Enterprise search wars

IBM has sought to cement its position as a leader in the enterprise search space with a new version of its flagship OmniFind product launched last week. Features in there which might appeal to large organisations include the ability to crawl Lotus’ new social networking and collaboration tools which were launched at the last Lotusphere event. Analysts rightly believe that Lotus Quickr, Connections, and other similar applications will increasingly be the places where vitally important information resides in the organisation, so it’s a positive that Big Blue has acknowledged this.

There’s also stuff in there for multi-language support and a new Top Results Analysis feature which promises to display results graphically, so that users can drill down into particular areas as they see fit. This kind of thing isn’t new of course, but seems to be getting increasingly popular for discovery, rather than search, activities. The only barrier to this kind of technology could be that many users still can’t unlock a lot of value from it. More training please.

But then, what you believe is really important in enterprise search always depends on which search vendors you talk to. Speak to Google, Sinequa, Exalead and the other (relatively) young pups on the enterprise search trail and they’ll say the days of complex, costly, unwieldy search implementations is over. They’ll say that the whole consumerisation of IT trend is nowhere more obvious than in search, with worker bees and more importantly chief execs now so familiar with web search that they want the same easy-to-use functionality brought to bear on corporate data.

And then you go to IBM, whose programme director for search and content discovery, Aaron Brown, told me that actually customers don’t want this, they want to drive better use of information, and this goes so much deeper than search. And then you go to Fast, whose chief executive John Lervik once told me that firms could eventually have dedicated chief search officers to help manage the complexity of their environments. Mention this vision to a Google and you’ll probably get an answer along the lines of “you won’t need a chief search officer with our technology”. Which is true, but then again there isn’t such a thing as a typical organisation.

Left brains are useful, but...

Jill Bolte Taylor gave a most moving 19-minute presentation at the recent TED conference. It was all about the brain and about how we choose to use it. I defy you not to be gripped by her performance.

She's a neuroanatomist by profession. Her brother is schizophrenic. And she had her very own stroke which slowly shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. This experience gave her a profound and intimate insight to the workings of the brain.

We all know that the two sides of the brain do different things. People often declare themselves as 'left-brained' or 'right-brained'. Some people are adept at switching from one side to the other. Others struggle.

The right side is the bit that deals with 'now', with movement, with senses, with grabbing, in parallel, everything that's going on at the moment.

The left side is serial in nature and deals with past memories and future plans. It extracts, from the messages being passed from the right brain, those which it feels might come in handy or need a reaction.

When Ms Taylor had a stroke in the left side of her brain, she was able to keep functioning, after a fashion. But, over the course of a few hours, she lost just about everything. She reached a point where she literally curled up to die.

Throughout this process, the left brain flashed into life spasmodically, enabling her to seek help. It also meant that she could store memories of the process she was going through.

When her left brain was dormant, she found herself stress-free, memory-free, baggage-free and euphoric. She felt at one with the universe.  By contrast, she describes the left brain as where we are individual, isolated, and separate from others.

She says much more during her talk and she believes that we can learn from her insights to make the world a better place. I'll not steal her punchlines. But she has shone a torch into the darkness of my rather left-brained computer-centric life. And explained why my happiness increases the further away from computing I get.

A slowly melting glacier

The melting glacier that is open access seems to be thawing a little, according to a research report released last week. Writes Peter Williams

SURF is a Dutch-based collaborative organisation for higher education institutions and research institutes aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. Its SURFfoundation has examined the copyright policies of traditional academic publishers. A group of forty seven traditional publishers, who do not currently allow Open Access, were assessed. The result: publishers are increasingly interested in allowing the depositing of articles into a publicly accessible repository.

The study asked publishers if they supported principles formulated by SURFfoundation and JISC, regarding publishing in traditional journals. The conclusion was that a growing number of traditional publishers support some, if not all, of the current open access repository principles. Furthermore, many of these publishers were said to be looking into changing their current policies to encourage an environment of sharing academic materials.

These principles attempt to clarify and balance the relationship between the rights of authors and publishers, to enable a wider access to scholarly literature, which in turn would make journals compliant with a growing number of funder requirements.

