Online Information Conference

Imagine a world where all the key information you could ever need could be available on your desktop.  Not delivered as pages of hits from a Google search, but delivered in a well structured format that you can use directly in any application you choose. 

Imagine being able to query every public database on the planet using a common language - filtering out the noise to give you precisely what you need.

Imagine that every knowledgebase in the world is fully interlinked allowing knowledge from many sources to be combined automatically to meet your needs.

STOP imagining!  these are the goals of the Semantic Web revolution and they are being delivered NOW in an organisation near you.

Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are leading the Semantic Web revolution pioneered by Sir Tim Berners Lee - also the inventor of the original World Wide Web. 

These two radical thinkers - thought leaders in the field - will give the opening keynote for the Online Information Conference 2009.  With their engaging and lively approach they will reveal the excitement and power of this radical new approach.  The rapid semantic web developments of 2009 have been built on the success of the Social Web - which has brought together communities of information scientists all with a passion for bringing structure, openness and value to the vast information stores now being published on the web.  The result is the Semantic Web and the Open Linked Data Movement.  So what does it mean for YOU?

Wendy and Nigel will explain what's happening. They'll show case the latest thinking.  And most importantly they'll point to real world applications operating NOW across academia, government and business.

So who will be the winners and losers?  Who will win the battles for standards?  How can your organisation prosper as the web truly comes of age?

We are transitioning from a Web of pages to a Web of objects. In this Web of objects its even more important to understand the need behind the user query, as people are interested in solving a task and not really in posing a sequence of queries. This trend will change current search engines, personalizing ranking and the user interface to the target task. In this talk we will hint how this can be done, and the challenges ahead, as well as the crucial role that the Web 2.0 may play in this future.

Search engine technology was not designed to solve the challenges it is up against today: huge number of users and increasingly complex documents. It is one of the oldest software technologies we use nowadays.

For users, search process has shifted from being a service (provided by librarians) to a self-service, similar to ATMs. This generates frustration for users and pressure on search engines to improve performance and user-friendliness.

Semantics can help solve this problem. However, so far, results are falling short of expectations.

Current natural language technologies provide one of the key ingredients to integrate search and semantics:  the ability to extract content from text (text analytics).

Bitext is applying this approach to real-life projects in areas like citizen services and opinion analysis.

Learning points:

Search engines are not delivering at the level that users demand. Semantics can help search engines deliver the results users need

Semantics is a complex discipline in which language knowledge and world knowledge converge. It is seen as a holy grail for the search problem

Semantic search requires the compilation of costly resources, intense in manual work and hard to reuse (ontology population, text tagging). Language technologies (text analytics) are one of the key technologies that can automate these tasks

"Semantic" is an popular adjective whose meaning, ironically, is tough to pin down. Indeed, it has at least two distinct meanings in the context of search. Regardless, when people ask for semantic search, what they usually need is a solution that fosters a conversation between humans and data through content enrichment, intelligent query processing, and exploratory search, particularly using techniques like faceted search. The human-computer information retrieval (HCIR) approach not only maximizes the effectiveness of indexing and search algorithms, but also incents people and organizations to make high-return investments. This talk will introduce HCIR and demonstrate its successful implementation.

Learning points:

Understand the difference between the "semantic web" and "semantic technology".

Learn about conversational and exploratory approaches to support users' information seeking needs.

Learn when to rely on clever algorithms and when (and how) to ask users to help the system help them.

Ian McNairn will talk in depth about how social networking in general and microblogging in particular has caught the imagination of users at all levels in IBM.  He will touch on business imperatives, the tools, the people and the culture change, and what in particular is so great about microblogging.  At the same time he will highlight how this can be a 'Pandora's box' when not approached with the correct understanding.

In particular he will dwell on the reality of how people work in the organisation and the ways in which these Web 2.0 inspired technological advances need to be woven into a realistic working framework.

More specifically you will learn:

• How, and why, IBM has adopted particular 'horses for specific courses'
• How you can get sceptics to try out the new technologies
• What you need to wrap around microblogging in order to make it contextual, integrated and a critical part of your organisation's fabric

Social technologies provide an opportunity for us to connect and communicate better with one another, whether in the workplace or in our private lives.

But not everyone gets it! If you have part of your organisation communicating and collaborating via social technologies, and the other part still using web 1.0 principles, then how can these parts of your organisation interact and work together effectively?

Before adopting social technologies into an organisation you need to first understand and develop a roadmap how to integrate it into your existing infrastructure -not just the tools, but also the "change in mindset" required by the people to adopt a new way of working.

David Christopher and Frank Bradley will talk about how their adoption programme is winning over the hearts and minds of Oracle's employees, the vision they are achieving:

"To create a socially connected Oracle where collaborative working across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges."

...And how this is improving the overall working methods of the organisation whilst significantly reducing internal email traffic (a bi-product of the adoption programme).

More specificially you will learn:

• How Oracle EMEA's Roadmap to Social Adoption is changing the way its employees connect, colaborate and innovate
• How to use the collective intelligence of your employees to identify and overcome the change barriers to social technologies
• How to develop a scalable adoption programme for your own business
• That social technologies is about People...

This presentation will provide an expert view of the latest information industry trends and growth, based on Outsell, Inc's proprietary research covering over 7,000 firms and original research among advertisers, enterprise information buyers, and end-users in order to follow the money and track spending trends. 

It will include Outsell's latest market size, share and growth forecasts for the information industry overall and 12 segments (named below*). Conference attendees can use these forecasts to benchmark their own organizations' performance.  These forecasts provide context for a discussion of the deeper disruption in the information industry which began around 1998 as internet use began to gain momentum.

The issues industry leaders have been focusing on to build business around this new technology remain present today and our response must now be accelerated given the overriding economic context. In other words, we must carry on boldly but quickly in the face of another economic downturn No Guts, No Glory.   Recessions exacerbate poor performance and accelerate land-grabs for growth and market share in the firms doing well. They also demand prudent risk-taking.  We recommend tending to five key themes:  Content, Platform & Experience, Business Model Focus & Execution, Social Media/Community, Strategic Marketing & Product Marketing, Operational Execution  Organizations need to be in a position to attract increased spending that will come when the recession ends and the upturn begins.

The presentation will give Outsell's latest thinking about what steps (essential actions) to take in order to be in the catbird seat, and what the end of the recession might look like for the information industry.   Outsell is the only research and advisory firm focused on the publishing, information, and education industries and is thus uniquely positioned to comment on the state of the industry. 

* The 12 information industry segments Outsell covers are: B2B Trade Publishing; Company Information; Credit & Financial Information; Education & Training; HR Information; Legal, Tax & Regulatory; Market Research, Reports & Services; IT & Telecom Research, Reports & Services; News Providers & Publishers; Scientific, Technical & Medical; Search, Aggregation & Syndication; and Yellow Pages & Directories.

As part of a major research project in 2008 that looked at how (if at all) knowledge transfer occurred between business and the museums, libraries and archives in London, MLA London and Sparknow identified that many business people have an uncomfortable relationship with the information that they need to use in their professional lives. In particular, they are concerned that the information they are using is of poor quality, or that they are using it in inappropriate ways.  At the same time, some information professionals find that they are being slowly edged out of a business setting when, for example, document delivery services are outsourced, or research departments are closed and staff are expected to become more self-reliant in their information needs.   This year, MLA London and Sparknow have set out to mediate these concerns by attempting to reposition the librarian or information manager as a friendly guide for business people overwhelmed with information. One of the four initiatives currently underway is capacity building for a cadre of information professionals, who are being trained to deliver a specially designed training course for business people, helping them to navigate the various ways of finding and using information for business purposes.  The session will deliver a frank assessment of how this initiative has been received. It will give an insight into how librarians can reshape their offer to meet changing business needs through a case study with a librarian, and will employ workshop techniques to help participants think about the lessons in relation to their own work.

This presentation will look at the various options a business intelligence professional has for using a proper mix of tools and services in order to support organisational decision making and to generate value.

The benefits which Web 2.0 services can provide to organisations are now becoming widely understood. A range of Web 2.0 technologies including blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, social sharing services, social networking, etc. are available which can help organisations achieve their organisational goals and support members of the organisation in their professional activities.

