State of the Computer Book Market, 2008

O'Reilly publishes a periodic update on the state of the computer book market on their Radar blog. It used to be done by Tim O'Reilly himself, but now it's done by Mike Hendrickson.

This time around it's in five parts. Let's take a look at some of the hightlights. As usual, if you're interested in computer books, the posts are well worth your detailed attention. The comments are also very interesting to track.

Part 1: The Market

As you can see, the computer market is only 1% of total unit sales in bookstores and online retailers. The Computer category was the only category down [-8%] year-over-year...

What you won't see on this chart is that the computer book market cratered in 2001, shrinking twenty percent a year for three years until it stabilized in 2004 at about half the size that it was in 2000. (We only have reliable data going back to 2004.) We are hoping that the cratering we experienced in the second half of 2008 will not be as pronounced or long as 2001 because the current economic conditions are not squarely for computer books centered around Tech. That being said, 2008 was the worst performing year since we've been collecting the Bookscan data. The chart immediately below shows total units by year for the Computer book category. As you can see, 2008 was the worst year for unit sale in the computer book market.

Really worth looking at is the chart of hot to not-so-hot topics. Hottest are: Mac programming, vitualization, mobile phone, computers and society and social web. Least hot include: web authoring, windows, Linux, MS programming, ipod & itunes.


Part 2: The Technologies

In response to previous State of the Computer Book market posts, there have been reader comments indicating that part of the decline in the market is due to a lack of anything that new in the Tech world to sustain lots of books selling lots of copies. It begs the question -- will we ever see another Java-like phenomena similar to what we experienced 12 years ago? (And yes, we understand it was much more than just a Java event, but Java skyrocketed more than all others - it was truly astronomical...) However, we believe that one reason why programming and administration topics are suffering more than consumer topics is that sophisticated users are the first to show the preference shift from books to online content consumption.

Part 3: The Publishers

The most notable factor is that Wiley continues to hold the leading spot as the largest publisher, with 30% market share of units sold, while Pearson lost 2% market share and O'Reilly gains 1%. (We’ll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)...

So what is notable from this data? First that these top 8 publishers are down - 375,820k units from 2007 to 2008. Only O’Reilly and Reed Elsevier saw modest gains in 2008. Seven out of the eight top publishers had more titles making the top 3000 list in 2008. Wiley, O’Reilly, and Reed Elsevier saw their efficiency improve in 2008 while the other large publishers saw their efficiency decrease.

Part 4 -- The Languages

Overall the market for programming languages was down 5.9% in 2008 when compared with 2007. There were 1,849,974 units sold in 2007 versus 1,740,808 units sold in 2008, which is a decrease of 109,166 units. So the unhealthy 8% loss in the Overall Computer Book Market was not completely fueled by programming-oriented books....

If you look at the five-year trend for the languages shown below, you can see that C# has been steadily growing year after year while Java has been going in the opposite direction during the same period. PHP, ActionScript and Python are the other languages going in a positive direction. Ruby, Java, and C++ had the biggest declines in unit sales during 2008, and Ruby dropped out of the top 10 languages....

Lastly, the following languages sold fewer than 1,000 units in 2008. Here is the list in alpha order: abap, ada, awd, blitzmax, cl, cobol, cs2, d, delphi, directx, dsl, e, eiffel, fortran, haxe, idl, javafx, jcl, kml, labview, lingo, lisp, m, maxscript, ml, mumps, mysql spl, natural, ocaml, octave, oopic, opl, pascal, pda languages, peoplecode, phrogram, pl/1, qbasic, realbasic, rexx, rpg, s, scratch, smalltalk, spark, sql server, squeak, unknown, unrealscript, windows script, and x++.

Part 5 -- eBooks and Summary

The market got off to a fast start in 2008 but during July took a nose-dive downward and never recovered. 2008 ended up 8% behind 2007, and there were very few bright spots. There were significantly fewer new titles making it into the Top 3000 reports, which means that more titles that were published before 2008 continued to make the list. Titles that were published in 2008 performed worse than those published in the prior 6 years and only outperformed titles from 2001 and earlier. Apple and its software and hardware [iPhone, iPod, and Mac OS X] had the biggest impact on computer book sales in 2008. Social media development, virtualization and mobile also performed better than in 2007. From a publisher perspective, O'Reilly showed the best gain while Pearson, Wiley, and Microsoft Press lost the most ground. The two Imprints of O'Reilly and Dummies have the most diverse publishing programs due to their strong performance in our six categories. The number one title for 2008 was O'Reilly's Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. The number one programming language was C#, with Objective-C and ActionScript showing strong growth in 2008. That's the quick view....

As you can clearly see, the decline in print has been slowly happening while Safari has maintained a very healthy double-digit growth rate. Do you believe we are at or near a tipping point for the computer book industry? Do developers want content online or a combination of online and print? Or is there a chance that new technological innovation will re-ignite a somewhat stale computer book market?