The main characteristics of the principles are that authors retains copyright of their work, while granting the publisher the required rights to publish the work, and that authors are entitled to freely deposit their work in a research repository with an embargo before public release, for a maximum of six months.

One third of the publishers in the study have developed a repository policy which is compatible with these principles and, the study reports, a similar proportion of publishers currently use a licence to publish instead of copyright transfer. In addition to having drafted principles, JISC and the SURFfoundation have also created a model Licence to Publish.

This initiative is an interesting attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional publishers and the Open Access movement. How successful it will be remains to be seen.

Government data woes continue

As if it couldn’t get any worse, the government has suffered another data protection PR disaster. Hang on, I’m sure we’ve said that before. Anyway, a firm called Garlik has just announced new evidence that most major government departments are still failing to implement data protection policies. Garlik has been around for a year or so now and specialises in services which allow customers see how much personal information about them is out there on the world wide web, and who has access to it. So you can see why they started this project.

After making 14 Freedom of Information requests, the firm found that HM Revenue and Customs, Ministry of Defence, and the Department of Health, among others, all came up short in certain areas. These include not having any data correction policies or funds to correct erroneous data, and possibly the most damming – “never having been subject to an independent audit in order to prove compliance with the Data Protection Act” (DPA).

Now the news might not surprise most people, which in itself is a pretty damming indictment on the government’s approach to data security, but it doesn’t actually prove any wilful transgression of the Data Protection Act. It is, though, yet another indication of the worryingly little heed government departments seem to pay to the value of personal information. The national ID register and NHS database projects look distinctly flaky when one considers the departments responsible have no policies around data correction.

When data errors occur, as Garlik rightly says they doubtless will, how can they be identified and corrected if there aren’t even any funds allocated to do this? Interestingly I was contacted a few weeks ago by a concerned citizen who'd made it his life's work – or at least a passionate hobby – to investigate the government’s record on data protection. He submitted the same FoI requests as Garlik and assimilated a significant amount of evidence amounting to the same findings. It’s all down to people and policies, training and institutional culture – no quick technology fixes here.

Garlik’s Ilube also told me people are generally more concerned about the fact that government might hold erroneous data on them than the fact that it might go missing, but I’m not so sure. The issue of data security has plagued the government in recent months and is surely more emotive than this new revelation. After all, having your name misspelled on your patient records is a slightly different proposition to having your personal details nicked from a government laptop.

HP's new labs address information issues

Last night (UK time) Hewlett Packard announced its new Labs structure. By focusing on five areas, it hopes it will become more effective. The five areas are: information explosion; dynamic cloud services; content transformation; intelligent infrastructure; and sustainability. All are jolly important and all reflect today's hot issues for the company.

Of the 23 labs in total, the biggest ones will be in Palo Alto, then Bristol and the remainder strung out around the world. Prith Bannerjee, the director in charge, talked of "twenty to thirty big bets, rather than the 120 to 150 of the past."

It would be interesting to know how many of Hewlett Packard's past successes came about as the result of serendipity rather than focused research. Bannerjee says that the approach of the past was appropriate for its time. I remember some of the garage startup style tinkering that used to take place. It often led to interesting software products, but none of them set the world on fire. So perhaps he's right.

Bristol has landed semantic web research. China is looking into searching visual content. Cloud services are personalised to where you are and what you're using. You'd expect more research into digitisation and digital to analog (pictures on buses for example). And you'd be right. Intelligent infrastructure is all about secure networks for banks, governments and the like. And sustainability is about ways of moving to a low carbon economy.

The new labs will work closely with the outside world, with venture capitalists,  entrepreneurs-in-residence and university students. You can take a look at some of what's going on at the IdeaLab website. HP Labs will seed HP's own business with teams, creating more of a start-up environment for new initiatives.

Apparently, although the labs are highly focused, they will still allow blue sky research within them. A third of the work will be applied research, a third will be advanced product development and a third will be blue sky.

This is the logo:

It bothers me that 'HP' and 'Labs' are being boxed in by those brackets. Could that be a subliminal message? Let's hope not.

