Part 2 of Library 2.0 Presentation at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians

I am on the agenda to speak at the Spring Conference for Minnesota Association of Law Librarians. The first of the conference speakers in Shane Nackerud, Web Services Coordinator for the University of Minnesota.

These are my notes on the second part of Shane's presentation on Library 2.0:

How have libraries reacted to the 2.0 movement? Let's look at how other industries have changed: Music industry, travel agencies, book stores, and newspapers are all trying to adjust to the increasing flow if information through the internet. Libraries are also being impacted. The number of visitors to libraries is decreasing. The number of reference requests has dropped dramatically and circulation statistics are down.

A lot of the impact is an impact from the internet. Libraries should compare the search of their catalogs to the Google search.

Libraries 2.0 = [book's stuff + people + radical trust] x participation

Get in the flow. Attention is scarce and resources are abundant. Get into the spaces where the users are. Trying stuff out is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.

Shane has built a plug into Amazon so that it shows that a book is in the U Minn library in the Amazon list. Shane is pushing RSS feeds out to users, including a users circulation. He has building widgets that users can plug into iGoogle and other widget compatible sites.

Libraries are pushing some photos out as a hosting site to display their photograph collection. Another was using flickr to publish book reviews.

He demonstrated McMaster University Library's Web team collection of links they share. MIT reference libraries are pulling delicious tags into their own website.

Shane showed the University of Alberta's Facebook application and Penn State University Libraries Search. They both tie into the library catalogs. Each had less than a 5 active users a day.

Shane pushed out a GreaseMonkey script that plugs into Amazon. If the book is in his catalog, that shows up in his search results. The script came out of the University of Seattle.

Shane started the UThink site that hosts the blogs at the University of Minnesota, the biggest blog collection at an educational institution.

In us new catalog, he returns results based on relevancy. There are also facets to filter the results to refine the result set. The catalog gives the users the ability to add tags to books and items. It seems like the knowledge management issues with enterprise search carry over to libraries. (The audience was very interested in this topic.)

Shane has done some great things with trying to integrate library information into the users workflow and sharing data, rather than keeping the information in a walled environment. At the end he encouraged the audience to play.

Library 2.0 Presentation at the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians

I am on the agenda to speak at the Spring Conference for Minnesota Association of Law Librarians. The first of the conference speakers in Shane Nackerud, Web Services Coordinator for the University of Minnesota.

These are my notes on the first part of Shane's presentation on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0:

Shane started off with a look back at Web 1.0, when the idea was to move print media to the web. You could read and search, but you could not interact.

Shane moved on t0 social networking sites and showed us his MySpace page (largely unused) then to Facebook (used more). Privacy is an issue and librarians can help guide their users through these issues.

Next up was media sharing. YouTube exists solely because of the user contributions. The site owners are not creating the content. The content comes solely from the users.

Copyright is an issue with Web 2.0. This is another area that librarians can apply their skills.

On to social bookmarking and how librarians address folksonomy. He moved onto LibraryThing.com (My LibraryThing catalog). It has users and librarians adding content, tagging and maintaining.

On to the wisdom of the crowds and the centerpiece was Wikipedia. Although one person may not know everything, but collectively we do. Wikipedia is a useful social experiment in sharing and memorializing knowledge. The encouragement of contribution is one key to 2.0.

On to Twitter, Shane (@snackeru) showed the power of # hashtags and how they can used in sites like Twemes. (Here is the Mall08).

Next up is Shane's second presentation focused on Library 2.0.

Speaking Engagements

I am currently working on an article entitled Wiki While You Work that will be included as part of the ILTA White Paper on Knowledge Management.

Then, I am off to Minnesota to speak to the Minnesota Association of Law Librarians:An Attorney's Perspective on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
The growing use and acceptance of these tools in the legal industry is changing the ways lawyers practice, communicate, capture information and FIND information. We’ll get the perspective of an experienced lawyer and Knowledge Management practitioner when Doug Cornelius shows us how he uses these tools in everyday practice.