In order to build on the initial successes there is a need for further advocacy work, but also learning from initial experimentation. There will also be a need to recognise that use of Social Web services and the associated culture of openness, sharing and risk-taking does not reflect everyone's preferred style of working.

Since many of the popular Web 2.0 services are intended for use by individuals, rather than organisations there will be a variety of risks to the organisation in use of such tools which may not necessarily be fully appreciated by the individual users. Such risks will include issues related to the sustainability and reliability of such services together with questions about the ability to migrate not only data but also comments, communities, access rights, etc. In addition to the risks associated with the services themselves, there are also the risks to the host organisation related to the user of the service. What if inappropriate language is used on a blog, for example? But even if the individual does make use of such Web 2.0 technologies in an appropriate way or if editorial processes are deployed there are still the questions as to what might happen if the individual leaves the organisation, is sick for an extended period or, indeed, dies. In such circumstances will resources which may be regarded as organisational intellectual assets, be lost? Will unmaintained blogs become full of spam? And what if an employee is sacked and chose to delete data and accounts which had been created for work purposes?

This talk will explore these issues and describe a risks and opportunities framework which is being developed to assist in the identification of possible risks, and strategies for managing such risks. This framework recognises that an avoidance of risks can lead to a failure to exploit opportunities and so does not seek to avoid use of externally hosted Web 2.0 services entirely.

The talk will be based on a previously published paper on "Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends" and related work in this area.

When humans make decisions about where and how they communicate, they are now faced with an array of choices: should they communicate face-to-face, by email, through a blog, internally within their organisation or in a wider collaborative environment? Faced with so many possibilities and potential risks some organisations have closed their doors to collaborative opportunities banning access to Web 2.0 collaborative networks.  

The Continued Communication research group is a group of 80 international co-researchers, with cross-disciplinary expertise from the public and private sectors, undertaking research that is developing outputs that can be used in practice. The group has developed a toolkit to help individuals and organisations actively engage with the possibilities of collaboration tools and maximise the potential of dialogues. The toolkit includes communication policies, risk policies and checklists for Web 2.0 tools, that help tailor the right policies for your organisation. They highlight to senior managers and information professionals the consequences of their communication choices.  

This paper will give practical tips on establishing Web 2.0 policies, procedures and training within different organisational environments. To shut an organisation's doors to the potential of collaborative technologies can rarely be justifiable. This paper will give information management professionals and senior managers the confidence to engage with the right collaboration tools for their organisation.

Learning points: 

1. Online communities within the enterprise usually fail if the right tools for a particular purpose are not properly scoped and selected.  The different possibilities and pitfalls of collaborative tools are not always well understood. It is important to know the capabilities and limitations of the tools you select and their potential impact in your organisational environment. How will you manage your collaborations to empower individuals or maintain management structures or engender change? 
  
2. Successful projects are those that set the expectations of the user group realistically and provide the right policy, guidance and support frameworks. Collaboration is about providing the right structure and support to obtain a comfortable environment for working and communicating. You must provide training and support, ensuring that key participants are not disengaged. 

3. We live in a rapidly changing world and those organisations that survive and thrive are the ones that constantly look for innovation and opportunities  Set concrete objectives that the group can achieve as milestones but in addition expect the unexpected and foster innovation.  This presentation will provide some examples of innovations in collaborative arenas. The examples will be taken from the public and private sectors.

The proliferation of Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and other 2.0 technologies is nothing short than astonishing. They seemingly spring up overnight, demanding our attention and immediate adoption. Individuals can meet this ultimatum for agility, libraries usually cannot. Information professionals need to evaluate the technologies and services in light of their organizations' goals, expectations, and culture. What is actually of value to our users? We need to guard against adopting and promoting technologies just because they are new, shiny, and cool. What problem will these technologies solve? Or are we tempted to embrace a technology looking for a problem to solve? Beyond that, how do we convince management to allow us to implement these technologies? Getting buy-in from IT is far from a trivial concern, since those professionals worry about losing control and about security.

This session will give some practical tips about evaluating, recommending, and justifying 2.0 tools in library settings.

Learning points:

Explain practical applications for 2.0 technologies

Learn techniques to refute objections to implementation of 2.0 technologies

Present tips for evaluation, recommending, justifying new technologies

All challenges come with opportunities. In a tight economy, one of our biggest challenges is to do even more with even less. This session looks at ways that we can address reduced resources while still providing added value to our organisation. Mary Ellen will look at cost-effective searching - online strategies and practices for getting the most for your search dollar, how to avoid false economy, some short-term fixes as well as long-term strategies for being cost-effective, and the critical distinction between "Wow, that sounds great" and "Wow, we need that". She will also address techniques that info pros can use to make themselves recession-proof.

Learning points:

Cost-effective searching, both on the web and the value-added services

How to balance short-term fixes and long-term solutions

How info pros can make themselves recession-proof

In uncertain times, libraries are a frequent target for finance managers seeking to make what they see as soft cuts that are perceived to deliver budget savings with minimal impact on the operation of business or detrimental impact on community.  There is business impact as a result of library closures and reductions in service which may not be apparent to those who sole interest or responsibility is for financial issues.  Library and information professionals must therefore demonstrate their true value, but there is little take-up of available metrics, certainly not to the extent that corporate finance managers are known to be routinely asking for reports based on this professions standard metrics.  A number of models have been proposed over the years with greater or lesser success.  Innovative practices in LIS / KIM can be as much about saving nugatory expenditure (corporate reputation monitoring and management, dealing with false stories circulated for malicious intent, or the consequences of infringing regulation and legislation on intellectual property, freedom of information and similar issues).  At and beyond the outer edges of the traditional LIS universe, some information professionals are already working in areas not traditionally associated with them.  In my own sector of knowledge, the UK public sector, this already includes information assurance and information security, whilst longer standing LIS/KIM skills such as taxonomy management are being applied to provide solutions to new problems.  Here practitioners meet professionals in related disciplines who are becoming aware of the relevance of modern LIS professionals who hold clues to problem resolution in those other disciplines.  One of my themes in my CILIP Presidential year has been how the profession deals with what has been referred to as an insurmountable opportunity  - that is, the apparently unbounded field within which librarians could apply their professional skills should they wish to step beyond their comfort zone.  We have seen this issue manifested in new areas of activity where librarians are encountered, in the development of national level bodies where librarians and information managers work alongside leaders of IT and business change (such as the Knowledge Council) and in the number of national strategic initiatives that are clearly missing the input of our profession to make sense of their findings. The role of LIS professionals has evolved : actual numbers have reduced but levels of influence and seniority are steady or even rising.  But the profession is exposed if its senior influencers cannot call on competent professional colleagues to deliver strategies in practical terms.   There is a role for professionals and their professional bodies; there is a role for further research and user case studies; and there is a future role exploring the overlap and possible convergence of skills in the LIS / KIM field and adjacent professions.    The solution may be to improve demonstration of LIS / KIM professional value in terms that organisations understand.  It may include showing the links across the sector that LIS professionals understand but are not obvious to finance managers (how exactly does the risk strategist link to the loans clerk in the corporate library or records centre?); expressing business value in terms of savings achieved and unproductive expenditure avoided; and showing the transferability of wide application of LIS skills to other areas of current business need.

Unlock the value that information can bring to your organisation.

• Harnessing technology as a key way to amplify your role and status
• Using information as a resource to increase your organisation's ability to compete
• Increasing your visibility - projects to support your business's strategy
• Building the business case - how to really add value to other business units and demonstrate you are more than a cost centre

The Semantic Technologies for Enterprises (STE) research landscape is characterized by a broad variety of issues and approaches ranging over many fields of application. From storage to user interfaces over editing, searching, retrieval and management methods, context processing, web services, social computing, etc. the list is long and gives the idea of how STE aim at a deep conceptual change in the way software technologies will be produced. On the one hand such technologies has been capable of capture the attention of the big industrial public, on the other hand the process of adoption and integration of ST in the enterprise is still a merciless work. Adopters have to face a new technology perspective and mostly speak a different language from the suppliers. Suppliers have to find out vertical markets fitting their applications and promote their technologies. Moreover, suppliers have to make clear what functionalities their products offer and what market needs they cover. This is not a trivial task, especially if we consider that semantic web has been seen for several years as a promising technology and has still to show his potential.  In the EU funded project Value-IT (http://www.value-it.eu) investigated STEs under the perspective of their application in the enterprise context in the short and middle term. The authors give an overview of present semantic technology research, tools and applications with a particular accent on the level of maturity for commercialization and the possible vertical area of application. Moreover, the research is focused on the adoption of STE in the enterprise.  The presentation points out: - state of the art of STE - maturity of technology under the pragmatic perspective of the adoption in the real economy (what's already there, what is going to come ON THE MARKET in the next 5 years) - the value chain under which the ST brings to value-how to classify the companies with respect to technologies in the value chain The presentation shows how a wide variety of STE products (e.g. light weight ontology based applications) are already there for direct adoption and how the market is going to develop with mergers, dedicated solutions and complete semantic platforms. 

