changed out of all recognition by the web. The whole information landscape is now dominated by online, whether its publishers like OUP and Macmillan investing in online, or Amazon's control of book sales. Add to that the fact that the commercial world is radically different because of the internet, isn't it time education altered to face the internet?

I'm looking forward to hearing about how relevant exams are and how to radically change the way students learn.