Then, I am off to Georgia to be part of a panel with Andrew McAfee at the Interwoven Legal I.T. Leadership Summit:Serving Multiple Generations: Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for I.T.
Today's workforce includes three or four generations of professionals, each with different motivations, expectations, and ways of learning, thinking, and working especially the newest generation. How do these younger associates work? What tools and processes do they prefer to use over the course of a day, and why? How do blogs, wikis, and social networking applications like Facebook apply to business in general and to legal in particular? Which aspects of Web 2.0 will have enduring value and be transformative, and which are likely to fade away? Do they really offer new potential for user-driven applications that do not require I.T. intervention or for engaging clients in new ways? What are the risk management implications? Is it possible to maintain standards and achieve economies of scale while servicing every part of the generational spectrum? An industry expert followed by moderated discussion helps attendees understand and debate how to develop I.T. strategies that straddle multiple generations and explores the reality and potential of Web 2.0 for the legal industry.

Contact Networks - Enterprise Relationship Management

We had Rich Rifkin and some of his colleagues in from Contact Networks to see what their product can do. I was left very impressed.

They call their product Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) and distinguish it from Client Relationship Management (CRM) products. I have posted about my dissatisfaction with CRM systems: CRM in Law Firms, Is CRM Worth It? The Pros and Cons of Client Relationship Management. The problem is that they do not add much value to the lawyer so there is little incentive for them to add and maintain the information in the CRM system.

Contact Networks mines information from email traffic, address books, calendar, the CRM system and other available data sources. In particular, it matches an email domain to database of companies. So it knows that an email to someone@gs.com, is an email to someone at Goldman Sachs. Using that email address they match the contact information to the CRM system or the contacts to flush out the name, title and other information.

They crunch all of the contact information, the frequency of email communication, and some other information to determine the strength of the relationship between someone inside the firm and an external contact.

Contact Networks provides a simple, "Google-ish" interface to search for who inside the firm knows a particular person outside the firm or who inside the firm has contacts at a particular company. That is a question that passes through my email system dozens of times a day. InterAction was set up to try to answer the question. But InterAction relies on attorneys adding contact information and dealing with its kludgey interface. Contact Networks also goes farther than showing Who Knows Who to showing How Well Who Knows Who.

When seeing the relationship, it displays what data is part of the relationship: emails, contact card, InterAction entry, etc. This exposes some interesting information. A large amount of email traffic goes out to people that are not in your address book. Looking back at my recent traffic, I agree that the proposition is completely true. I am just as lazy and time-pressured as anyone else. I often will just hit reply all and not bother adding the contacts into my address book. Rich threw out a number of 70% of email traffic recipients not being a person's address book. A benefit of Contact Networks is that it can match the email address and email traffic from one person to someone else's contact card or InterAction information for that person. I may just be hitting reply all. But if my junior associate has entered that person's contact information, Contact Networks will match the contact information to the email address.

Contact Networks also has a compilation of Standard Industry Codes for the companies so you can associate the contact with an industry. The you can search for contacts in a particular industry and see who in the firm knows the person and how well they know the person.

Contact Networks is not trying to position itself as an alternative to InterAction or CRM, but as a complement. Contact Networks is able to pull in lots more information than InterAction can get on its own. Bu Contact Networks does not have the management and control features of InterAction to track information and catalog it.

Obviously, Contact Networks focused on alleviating concerns of privacy. First, they do not look at the contents of the email. They just grab the address, date and frequency of email contact. You can also allow users to opt-out, you can allow users to apply a private label to exclude the contact information and you can limit who has access to the ERM information.

The great thing about Contact Networks is that it requires no user input. It harvest everything from existing inputs in other processes and systems. It has a simple user interface, so training is a few minutes or a simple email instruction.

Tom Baldwin has been telling me to bring in Contact Networks for months. I am glad I finally did.

Matthew Parsons & Associates - On Knowledge Management Strategy

Neil Richards has joined Matthew Parsons to start Matthew Parsons & Associates. To kick it off they have put together their views on how knowledge management and knowledge management strategy is evolving in law firms: Open for Business.

The post is an excellent primer on the basics of knowledge management.