Getting creative with user generated content.  The current evolution of the web is largely being driven by three key components: the Interactive Web, the Semantic Web and the commoditization of functionality available through Cloud APIs. We see features of each of these components in more and more Web sites but rarely in an integrated way. The value of the Semantic Web is understood by many online publishers, striving to add understanding to their internally generated content. Unfortunately, most users are not well equipped to provide semantically relevant metadata to any large degree. Certainly, a community will not consistently supply metadata about the content they have contributed. The field of automated semantic enrichment provides an opportunity to overcome this limitation and to manage the increasing volume of content on the Web. In this talk we explore the benefits of applying semantic analysis in connecting content and people to resources available on the web, such as Google Maps, Salesforce.com, etc. How by extracting known quantities, like geographic locations, from a users contributions we can enrich that content with services that require specific inputs, like a mapping tool. By semantically enriching interactive, user generated content site designers can confidently take advantage of the huge spectrum of Cloud functionalities available on the web.  Chris bio (added by Lorna): A Computational Mathematics graduate of University Of Sussex, Chris has quickly become of one Nstein most influential technologists. A specialist in online distribution and digital asset management, he has repeatedly illustrated the power of Text Mining in everything from Web Content Management to Twitter.  His technological prowess has helped Nstein's customers including Independant News & media and DC Thomson, maximise their online potential.     

Publishers and information providers are in danger of developing a blind spot to one of the key issues currently inhibiting the growth of online information services: identity management. In this paper I will examine the authentication and identity management environment which exists within the information industry, and will highlight issues which affect the use of online services. I'll be looking at how this affects personalisation, usage metrics and usability. I will examine how critical identity issues are within the software as a service model, how this affects the semantic web and is related to issues of provenance, trust and authenticity. Identity management plays a key role in the Web 2.0 world, and I will highlight how web 2.0 tools need to step up to the privacy and security challenges raised by the new software models of the API driven web. On the technical side, I will review the range of identity management and authentication techniques and technologies, highlight some new initiatives, and show the strengths and weakness of current approaches. I will also take the opportunity to look at lessons that can be learned from other markets and other sectors.

This very practical and fun session will show you how to use Twitter. 
Get the latest top tips for effective tweets, legal issues to be aware of and understanding Twitter etiquette.

The development of conversational web services such as Twitter provide an incredible opportunity for the public sector to each out and engage with citizens, organisations and community groups. Any such foray into the world of social networks and web 2.0 must, however, be properly thought through and considered. Looking at various examples of good and bad use of Twitter and other related tools, the session will leave attendees enthused about bringing their organisation into the Twittersphere.

The paper describes a highly innovative and exciting nation-wide project which sought to obtain a comprehensive and robust understanding of e-book use in the scholarly environment by offering a number of course text e-books to the UK university community at no cost to them and then watching and describing what happened.

It was a pebble in the pond experiment. The watching and describing was undertaken through an evidence-based methodology called deep log analysis, which makes sense of how people behave in the virtual environment. The specific aim of the deep log study highlighted here was to provide an evidence-based assessment of the use and information seeking behaviour associated with the 26 higher education course text e-books which were provided freely by JISC to 127 UK universities during a 14 month period (2007 to 2009) on the MyiLibrary platform.

To provide the essential context and comparison more than 10,000 MyiLibrary e-books used by the participating 127 universities but not provided as part of the experiment were also evaluated. So in effect this paper provides an analysis of the use of 10,026 e-books by tens of thousands of users at 127 universities, an enormous evidence base which can be used by the information community and publishers to efficiently manage the next digital transition, that of the book. This is particularly important as what we know about the scholarly digital environment is largely derived from e-journal studies, and as we shall learn there are considerable differences 

The study probably constitutes the largest and most robust evaluation of e-book use and information seeking behaviour ever conducted. During the period study nearly 7 million page views and over a half a million user sessions or visits were made by e-book users, an astonishing volume of use for a relatively new medium. Furthermore, the study provides unique and deep insights that can only be furnished by deep log analysis, like the exact time people use an e-book, and how many pages they view in a session. 

On the basis of the massive evidence base amassed the paper will profile and characterize the scholarly e-book user. The fact nobody appears to be reading an e-book online and the great diversity detected in regard to subject, title and institutions will be the major topics of discussion.

In light of current conditions with the global economy, libraries are increasingly transitioning their print book budgets to digital for a more cost-effective way to serve their patrons. This presents publishers with new opportunities to increase e-book revenues globally.  Publishers have many choices for e-book distribution, through multiple aggregators and vendors, under many different models, on various platforms. This presentation will explore those options.  Publishers will walk away with the following key

Learning points: 

1. An understanding of the various models available to them for institutional e-book distribution (perpetual access, subscription, patron-driven, usage-based, print-on-demand, etc.).
2. How to best leverage their various e-book assets (frontlist, backlist) etc. using these models for the highest return.
3. An understanding of how librarians are adopting these various models and trends that are impacting their decisions.

Users want answers to questions. They need facts to support their thesis. They need access to data so they can make discoveries. They do not care if the answers or facts are to be found in e-books or e-journals - and they do want access to original data. Slowly, (too slowly?), publishers and librarians are realising that the distinctions in publication type are legacies from the print era and have no place in an information age. But publishers seemed to have missed out on data, leaving universities and other institutions with the challenge of making it available to a wide audience. In this presentation, Toby Green from OECD will not only reinfornce the arguement that scholarly books and journals should be published in a single, integrated way, but that the underlying data from which the chapters and article were drawn should also be included in the same platform. More than simply making the argument, he will show how OECD has attempted to do this with their new OECD iLibrary system. Toby Green will show how datasets can be managed using the same bibliographic standards and tools used by e-books and e-journals so that librarians can catalogue and index datasets easily, so that users can cite and use datasets using their current reference management tools. He will also show how new data visualization tools are blurring the line between analytical content and raw data presenting challenges not just to publishers and librarians, but also to authors. Is this an e-book or a dataset? Who cares? It's stuff which helps users get answers, find facts and make discoveries.

The presentation will cover:

1) what is currently possible with linked data

2) where is linked data working right now

3) how can your organisation take advantage of linked data today

Semantic web technology offers the means to describe web- and intranet-based resources in a machine-processable way. Making such resources more amenable to machine processing offers ways to unlock the value held in such resources. Semantic web technology is being increasingly applied in the business arena. In this presentation we look at 4 application areas which are in the vanguard of exploitation of semantic technology.: knowledge management, business intelligence, information integration and ontology usage in the health sector, including specific examples from BT and its customers. We also look at recent development in semantic search. We also discuss emerging application areas  for semantic technology, including inter alia service-oriented environments and take a look at the relationship between semantic web and Web 2.0 technologies.    

In early 2009 the author prepared a report for the Intranet Benchmark Forum on the use of SharePoint for enterprise intranets. The report was based on the outcomes of consulting projects undertaken by Intranet Focus Ltd, input from IBF members and the participation of the author in conferences and workshops in the USA and Europe. The paper will be based on report and will set out some critical success factors for enterprise implementations of SharePoint, with a focus on intranet implementation but of more general applicability as well. The author takes a vendor-neutral perspective of the benefits and challenges of adopting SharePoint.   The published paper will include a list of web and other resources on SharePoint that the author has developed for use by Intranet Focus Ltd. clients.