Information professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere

An assistant librarian at a commercial law firm in Edinburgh, Jennie Findlay started
blogging to release her inner geek, never imagining anyone would ever stumble across it

Q Where is your blog?
A It’s at http://jennielaw.blogspot.com. I’ve also been invited to take part in a collaborative international law librarian blog initiative at http://lawlibrarians.wordpress.com

Q What’s your blog like?
A I’m interested in Web 2.0 technologies and how they work (or don’t) for libraries, particularly commercial libraries. I also look at developments in Scots law, either legal or technical. I get particularly irritated when organisations lump all parts of the
UK together; it makes finding out whether things apply to my jurisdiction hard work.
I am cautious about opinions that might be too controversial, as my posts may be linked to or reflect on my employer. I often post light-hearted stuff rather than in-depth
commentary on certain topics.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A I’ve had a personal blog for almost three years, but started my work-related one in July 2007.

Q What was it that started you blogging?
A Well, everybody else was doing it, so I thought I’d join in! I started my work blog
mainly because I wanted to discuss library, technology and legal topics. I didn’t really think anyone would ever even find my blog, and that it would just be a personal reminder of things I‘d found interesting, to refer back to when needed. It hasn’t turned out that way, though.

Q Which bloggers do you watch, link to and why?
A James Mullan. As another commercial law firm librarian he tends to post the info most directly relevant to me and my work. The Lo-Fi Librarian posts useful technical tools, and lists them in a handy weekly roundup. I also read a lot of everyday librarian blogs, just to get an idea of what people are getting up to in other sectors.

Q Do you comment on other blogs?
A I comment if I feel I can add something useful to a discussion, and if it hasn’t already been said, which in practice means that I don’t comment very frequently. I think that commenting on blogs is important, as it’s often the only feedback and encouragement that a blogger gets.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?
A I’ve learned huge amounts from blog-hopping, and have been able to assess whether various products or ideas would enhance our library service. By being more informed about what it is possible to do with the tools out there; I can give a better response to the users of the library service, and hopefully take some shortcuts at times. And not being bamboozled by the technical stuff is also a bonus.

Q What do you personally get out of it for your career?
A I’m not hugely career-focused, so it’s not really been about getting anything out of it for my career. I’ve just been enjoying getting to know lots of interesting people, learning lots of new things, feeling like I’m involved in something useful and exciting, and seeing where things develop.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of blogging?
A I’ve learned about lots of useful sites and tools, kept up to date with all the news that’s relevant to me and my firm, and I’m able to put names to faces at conferences. I was also asked to write for a collaborative blog about libraries and library bloggers around the world, http://infobib.de/blog/features/libworld/, but had to turn the offer down as I don’t know enough about Scottish library bloggers.

Q Which blogs do you read for fun?
A Nothing To Do With Arbroath at http://arbroath.blogspot.com covers the more bizarre news stories out there. Boing Boing, www.boingboing.net, because it covers so many random topics. Popular Science, http://popsci.typepad.com/popsci, to satisfy my inner science geek. And finally, the Hedgehog Librarian, http://hedgehoglibrarian.
blogspot.com, and her yarn-happy life and work in a public library in the depths of Wisconsin.

What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
Most of them; we librarians are a reputable lot, don’t you know?
But mainly:
James Mullan
http://ligissues.blogspot.com/
Binary Law
www.binarylaw.co.uk
The Lo-Fi Librarian
www.lo-fi-librarian.co.uk
IWR
http://blog.iwr.co.uk
Scott Vine
www.informationoverlord.co.uk

Questions, questions, questions

As an IWR reader you will probably have some strong opinions on Intellectual Property (IP) law and how to bring it in line with modernity.

I see that over at the British Library (BL) website they are currently running a questionnaire on copyright issues. I assume that this is a part of their involvement in the Intellectual Property (IP) debate following on from the Gowers review and the BL’s involvement in the next step of the ongoing copyright consultation process.

It’s a straight-forward, five minute affair. There are a few questions on fair dealing and IP use as well as the opportunity to add your own comments and your understanding of the terminologies. The BL are encouraging any UK resident to enter; so worth circulating among any interested (and eligible) colleagues and peers.

The questionnaire can be found at www.bl.uk/ip so get on board and have your say. I’d imagine that any results the BL garner from the questionnaire results will be well considered in the final consultation report.