• It starts with people and leaders
• A changing landscape requires strategic reassessment
• Strategic elements
  
  • Strategic intent
  • Firm culture
  • Client access and services
• Implementation elements
  
  • Practice planning and support
  • Technology platforms and systems
  • Audit and process

Congratulations to Neil and Matthew on their new endeavor.

Lawyers and Twitter

I am user of Twitter.

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, you can think of it as a combination of blogging and instant messaging. Each post or tweet is limited to 140 characters so you can send tweets by text message. Like most social media, it is cheap (free and currently free of advertising) and very easy to use (there are only a few buttons).

Steve Matthews wrote a great post on an intro to Lawyer Marketing with Twitter. Kevin O'Keefe followed that up with his own perspective and success stories in Lawyer Marketing with Twitter Has Arrived.

Like both Steve and Kevin, I've had a few Twitter moments and find it useful to engage people through this communications platform. In this era of new ways to communicate beyond email, Twitter is a great avenue to communicate and share information.

Rather than duplicating what Steve and Kevin said about Twitter (you should go read both stories), I have two additional features that I like about Twitter.

First, it is very compatible with other platforms. The flow of tweets is available through RSS. For example, Twitter ties into Facebook and updates my Facebook status. I have a Twitter widget on this blog showing my most recent tweets. I also have a Twitter widget running on my intranet page.

Second, tweets are indexed and returned by internet searches. All of that good stuff in my tweets, gets returned in a Google search, just like posts on this blog. You are sharing beyond the Twitter universe.

To learn more about Twitter there is a great video from Common Craft, Twitter Explained. Once you join Twitter, feel free to follow me on Twitter: @dougcornelius.

Book Review - Backyard Giants

I just finished reading Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever. It is a quirky subject, but very well written by Susan Warren (who is also the deputy bureau chief for Wall Street Journal in Dallas).

The book followers a group of growers in Rhode Island in their pursuit to grow enormous pumpkins to win pumpkin growing contests, to break the world record and to reach the 1500 pound benchmark.

[They] belong to a special breed of gardeners that compete to grow the largest flowers, fruits and vegetables they possibly can. At the end of every season, special events are held where the botanical marvels are weighed and measured and prizes handed out. Thus, the world has been gifted with its first 269-pound watermelon, a 124-pound cabbage, a 24-pound tomato and a carrot nearly 17 feet long. It is pumpkins, thought, that have taken center stage. No other vegetable or fruit grows that big, that fast.

This was a great story and was very enjoyable to read. Yes, it is on a quirky topic. But the story of hard work and sacrifice is as true for these competitors as it is for any others.

Next on my list is The Toothpick: Technology and Culture by Henry Petroski. Here is the New York Times Book Review that caught my attention to the book: Consider the Toothpick.

Corporate Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World

I watched a webinar sponsored by GoLightly on Corporate Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World. The presenters were Abby Shaw, Web Channel Management, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company and Christopher Dworin, Vice President of Business Development, GoLightly, Inc.

Abby started off with her take on what is Web 2.0. She included the usual suspects of blogs, wikis, user comments, discussions, ratings and rankings, community contact tools, file sharing, federated search and mashups. She pointed out that this is not the right way to present Web2.0. Her take is creating an efficient, resourceful and engaged communities of interest.

How has Web2.0 changed knowledge management?

• Facilitate, don't manage. You have been willing to let go. Remove control.
  
• Higher value knowledge is smaller, flatter and broader in scope. Small chunks of information.
  
• Reduces overhead. The capture, catalog and distribution of KM can be part of ordinary work activities

Some participants were concerned about review prior to publishing. She had her lawyers look at it. Her lawyers said that they are protected from liability as long as they reviewed content regularly and remove the offending content.

Abby focused on the importance of social networks outside the hierarchy of a firm's structure. This recognition of social networks was especially important during a merger. It was key to keep those social and communications channel open. She also emphasized that employee profiles should be opened up for employees to add content. HR could not effectively add enough information.