Microsoft SharePoint is a disruptive technology in the world of content management and it has changed the rules of the game. In a SharePoint environment, it's no longer about a few people organizing and overseeing the collection and dissemination of static pieces of information maintained in a central database or document repository; but about dynamic, constantly changing content that anyone with the relevant SharePoint access permissions can contribute to and organize. Furthermore, SharePoint technology makes additional types of content available to users, through functionalities such as wikis, blogs, discussion boards, and lists. SharePoints search engine is intended as the magnifying glass that will reveal the relevant content regardless of where it resides on the system.  Any employee with access to SharePoint can use the tool as his desktop, filing cabinet, team workspace, reference library and window to his world. Since SharePoint essentially restructures the old approach to collecting and organizing enterprise content in centrally maintained repositories and provides new Web 2.0 tools for sharing knowledge, information professionals and content managers have no alternative but to rethink knowledge management processes. In a SharePoint environment, the entire process becomes much more spontaneous and user-driven. Content managers need to become facilitators and enablers; facilitating the process by thoughtful design of SharePoint sites, by identifying and implementing best practices, and by acting as SharePoint evangelists, demonstrating the benefits of SharePoint. Indeed, content managers have a vital role to play in enabling colleagues to get to grips with SharePoint, thus supporting the adoption of the tool in the organization. The advent of SharePoint within A.T. Kearney has meant that we have needed to take a new approach to knowledge management and content sharing, moving away from document repositories in e-Rooms to multiple SharePoint sites, wikis, blogs and podcasts. The presenters will share the story so far of implementing SharePoint for content and knowledge sharing within the Procurement & Analytic Solutions unit of A.T. Kearney, including practical tips for those about to embark on a similar venture. The presentation will cover how we got started, what pitfalls we encountered, the lessons learned, what we would do differently next time and what we have accomplished to date. 

When your organisation has most visited university website in the world and has a history dating back to 1167, planning and ensuring your on-line success is critical.  The University of Oxford was the first University in the English-speaking world. For nine centuries people from all walks of life and all parts of the world have looked to Oxford for enlightenment and education and by developing a successful online presence this long tradition can be ensured and built upon. 

During 2008 and 2009 the University of Oxford decided to embark on the deployment of an Enterprise Web Content Management System, across their administrative offices initially.  The university required a solution that would allow them to easily manage a host of online processes and ultimately free up their Web Team and IT resources. Because of the diverse structure of the organisation, the project posed a number of challenges. 

The University had a unique set of challenges ranging from the colossal scale of the project, strict security requisites and diverse technical environments. Catering for users with varied requirements and skill levels, and targeting diverse target audiences would prove pivotal to the success of the project. The development of a user friendly and useful intranet alongside the web initiative would prove vital. Tony Stark was tasked with managing this unique web project, a first of the University of Oxford on such a scale.

Placed in charge of the implementation of up to 60 separate sites within one of the most established Higher Education Systems in the World, Tony brings you insider knowledge of what it takes to roll out a CMS project of this grand scale and importance.

Learning points:

Higher Education in the digital age - Choosing your CMS

CMS roll-out on a large scale project - What you should know tatics / what works /doesn't work

Reaping the reward - One solution across many departments

The world didn't end in 2007 as predicted (by some) and it probably won't end in 2012 (as predicted by Nostradamus). Closer to home, Dennis Lewis' "Doomsday scenario" of 1981 has yet to come to pass and Sutton and van House's "Panda Syndrome", identified in the late nineties, now seems like a lot of hot air. Information scientists and librarians have not yet gone the way of either the brontosaurus or the giant panda, despite the predictions of knowledgeable commentators. It's the paradox of expertise once again.  Wisely, I shan't predict the demise of anything, but I shall illustrate a paradox of another kind: the notion of an information profession.

Today's Next-Generation libraries are forces of innovation and their librarians agents of change. These forward-looking organizations are embracing the information revolution brought about through Web 2.0 technology, are open to collaboration, and are joining the global community at large. These cutting-edge libraries are creating engaging experiences for their patrons by incorporating social functionality into their websites and online catalogs, building mobile products such as iPhone applications and mobile websites, and offering new services which are native to their users such as SMS text reference. Next-Generation libraries are increasingly adopting the principles of Open movements such as Open Source Software, Open Licenses, and Open Data and are sharing with other libraries and a worldwide community. They are taking part in new initiatives such as the Flickr Commons project, lending iPods pre-loaded with audiobooks, and offering downloadable .mp3 library tours. These are the libraries that are creating interactive social media subject guides, chatting with patrons via IM widgets, and enabling patrons to send cataloging records to their cell phones. The Next-Generation library is user-focused, social, open, mobile, and most of all eager to find out what's next and deliver it to their users. This presentation and paper will focus on new library initiatives in the areas of mobile technologies, Open (including OSS, licenses, and Data, etc.), and new social software efforts of libraries who are leading the way in the areas of technological change in the LIS field.

A joint presentation by David Pullinger, COI, and John Sheridan, OPSI  The UK government has implemented semantic web using RDFa for four different information types. 

Although an easy concept, the actual implementations were slower than expected or planned.  This was caused by a number of factors: general ones associated with all new developments, for example organisational buy-in and the need for tools and skills; through to specific ones such as linking different ontologies, developing shared mark-up and identifying controlled vocubularies to use.  We cover these and what has been learned, while describing what has been done to overcome them.  The paper builds on the one presented at last year's conference to report actual delivery and experience as a case study. 

The rationale for implementing semantic web varies across the different information types.  They all share one aspect: that public sector information should be released so that is easy to find, easy to use and easy to re-use.  By structuring information on the Web page itself means that it is easier to find.  If structured with common elements, it is quicker to use because of knowing what to inspect. By placing extractable data into the page itself, machines can extract what is needed for re-use.  In many cases re-use then re-delivers information in a more usable form in services that people already use, so they receive it without having to seek it.  The cycle of find, use and re-use is self-reinforcing. 

We used semantic web for two different motivations.  The London Gazette took something unusable except laboriously to the expert eye and turned it into something machine-processable and usable.  Apart from the more obvious re-uses of roadworks and insolvency notices, the deeper use lies in generating information for government itself.  This comes in the form of lists that were not previously available, for example of all the courts in England, and in how legislation is being used. 

We will demonstrate a tool that displays the use of legislative acts as an example of management information that can modify policy and practice. This will give ideas that lie beyond the user advantages of semantic web.  More often we wanted to use existing lists, for example to describe the location of something that is in a region.  Where is that master list, or controlled vocabulary, of regions to be found?  Most often in legislation, although not often in usable form.  We therefore explored what processes need to be put into place to create a database about controlled vocabularies.  Without it, the danger is that different semantic web implementations use made-up vocabularies and you cannot tie them up at the users interface.  The other reason was to aggregate information that resides in a distributed form, made available on the Web and for which structure is beneficial. 

The first two examples implemented were for job adverts and information about consultations.  We will demonstrate these and discuss the implementation of semantic web by distributed parties and what we learned.       

The Semantic Web / Web of Data / Web 3.0 has been holding out the promise of bringing together data from public, commercial, educational and socially created data sources to deliver a holistic user experience, for many years.  Web 2.0 and the mash-up has given us a tempting glimpse of what may be possible, but it is only now, with the emergence of Linked Open Data and pioneering organisations such as the BBC, Library of Congress, and OPSI exposing their data in this way that we can see practical examples of the benefits of Linked Data in action.

The talk concerns problems of creating and using ontology library services in production use. As a solution,  the Finnish Ontology Library Service ONKI is presented. This system is in pilot use on a national level in Finland. ONKI contributes to previous research on ontology libraries in many ways:

First, mashup and web service support with various tools is provided for cost-efficient utilization of ontologies in indexing and search applications. Second, services covering the different phases of the ontology life cycle are provided. Third, the services are provided and used in real world applications on a national scale. Fourth, the ontology framework is being developed by a collaborative effort by organizations representing different application domains, such as health, culture, and business. At the moment, ONKI is used in an open  Living Lab test enviroment. It has published some 70 ontologies and vocabularies as services, its pilot application program interfaces have 150 registered online users, and the system is used from some 10,000 different unique addressed in a month.

More info: http://www.seco.tkk.fi/services/onki/

Learn more about WWF's experiences with Google Apps for Collaboration.