ICSTI 2009 Conference: Managing Data for Science

A very interesting conference coming up this June in Ottawa. I'm almost certain that I'll be there.

ICSTI's 2009 Public conference will take place on June 9 and 10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Speakers from Canada, the United States and Europe will address:

• How eScience affects the way libraries, publishers and scientists relate to each other.
  
• How the era of "big data" will enable enhanced experimentation and collaboration in science.

The conference program will inform researchers, scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers, IM/IT professionals, chief information officers, and librarians about specific data initiatives of experts from Microsoft, the San Diego Super-Computing Center, Indiana University, Carleton University (ODESI Project), the British Library, and other institutions.

The program looks great!

ICSTI is the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information. Canada's national science library, CISTI, is organizing the conference.

More books and reports on the future of academic libraries

The two posts I did a little while back on books and reports about the future of academic libraries have proven to be surprising popular, with the latter edging up towards being my most popular post ever (details in a few days).

Of course, there are a lot more books that are relevant to the future of academic libraries that aren't part of the formal LIS literature. So, I thought I'd follow up with an even bigger list!

This list of books is a bit more scattershot, a bit more random, but still it picks up a few themes the last set didn't, like crowdsourcing. Like with the last list, I'm not sure I expect anyone to read every word of all of these books. To be sure, the business book style that a lot of them embrace would lead to Lovecraftian dementia, what with the excessive repetition and hype. On the other hand, I think that each of them could have one idea or one case study that's worth paying attention.

There are also a couple that aren't published yet that I'm looking forward to.


More Books

1. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins
   
   
2. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger
   
   
3. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
   
   
4. Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
   
   
5. Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self Interest by Peter Block
   
   
6. The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason
   
   
7. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer
   
   
8. The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun
   
   
9. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe
   
   
10. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
    
    
11. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
    
    
12. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
    
    
13. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
    
    
14. We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass production by Charles Leadbeater
    
    
15. Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
    
    
16. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg
    
    
17. Mind Set!: Eleven Ways to Change the Way You See--and Create--the Future by John Naisbitt
    
    
18. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling
    
    
19. Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters by Bill Tancer
    
    
20. Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know
    
    
21. The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed
    
    
22. Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinner and the Age of Affluence to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley
    
    
23. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Dubner, Stephen J. Levitt
    
    
24. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki
    
    
25. Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of their Own by David Bollier
    
    
26. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship by John Willinsky
    
    
27. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. Borgman
    
    
28. The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid
    
    
29. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein
    
    
30. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
    
    
31. The Tower and the Cloud by Richard N. Katz, Editor
    
    
32. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
    
    
33. The Virtual Community:Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold
    
    
34. Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age by Jeff Gomez

Just like I didn't mention every single interesting book last time, I also left out a few reports that look promising. The FriendFeed thread for the previous Reports post garnered a few suggestions that I'll repeat here. As well, I found a few more on my own.


More Reports

1. The Research Library’s Role in Digital Repository Services
   
   
2. The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools ("The Calhoun Report")
   
   
3. On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control ("WoGroFuBiCo")
   
   
4. Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum responds to On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control
   
   
5. Writing in the 21st Century: A report from the National Council of Teachers of English
   
   
6. ALA's Core Competences of Librarianship
   
   
7. TAIGA 2009 Provocative Statements
   
   
8. How to Use Social Software in Higher Education

As usual, I'm happy to take suggestions for other books, reports, blogs, etc. about the future of academic libraries here in the comments, on Friendfeed or via email (jdupuis at yorku dot ca).

Update 2009.03.11: Re: Joe Kraus' comment, I added a few more books and one report to the list from the original FriendFeed thread.

Friday Fun: Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

Boy, do I ever love The Onion:

"Our schools are orderly, sanitary places where students dwell in blissful ignorance of the chaos that awaits," West said. "Should our facilities be repaired? No, they must be razed to the ground and rebuilt in the image of the Cyclopean dwellings of the Elder Gods, the very geometry of which will drive them to be possessed by visions of the realms beyond."

The whole article is hysterical.

By the way, I absolutely love the caption to a Cthulhu drawing: "Artist's rendering of the Cthulhu, a hideous demon borne of pure malice that fewer than 3 percent of high school sophomores can identify."

Friday quiz: The board member's name (Charles West) is a combination of the names of two Lovecraft characters. Without googling, which ones?

(via LisaSlo)

Open Laboratory 2008 is for sale

It's finally here and available for purchase at Lulu.com.

This year's editor Jennifer Rohn put together a collection of fifty-two selected blog posts showcasing the quality and diversity of science writing on blogs in 2008. You can see the background story on how the book came about here. You can order the first (2006) volume here and the second (2007) here.

I'll be ordering one copy for myself and one for the collection at work as I think that this is a worthy project to support.

If you want a preview of the contents of the book, links to all the winning posts are here.

I look forward to reading and reviewing the book.