Abby laid out some hard benefits:

• improved work quality and cycle time
  - improve employee access to employee expertise
  - improve usefulness of public (intranet content)
  - speed time from question to answer
  
• employee engagement and retention
  - informal knowledge transfer is cheaper and more effective than formal training
  - recognize key players in informal knowledge-sharing networks
  - much more effective than handing out company swag
  -Picture on the front page of the intranet was one of best rewards in a poll of employees (more so than cash).
  
• corporate compliance
  - Automate governance and document business process
  - if information is more available outside the company then they will go there instead of your internal sources
  - better to have employees using an internal social network and keep the information inside the firewall, rather than all of that information and communication happening outside
  

Knowledge is power; but the sharing of knowledge is even more powerful. Knowledge hoarders just end up out of the loop.

How do you validate the information if you are not reviewing information before it is published? People are using inaccurate information already: outside sources, email notes that are now outdated, etc. It is easier to monitor and address bad information if it is in a public space.

How do you deal with personal opinions? - Opinions are knowledge. You need to stop bad behavior. Abby's example: are you worried about employees in your lobby pushing each other around.

Chris took over to talk about the GoLightly products and their upcoming webinars.

It gives you everything you need to get your online community up and running. Includes: Community Home Page (easy to update), Searchable Member Directory, Unlimited Groups, Unlimited Email Lists, Resource Library, Forums/Bulletin Boards, Unlimited Blogs, Unlimited Wikis, and Training. And all of this with your Branding!

Knowledge Management in a Fragmented World

Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge started a new column in KM World magazine. Borrowing from Dave Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, he calls it Everything is Fragmented.

"I wanted to build on that by pointing to the shift during the life span of knowledge management from the "chunked" material of case studies and best-practice documents to the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. So when I was asked to contribute this column to KMWorld magazine, it seemed an appropriate title; it allows me to talk about not only trends in technology but also social issues, the scientific use of narrative, and to fire off the odd invective about over-constrained and over-controlled systems."

Since I started following the Enterprise 2.0 movement, I have shifted my philosophy of knowledge management. I fall pretty close to Dave's position.

"It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction."

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are still useful. But, as Dave Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, everyone has a different view on what the structure should be. Whatever taxonomy I create or a group decides upon, it will only be meaningful to some of the people some of the time. As the taxonomy gets more and more complex, the less useful it will be.

On many knowledge management projects, people ask for a very structured way of organizing content. Inevitably, they query the system for something that is outside the structure they requested.

The improved power of search, adding metadata and adding user comments have changed the way we should approach knowledge management.

If you are a KM practitioner I am sure you have received a request for matching the Google search. There is only one field to enter information; you just type in a few words. Obviously, the Google page rank algorithm is unique to the web and does not work well inside the enterprise.

We need a way to manipulate the search results inside the enterprise and add more context to our internal nodes of information. Google does this by interpreting links to the nodes of information (webpages). We KM practitioners need some way to replicate this ability to add metadata to our knowledge artifacts. We need to better describe them, attribute authorship, rate them and add notes to them.

That is one of the reasons that I am enthusiastic about products like Vivisimo's social search. [Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration][The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search].

Structured systems of knowledge and precedent are very useful for law firms. As law firms we need to highlight the better forms and precedents for reuse. I believe we need to rethink how they are highlighted, where they are stored and what people can do with them to keep them organized. Organized in a way that is meaningful to each individual.

Social Networks - Claim Your Name

Dan Schawbel put together a compelling piece on signing up for social networks to claim your name or suffer. Wearing my real estate lawyer hat, it is all about three things: location, location, location.

Joining social networks does not cost you anything other than a few minutes to register and add your information. You may find it interesting. Even if you do not find it interesting today, you may find it interesting in the near future.

Claim you name on these social network sites. Even if you do not use them actively, you can generally point a lot of information at them from other collections.

Even if you have a fairly unique name like my name, there are still others out there with the same name. When I first became Doug 2.0 and started my online presence, "Doug Cornelius" was mostly about the Yuba College basketball coach. Since then, the top 20 search results in Google for Doug Cornelius all point to me. (At least as of this morning for my search).