As a global organization with over 1300 active projects, WWF faces a huge information management challenge. Part of that challenge is in enabling its staff connect to each other for learning and sharing from all corners of the planet. Collaboration in action.

• What are the challenges of online collaboration?
• Can Google Apps really help to make you more efficient in your work?
• What's missing in Google Apps?
• Introducing collaboration in your organization

Neil will also talk about a recently completed project to identify the readiness of WWF's employees to engage with online collaboration solutions.

Anyone attending a presentation on Web 2.0 will be impressed by the enthusiasm of the presenting zealot and the terrific, if often quixotic, examples.   At a research level there are two basic questions to ask: can the energy and enterprise of Web 2.0 be harnessed for mainstream operations and are the technologies of Web 2.0 a passing fad or a seismic shift in our way of working? We will present our answers to these questions based on a research project which supported and incentivised student contributions in a Web 2.0 world hosted in Google Apps & Facebook.  Start first with an example: Wikipedia. We know that its launch and commercial model happened by accident, we know that there is a big asymmetry in contributions and we recognise its value and success. Scale Wikipedia to your organisation and your challenge and questions arise: can you design a success, what catchment and incentive do you need to include the contribution zealots and how do you judge success.  In this presentation we will present our latest research findings exploring directed serendipity from our students, how, where and why they can help grow the information space of the University. Building out from an established base of technology, of policy and of existing professionals is a very different proposition to the green fields approach of Wikipedia. Boundaries need to be shifted and policy needs to be unpacked.  The core resource is the energy, enthusiasm and enterprise of the students and their social networks. Where conventional producers struggle to communicate with their intended audience, the student producer benefits from viral, guerrilla marketing. While professionals dissect and analyse their technologies and channels, the student audience judge by experience. When we are fearful of failure students are bold experimenters. There are profound shifts underpinning broad assumptions: whilst everyone focuses on information consumption all students are far more active producers of content that the generations that proceeded them but the content is not just the centuries old essay but also digital chat.  Bringing these elements together we will discuss the findings for our, and for your, organisation. A very different information fluency and technological familiarity is becoming a given, it challenges how we design our facilities and how we encourage and enhance contribution. We are left with some key questions of our own role in this current future. 

This paper authored by Tim Gollins of the National Archives of the UK takes a new look at the problems that face institutions who need to curate digital information. It draws upon the experience of the National Archives in developing their current, state of the art, digital archive system and sets out a radical view of digital preservation that will enable institutions new to digital curation to make significant progress with very limited investment.  While there are many and varied threats to the successful curation of digital material, the impression given by the current generation of digital preservation systems is that imminent technological obsolescence is the primary threat. This paper argues that, while the threat of technological obsolescence is real in the longer term, a much more immanent threat is the inability to capture and store the original material in a safe and secure way.  Institutions starting out on the path of digital curation should look to address this threat; as Mrs Beeton is alleged to have written “First Catch Your Rabbitâ€Â?!  What then can institutions do to take these first steps? And how can they afford it?  The answer partly lies in understanding what many existing institutional IT systems (and their support departments) do as a part of normal business and how this relates to the challenges of capture, custody, continuity and integrity facing the new digital curator. The answer also lies in a number of open source or free resources that can be intelligently applied to these challenges without needing huge integration or significant IT resource allocation. The paper gives examples of all of these and argues that simplicity of digital curation systems is critical to the long term access to the material that they hold.   This approach makes it possible for even the smallest institution to begin to take steps to ensure the long-term survival of vital digital data.

Repositories emerged in the late ninetines to provide researchers and other creators of digital content with usable and fast platforms to expose their content online. In 2003, it became clear that repositories would play a key role in the theme of Open Access, when the Berlin Declaration on Open Access Knowledge was first announced.   With vast numbers of funding bodies and institutions that signed this declaration, and established Open Access Mandates to support the declaration, repositories matured and  became strategic components in this landscape.  After ambitious projects in institutions, bolstering visions of Digital Preservation and stewardship over produced content, these repositories are online today, offering access to content from the world's leading research organizations and libraries. Trans-national projects, such as the EC's Europeana portal and DRIVER have aggregated content from different sources. These projects were possible through novel standards, such as the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. At the same time, google and other search indexes successfully crawl institutional repositories, resulting in an average of 60% of IR's visitor, originating from search engines.  The current state of the art still faces important challenges. Up until today, it's still easier to find out if you were mentioned in an online blog, than detect whether your research was cited in a published paper or conference proceeding. Repository managers are often faced with difficulties to motivate individual researchers to contribute to the institutional repositories. Unique author identification, copyrights and licenses remain topics to be addressed in current and future research. Furthermore, the question arises if harvesters and search engines are so successful in offering access to the contents of a repository, if there is still a need for repositories, in the form of web-based platforms, to offer this access.  The key argument why repositories are still here to stay, in 2010 and beyond, is the fact that these systems embody the commitment of both an institution's administration, as well as its researchers, to stewardship and long term preservation of the created content. An institutional repository clearly depicts the relation between an individual item, and the institution, which is sometimes less clear or explicit when the content ends up in search indexes or aggregators.  Emerging technologies and standards will enable uses of repositories and novel concepts in authoring of research or learning materials. With individual researchers and institutions guaranteeing the consistency of the individual item data, it will become possible to visualize citation networks as a basis for new notification systems.  Already today, companies such as @mire and Microsoft experiment with direct repository interaction, from within text and presentation editors. Searching for a (scientific) image, definition or publication, to cite in your document or presentation ? This can happen right from within the application. Trends and features from social networks are applied in Repositories under what is called Research 2.0, facilitating more rapid networking and interaction in research communities.

Access to specialized trade information has consistently been named as a major obstacle for developing countries in their business and trade development activities. The Trade Intelligence Platform and the Portal of ITC address this major need and are aimed at assisting these countries in accessing highly specialized trade information, sharing this information with their business communities, and integrating the information resources available from ITC's portal into their own trade information portals.

The learning points of this paper are the following:
1. Setting up traditional trade information centres or libraries is still applicable in many developing countries due to the digital gap and limited access to technologies and the Internet. However the gap has been narrowing and an increasing number of trade support institutions and their clientele use the Internet as a major source of market information. The Trade Intelligence Portal of ITC provides access to the highly specialized trade information. Its "Search" function is based on a large-scale trade taxonomy.

2. The Portal is based on Web 2.0 technologies that allow multi-channel dissemination of information and incorporates collaborative features of sharing, rating, commenting and suggesting content. The Portal gathers the business sector in a virtual community and allows easy sharing of information. User generated content adds value to the information provided by the portal and drives more traffic to previously hidden information resources.

3. Developing trade information portals is expensive and time consuming for many trade support institutions. They frequently lack resources even for maintaining portals. Information soon becomes obsolete and unused. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies developing trade information portals has become affordable and rapid. The Trade Intelligence Portal is powered by a platform that allows information specialists to create vertical and horizontal portals depending on the needs of particular trade support institutions. They can choose from a number of services and applications and integrate them as widgets into their portals, customize the view and have instant access to market intelligence. The Portal's "Search" function can be integrated into the information portals of trade support institutions in developing countries.

Il Sole 24 Ore is one of the leading daily newspaper publishers in Italy, providing news and information services about politics, the economy, legislation and Italian and international financial markets. 

We found that semantic technologies could bring considerable benefits to a number of areas within our business.

In this paper, I will discuss how semantic technologies were used to support Il Sole 24 Ore in three important aims:

- increase the monetization of our content by both enhancing the relevance of information presented to our customers, and improving the effectiveness of our SEO and SEM activities. 

- to improve the user experience on our portal http://www.sole24ore.com/, through the implementation of innovative solutions;

- to introduce new efficiencies in our publishing activities through automation in the analysis and classification of content. 

Our efforts in these three areas brought value on both sides of the business case equation through both revenue enhancement and cost efficiencies. Automatic categorisation and ranking of content, and creating linkages between content, enabled us to suggest content of interest to users encouraging them to view more pages and spend more time at our site.

Complementing this, we were also able to enhance the user experience using search software to allow users to apply all sorts of filters to the content (topics, concepts, domains, many types of entities) to drill down within a result set and retrieve the most relevant content sorted by relevance. Automated tagging, categorisation and identification of relevant related content also enabled the simplification of the most complex, and tedious part of the work of the editors, thus increasing their availability to perform more valuable tasks. 

This case study will provide valuable insight into the key elements of the business case for publishers and others who are evaluating how semantic technology will help their organisation. We will also discuss some of the lessons learned and provide a brief view of possible future developments.

Providing citizens with reliable, up-to-date and individually relevant health information on the web is done by governmental, non-governmental, business and other organizations. Currently the information is published with little co-ordination and co-operation between the publishers. For publishers, this means duplicated work and costs due to publishing same information twice on many websites. Also maintaining links between websites requires work. From the citizens point of view, finding content is difficult due to e.g. differences in layman's vocabularies compared to medical terminology and difficulties in aggregating information from several sites. To solve these problems, we have created as a solution a national scale semantic publishing system HealthFinland which consists of a 1) a centralized content infrastructure of health ontologies and services with tools, 2) a distributed semantic content creation channel based on several health organizations, and 3) an intelligent semantic portal aggregating and presenting the contents from intuitive and health promoting end-user perspectives for human users as well as for other web sites and portals. The research pilot system got the Semantic Challenge Award in 2008, and has now been deployed in producion use by the National Institute of Health and Welfare in Finland.

More info: http://www.seco.tkk.fi/applications/tervesuomi/

Reports of the death of the intranet have been greatly (or at least somewhat) exaggerated. 

Learning Points: 

1. The adoption rate of "enterprise 2.0" tools;
2. The threat such tools pose to the corporate intranet;
3. The evolution of intranets into information workplaces:
4. Whether the name given to the internal information management system really matters.

Few practitioners have had the time to engage in the debate whether the intranet is dead or should be renamed. In fact, even those with great intranets, have been terribly busy, in particular dealing with lack of management support. Based on real-life examples from members of the J. Boye community of practice as well as years of research on intranet and portals, Janus will untangle the significant intranet challenges, including 1) lack of support from senior managers 2) usability 3) collaboration, 4) governance and 5) vendors, including software companies, agencies and analysts. While covering these points, Janus will draw on his research into enterprise portals and dig into the fading distinction between intranet and portals. No matter your intranet self-esteem, learn from the different approaches, compare your own intranet and take away tangible recommendations.

One of the differences between an information professional and a casual web searcher is that the information professional will spend time building a search query before they start searching and a casual searcher just enters words in a search box and prays that he will find what he is looking for. Information professionals rely on key words as a means to find information that others won't find. We get a great sense of satisfaction from the surprise on the faces of our clients when they realize we have succeeded where they themselves have failed. To succeed in today's world with Web 2.0 in the game, we need to find not only the controlled vocabulary but also the common words an average person uses. Add to that the fact that today's business terminology is changing very rapidly and you will find yourself lost trying to pinpoint the most useful key words.  Even if your native language is English, I assure you that you won't think of all the synonyms by yourself. And if you can't find the right words, you will, most certainly, miss out on valuable information.   By attending this lecture, you will learn great new ways to find the right keywords for your search query. We will go over some new tools provided by the leading search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo) and others (e.g. Cloudlet, Lexipedia). By the end of this session you will be armed with new technologies, tools and methodologies to help you find the magic (key) words to get better search results. 

The web has moved from a search and download environment to a global interactive research tool that is has numerous competitive intelligence applications.  In addition to information-based tools, Social Networking has become common place in the commercial and professional markets.   Well known sites, such as Linked-in have become standard ways for current and past business colleagues to reach out and network while they also provide information about their careers and areas of interest.  New applications have enabled professionals to share presentations and other knowledge over this platform. Meanwhile services, such as BioMed Experts and Community of science have become visible social networking sites of interest to scientists and scholars.  However, the web continues to evolve.  As social networking becomes commonplace new capabilities based on semantic search technology will add dramatic capabilities over the next few years.  This presentation will explore the concept of an evolving web from a competitive intelligence perspective.  It will review the various ways web may be used by competitive intelligence experts.  It will also outline reasons why companies and individuals may need be concerned about social networking or other web sites that could include information that may not be appropriate to share. This paper will focus on examples of content  that is easily accessible via the web

Learning Points:

1. The ongoing evolution of the Internet continues to add capabilities that Competitive Intelligence Professionals may employ within their daily workflow
2. The emergence of professional caliber Social Networking within the Sciences has added new ways to gather primary research-like information from the web. The next generation of semantic web tools are already beginning to emerge along with powerful CI applications
3. However, companies and individuals may need to be concerned that that the information they acquire from the web is reliable and valid. It must also conform to various legal and ethical guidelines

With the collapse of boundaries in the digital world, content is no longer defined by its container.  Text can be in print, electronic, or audio.  Photographs can be a 4x5 transparency, a hi-res JPEG200 or a thumbnail; video may be a streaming proxy, a DVD, or a downloadable MPEG file.  Descriptive metadata has never been more important as we rely on language to communicate our content availability to our community and receive instruction on how to deliver it in varying formats to multiple electronic interfaces.  Metadata is the prism through which our content is perceived.  In this session, Madi Solomon, Director of Content Standards for Pearson Plc, will take you on a journey of rich media discovery from moving image assets to customised content for educational instructors and how this proliferation of formats and mash-ups can be successfully managed and tracked.

Learning Points:

1. The importance of metadata in rich media
2. How taxonomies optimize metadata efforts
3. How applying traditional principles to new media still works

Today the arts and entertainments sector is lagging well behind other information domains in its ability to participate in semantic web services because of the weakness of interoperability characteristics of datasets.

The International Venue and Event Standard (IVES) project, a collaboration between The List, Glasgow University, ACT Consultants and Blue Compass addresses a number of key issues to enable the development of new services. The IVES project originated at The List, Scotland's leading arts and entertainment publisher. We publish listings covering around 3500 events at around 5000 venues across Scotland and a range of other publications.

We have our own research department of c.4 people who receive information on all arts and entertainments genres including cinema, music, theatre, the visual arts, and clubs. The information comes in a wide variety of forms from handwritten faxes to perfect XML, and every other type in between. We have a substantial research database through which, with a combination of manual editing, automatic validation and display formatting we have been able to deliver with very high levels of accuracy. 

Development of new services in the arts and entertainments domain requires matching of venues and distribution of event data between venues, aggregators, publishers and ticket sellers. New services are severely hampered by the absence of identifiers and a lack of standards. A Google search of structured arts data or arts dtd or event information standards reveals the paucity of activities in this area. Only in the museum area have any substantive collaborative data activities been undertaken.  Contrast: within the scholarly publishing arena the benefit of well understood dtds, metadata and identifier management services required for Web 2.0 services is visible. 

In the autumn of 2008, with UK Technology Strategy Board support, the IVES project became a reality and it started work in early December 2008. The deliverables were 3 fold a) an arts Venue Identifier b) creation of an xml public standard for arts and entertainments information c) delivery of a reference implementation. (These will be delivered by October  2009, the first deliverables in May 2009). The Venue ID will be in the form of a url to enable ease of system resolution in a semantic web environment. It will open some interesting opportunities for new services to arise once (June/July 2009) this unique identifier for UK venues is available as a free service at www.ives.info. In addition as more organisations adopt the IVES xml standard there will be a major increase in the ease with which event information can be shared by all in the arts sector. At completion of the IVES project it is intended to establish a not for profit entity to provide governance for the future of the Venue ID service and the IVES standard. 

Summary

We identified an issue within our sector that is inhibiting RDF driven interoperability. IVES will create a service to deliver a Venue ID system for the UK and a data standard to greatly enhance the ease of data exchange between organisations. 

The panellists will share insights into:

- An overview of ECM (collapsing) market and technologies
- An overview of products and suppliers, including SharePoint and Open Source
- The future of ECM (Is one end-to-end solution best or a federated solution of best-of-breed products? Should they be managed in house or hosted in the Cloud)?

In the current climate, the ability to prove our value is every more important. Justifying current spend and fighting for new budget is challenging. This presentation is a practical guide to making a business case work for you. Identifying data  an information team should be collecting to define value, assessing the real agenda and finally what to write - this presentation is a call for librarians to adopt the business case as a day to day management tool. 

Return On Investment in Academic Research Libraries: Phase 2 'The Role of Libraries in the Grants Process in Nine Countries' Carol Tenopir, Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA 

Learning Points:

1. How to calculate Return on Investment in Research Libraries;
2. How ROI varies by country and context;
3. Multiple measures of value of library e-collections to administrators and academic staff and researchers. 

In an era of decreasing resources and increasing calls for accountability, academic libraries all over the world face the challenge of demonstrating and quantifying their value to their funders and to all of their stakeholders. Return on investment (ROI) is one approach to meeting this challenge of demonstrating value.  

Building on the Online Meeting presentation in 2008 by Paula Kaufmann of the University of Illinois, who described a case study of ROI at her institution, this presentation will describe a research project that examines ROI in many countries.

In 2009, the methodology established for the first study was expanded and tested in nine academic institutions in nine countries. Universities or research institutes in North America, Western Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia participated in Return on Investment of Academic Libraries: Phase 2 Each institution provided data on their grant proposals, grant funding, and library budgets. In addition, administrators were interviewed and faculty members participated in a survey to report the role of the library's e-journal collection on their grant writing activities. These comparative results have not been presented before. 

The basis of ROI studies is to quantify and demonstrate the library's economic value to the institution. For every euro or dollar or yen or pound spent on the library, the university receives euros or dollars or yen or pounds back in the form of additional grants income or donations, or long term value to the community from an educated work force, more productive faculty and more successful students and graduates. ROI must be articulated within the mission and objectives of the specific institution and any ROI project must be measurable, replicable both in the same institution and in others, and meaningful (and interesting) to funders. 

This study demonstrates that, although there are differences between institutions and countries, library e-collections have a quantifiable ROI and demonstrable value to their parent institution.   *Phase 1 and 2 were partially funded by Elsevier; government funding has been requested for phase 3.

Collaborate to Innovate A case study of how one college has successfully blended their learning centre service, using a virtual learning environment VLE, in order to support learners directly at course level, thereby extending their award winning learning centre service online.   Learning Points 1.Successful Collaboration between academic and support staff in virtual learning environments needs to be carefully planned 2.New skills in designing, editing and maintaining a VLE area need to be developed  3.A common design template is essential to ensure usability in large scale initiatives   City and Islington College, in London is a large inner city college with an outstanding record of success. In 2008 the college won a BECTA Technology Exemplar Award, in recognition of its excellent E-Learning provision.   The college has successfully blended their learning centre service, using a virtual learning environment VLE, in order to support learners directly at course level, thereby extending their award winning learning centre service online.   The rationale of the course area was to provide an approved, course specific collection of resources, to enable learners to access these resources for guided or independent study at college or via the web.  The innovation has enabled the subject librarians to develop a closer relationship with learners in all their course areas than would be possible in any other way.  It has further promoted the use of the VLE among academic staff, the promise of a managed area with excellent online resources tailored to their course, has proved a good incentive.   The presentation will cover the background to the project and the research that informed it, the planning for what was to be a cultural change and the evaluation of this initiative after one year and how it has subsequently become embedded.   The initiative has prepared the college both culturally and professionaly to adopt appropriate Web 2.0 technologies to further extend and blend the learning centre service using Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts to support learners in guided and independent study.   The three key learning points of the case study are: 1.Successful collaboration between academic and support staff in virtual learning environments needs careful planning, with consultation on ground rules, design and limitations between the parties sharing the editing of the VLE course area. Key roles in each area of expertise must be involved and work together, this will establish trust from the start.  2.New skills in designing, editing and maintaining a VLE area need to be developed. A planned programme of training and support was provided by the e-learning lead and the learning centre lead based on the VLE area template, which included background to the project, the template design rationale and hands on training in how to edit a course area.  3.A common design template is essential to ensure usability in large-scale initiatives. In this case the design of the content and layout was piloted, agreed and replicated on all course areas, this ensures consistency for users across all courses. 

aluating the value of databases is a notoriously mercurial business.  How can libraries measure return on investment based on quality over quantity?  This question is critical as we consider the fact that centralised publisher platforms will be supplying new types of content (multimedia and e-book content) and searching is equally valued as browsing.  Do the  key measures of the success like number of searches and downloads, still apply?  What measurements should apply in the new digital world.   How can quality of content be evaluated?  Mary will give a critique of the current ranking systems and discuss ways in which libraries can measure the value of their databases in their new next generation platform.

The adoption of social media by customers and employees is pushing companies to re-examine how they engage with these audiences -- and in particular, to decide how open and transparent they can and should be. This is causing a rethink as to how to organise, manage and lead in this new era.

Charlene will share insights into the impact of this new social environment, how its tranforming the way we work and how you can prepare for future changes. 

"It is a clear trend that library and information systems are becoming more open and this is a good thing.  However, is it living up to the hype and messianic verve?  What critical questions should be asked to choose the best path for your operations?" 

Three learning points:

1. A better understanding of the challenges of open systems
2. Key opportunities for libraries in being more open
3. A balanced approach to exploring open systems

Estimates show that there will be more users connecting to the web from a phone than PC by 2020. User already want information at their fingertips, wherever they are, whenever they want. But they do not want to be inundated with services they didn't ask for.   To fulfill the users' needs we should find ways of combining applications such as open data, APIs, xhtml and phone apps in innovative ways. Open source systems or legacy systems, does it make a difference? It does probably doesn't affect the functionality required.  The services should be convenient to obtain and convenient to discard. The phone applications can be simple text alternatives or have advanced functionality like localisation awareness, motion sensibility and image identifiers.   In the presentation we will go through examples from inside and outside the library world and cover questions such as: - Will the more functional I-phone and Android platforms drive integration of the normal web into phones and will cell phone proprietary solutions then disappear? There are many possibilities in simple techniques like RSS which are not yet fully exploited.  - Will we at last have the librarian and the user gather around a mobile phone to see its 20" screen projection on the wall?  - Will users be able to use their mobile to input their ideal style, genre and subject of book from their mobile phone and to link to the library to find out which titles match?  This paper will be presented for the first time at the Online Information Show.

For most people, access to online content is achieved by typijng a URL into a web browser, or clicking on a link on a search engine results page. But what happens when information can flow easily around an organisation? In this talk, I'll show how simple document formats, online applications and widely used web protocols can work together to take the friction out of a knowledge network and help information get to where it needs to go.

Examples will include:

How to use Yahoo pipes to process RSS feeds and create your own finely tuned news feeds;

How to turn HTML tables and online spreadsheets into queryable databases;

How real-time web publishing and alerts are now a very real-possibility.

The application of social tools and social networking within business is all too often regarded as a purely technical exercise, where simply installing new software can solve business problems. In fact, the really interesting lessons of this new era of social business tools are about the affordances, behaviours and new ways of working that social networking makes possible. This session will look at some of the areas in which key concepts such as information flows, ambient awareness, networked productivity and cheap, easy collaboration are impacting on business processes and business design in various sectors and industries.

Learning points:

1. The basics of network-centric information management
2. How to identify business processes ripe for change
3. How to get started with social business design projects

Over the last six months, Eduserv has been developing some internal tools (blog, forum, desktop client, flexible web-based staff search, IM "alerter", etc) to encourage rapid, easily accessible information sharing between our staff. These tools have all been put together on minimal budgets and timescales, and have deliberately been pitched as such in order to avoid more formal workflows and project management processes.  This presentation will focus on the *real world* aspects of Organisational 2.0 - how you make "it" happen, which tools to use and what competencies are required. We'll share some thoughts about how we've been successful as well as some ideas about what we'd do differently next time.   The key learning points of the paper are as follows:  1. Making things happen quickly: using hosted and open source tools in order to foster innovation; how to demonstrate value; what to do when things get "serious"  2. Building community: what we've learnt about encouraging people to take part; how people use social tools; measuring success  3. Empowering staff through the social web: what does "web2.0" actually DO for organisations?

Even in an environment currently saturated by innovative tools and technologies emanating from the web 2.0 movement, the challenge for knowledge managers has remained constant for some time. Finding the right way to identify, access and share tacit knowledge and intellectual capital is the perennial goal. Out of context tacit knowledge loses value, knowledge always needs a knower. Web 2.0 technologies can provide increased opportunities for improving knowledge flows and communications around the organisation. Simultaneously they also provide knowledge workers with increased channels to reach distributed populations and help to share tacit knowledge, or at least provide a route to accessing it. However, they also introduce new challenges resulting from the innate flexibility of toolkit of Workplace 2.0.

Case study: KPMG LLP is attempting to use a variety of web 2.0 tools to enhance and compliment its knowledge management strategy to provide fast and intuitive access to thought capital in order to increase speed to market and corporate agility. It also underpins the current modus operandi of the younger generation employees the leaders of the future who enter the organisation as power users of this toolkit.  Unlike any other aspect of an organisations knowledge management strategy or toolkit, adoption of these tools is employee driven, so ignoring them is not an option. Anyone with access to a web browser can begin blogging and communicating with peers and colleagues and sharing innovation and thought capital in and outside of the boundaries of the organisation. For todays graduate intake email is antiquated, there are faster, flexible, more effective ways to communicate, inform and be informed.  At a time when many information managers are still grappling with how to manage electronic communications, the newest employees into the organisation and the savviest of those already through the door are no longer relying on email for fast and effective real time communications or access to the information they want in  a highly competitive external market place with increased pressure win business, increase market share, improve profitability and reduce cost base.

This is a case study of some of the knowledge sharing initiatives supported by web 2.0 tools underway in KPMG LLP and some insights into their business benefit or the impact they have on individual productivity. Some of the initiatives are still aspirational and this case study also presents some of the plans for the future and how learning from our activities to date is helping to inform our future plans. Whilst the case study demonstrates some of the benefits of toolkit 2.0 it also addresses how to ensure that senior stakeholders understand how perceived risks to both corporate reputation and employee productivity that arise from some of these new tools are managed, and provides need tangible evidence of the return on investment. Demonstrating through agreed KPIs, and anecdotally, that it is possible to move faster to market, win more work and circumvent barriers of location, geography, language and culture resonate well with stakeholders. Importantly, success can also be measured by an increased level of engagement with clients as presence becomes constant without being intrusive. 

Ulla de Stricker focuses on the implications for information professionals when completely new publishing and information searching models enter the lives of our clients and comments on the likely impact Google may continue to have on an entire profession as a result.  In order to maintain credibility, we must be ahead of the curve and act as enablers and guides for our clients in the new landscapes in which they live and work,  but in addition, we owe ourselves, our clients, and the future that we take our rightful place as collaborators and guides for the new actors in the publishing and information arena by working WITH them, not just with their products after the fact.  As a specific example how Google has altered and will continue to alter the publishing landscape, Stephen Arnold provides the highlights of his book Google: The Digital Gutenberg (Infonortics, 2009) and explains why Google is, indeed, a publisher to be reckoned with, not just in the ways we may have thought.     

The scholarly communications sector is now relaxing in the aftermath of the digital revolution; with publications now safely online, we can look forward to a less turbulent period.   Or can we?  This paper argues that complex and eye-opening though the transition to online has been the revolution is still to come.   So far, we have added a new delivery mechanism to an existing supply chain. This is the beginning, not the end, of the process. What we have achieved to date has effected a change in how people access information. It has not radically affected how they use that information, and it has not significantly changed the information itself.   The next step will be a more fundamental leap, from delivering information digitally to making that information truly digital in itself beyond the legacy limitations of printed articles. This means radically reimagining how scholarly information is structured, stored, communicated, shared, used. It is a huge challenge that will impact publishers processes much more deeply than the transition to online. And we must face this challenge at a time when the delicate ecosystem of scholarly communications is evolving, and we are all at risk from online networks that threaten societies, from agile forms of communication that threaten traditional journals, from substitute review mechanisms that threaten the editorial process, from pseudo-authoritative resources that threaten the credibility of ongoing research.  This paper argues that only by embracing the cultural and technological shifts behind these threats can publishers reinvent and reinforce their role in the scholarly communications supply chain. As reading habits evolve, researchers will increasingly want more intelligent publishing that allows them to auto-analyse data, to ingest more information more efficiently, to collaborate and connect more effectively. Progressive publishers need to invest now in building new value into the supply chain and ensuring they remain fit for new purposes.  Examples from a pilot project, in which data from two scholarly societies is being mashed and mined for hitherto unrecognised connections, will demonstrate how embracing emerging semantic technologies can consolidate communities and create new value around scholarly content. The pilot project aims to illustrate the synergies to be gained from innovating collaboratively the deeper the data pool, the more likelihood there is of revealing valuable new research connections, for example. The paper will review the advantages, disadvantages and risks encountered during this project and share the experiences gained to inform delegates' own adventures in the brave new world of digital publishing.

The process of growing European integration of markets and science communities and the serials crisis brought up the need of complete new solutions. The big success of COSIS.net and its initiator European Geoscience Union is an interesting success story for web 2.0. and modern publishing processes. One journal reached within just 8 years market leadership with an impact factor over 4.5 and over 20000 pages a year - and is still growing strongly. COSIS.net serves over 40000 active geoscientists with publishing, meeting organization (more than 12000 participants) and discussion tools. The main factors for its success were (1) the early adoption of open access, (2) a most lean production that cut service charges to half of the average, (3) elaborated open peer review, (4) automated editor choice for big publications (over 60 editors), (5) integrated meeting management system, (6) integration of institutional sponsors for open access publishing, and (7) early web 2.0 community building with special features for scientists. E.g. for scientific users the shop needs four addresses, not only two as conventional shop (billing and delivery addresses). So we provide: ordered by, ordered for, invoice to, send to. The community portal integrates also several service provider for the community like professional conference organizers, publishers, typesetters, PR agencies, book sellers, travelling services and many more. The role especially for publishers changed from rights selling to serving the community in developing communication. For publishers the portal is of great use to get deep knowledge of his clients, analyse trends in publishing and serve the divisions of the big associations. This evokes more and more new publishing projects.  This mass of functionality and the easiness of use (you only need internet, browser and an email address) leads the scientist to use COSIS.net and to provide current data even of temporary addresses.  New developments like geodata based contacting support and indexing, and online XML editing (to beat down service charges) keep the community in good humour.

The EU TEMPUS programme is currently funding projects to improve libraries in Higher Education within the theme of improving university processes and management in the countries on the fringes of the European Union area. After working on a project led by Humboldt University in Berlin to help certain university libraries in Serbia modernise, particularly necessary after they had been cut off from the rest of the world through sanctions, Middlesex University Learning Resources was awarded funding to promote e-resources in Yerevan State University (YSU) in Armenia. This involved working informally with eIFL (electronic Information for Libraries) to get good deals for licenses for e-resources and then encouraging librarians to use them.

In comparison with Serbia, Armenia was a world apart. There had been enough librarians in the Serbian target libraries who knew English to be able to work with e-resources and to have followed progress in the formative years of e-resources to know what western libraries were doing. In YSU, there were few librarians who knew English and there was a feeling that dealing with e-resources was the task of computer specialists (who tended to be younger and to know English better), while librarians should concentrate on managing printed books and serials. A programme of visits was part of the project and on one occasion a senior librarian expressed amazement at the enthusiasm of library staff in the UK and at Middlesex University in particular, since back at home librarians were supposed to be quiet and reserved.

One of the main conclusions to be drawn from this project was that the main inhibitor of progress lay in the education of librarians which had never been modernised since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990. Middlesex and RGU had previously been involved in a similar project in the Near East where the impetus for libraries to be more proactive was in many cases coming from the academics who before the project had not realised that librarians were supposed to be able to help with e-resources. As a result of the experience in Armenia, another project was proposed for Armenia and accepted by the EU to re-train, with the help of the Department of Information Management at RGU, library school lecturers not only in Armenia, but also Uzbekistan and Georgia. A project team was established and the project is now under way.

Interestingly in the initial meetings we have observed a tendency for the requirements for librarianship professional training in the target countries to be divided into the classical and the technical, which might if we were not careful result in the confirmation of the views of the CIS partners to divide support for library materials into two, traditional and electronic, which we feel must surely be inappropriate; this paper will outline the thinking behind the project and describe its progress particularly illustrating the ways in which progress is being made to follow a model closer to what is found in western Europe.