Best Science Books 2008: Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Books

This might be the last post for 2008 books, and it's one of the best annual lists out there. Every year, I use this LJ list to catch up on my popular science ordering for the year, to get the good stuff I missed. I don't order a huge amount of popular science for our collection, but I do like to get the best stuff. I like the fact that the books I get are check out quite a bit. There is a demand for popular materials among academic library users.

Here goes, some hightlights:

• Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food by Ronald, Pamela C. & Raoul W. Adamchak
  
  
• Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End... by Plait, Philip
  
  
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Hölldobler, Bert & Edward O. Wilson (text) & Margaret C. Nelson (illus.)
  
  
• Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by Palfrey, John & Urs Gasser
  
  
• Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Pearce, Fred
  
  
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion–Year History of the Human Body by Shubin, Neil
  
  
• Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked a Nation on Prescription Drugs by Petersen, Melody
  
  
• The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation by Shapin, Steven
  
  
• One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers by Hodges, Andrew
  
  
• Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Zimmer, Carl
  
  
• Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Schutt, Bill (text) & Patricia Wynne (illus.)
  
  
• Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Gazzaniga, Michael
  
  
• The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking To Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Susskind, Leonard
  
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Roach, Mary
  

Whither CISTI and the Canadian War on Science

Many of you will have heard of CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, one of the premier scientific libraries in the world and a key document delivery provider for universities everywhere.

Well, apparently the Government of Canada doesn't think that this is such a good thing to have because, I guess, everything is on Google for free.

Here's the recent announcement (via) (emphasis mine):

An announcement from CISTI as to the upcoming changes:

Dear colleagues,

I would like to share some news with you regarding upcoming changes to CISTI as a result of the recently approved Canadian federal government budget.

Over the course of 2008, the National Research Council (NRC) was included in the Government of Canada’s Strategic Review http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/media/nr-cp/2009/0206a-eng.asp process. As a result, NRC will be realigning resources and programs, which will include major changes to CISTI.

The NRC Strategic Review plan focuses on the issue of ‘core role of government’. For NRC-CISTI, this will be realized through the spin-off of NRC Research Press and the transformation to new delivery models of the Information Intelligence Services and National Science Library Programs.

CISTI will continue to exist but will function on a significantly smaller scale, and will seek to deliver some services via private sector vendors or partners. The provision of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information remains a priority for NRC and the Government of Canada. CISTI will continue to partner with other organizations to fulfill its core role as part of Canada’s innovation infrastructure, as feasible under the new model.

The option we have recommended for the Research Press is to move to a new not-for-profit corporate entity to permit a continued commitment to provide a viable Canadian S&T publishing option. Free electronic access to Research press journals for Canadians is in question due to the projected loss of DSP support.

It is too early to say how these changes will affect the way we work with you. The proposed program transformations will require investigation of feasibility and best options, consultation with staff, potential partners and stakeholders, and planning. This planning phase will occur in 2009, with implementation beginning in early 2010. You will be consulted as CISTI moves into the planning phase, and I will provide you with more information when I have more details.

CISTI’s core value of delivering quality STM information service remains unchanged and we will try to minimize the impact of these changes on our clients and stakeholders. However, this year is going to be a very challenging one for everyone at CISTI due to the scale and complexity of the proposed changes and the ambiguity around how some of them will be implemented.

Sincerely,

Pam Bjornson

Director General, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
Directrice gnrale, Institut canadien de l’information scientifique et technique
National Research Council Canada | 1200 Montreal Road, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Conseil national de recherches Canada | 1200, chemin Montral, Ottawa (ON) K1A 0R6
Tel/Tl: 613-993-2341 | Fax: 613-952-9112

Thanks to a FriendFeed pal, I see this letter to opposition leader Michael Ignatieff framing a possible response to the government's actions:

The lion’s share of these cuts to the NRC are shouldered by the National Science Library CISTI. From the present budget of about $48M the current budget by NRC to CISTI for 2010 is targeted at $16M - a dramatic drop of close to 70%. While some proportion of this cut will be accounted for by the planned privatization of the NRC Press this measure represents a major slashing of public spending on the basic infrastructure of science and technology: knowledge. At a time when scholarly science libraries are transforming from bricks and mortar repositories of papers and books to sophisticated information retrieval engines in specific fields of science, our country needs more, not less, investment in next-generation digital libraries as well as time to implement them.

Sigh. It seems that the current government has begun it's own little war on science. In particular, check out this article from today's Globe and Mail. I'll excerpt it below, but it's well worth reading the whole depressing thing:

So while the Barack Obama administration in Washington has added $10-billion (U.S.) to finance basic research in the United States, the three agencies that back basic research in Canada must cut spending by $148-million over the next three years.

CIHR, for example, Canada's main funding body for medical research, has to find about $35-million in savings by 2012, and $28-million of that is by eliminating a program that provided grants to research teams.

*snip*

The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which had been financing his work, received no new money in budget 2009.

CFACS, like Genome Canada, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, was one of 14 agencies created in 2000 to finance particular areas of peer-reviewed research.

But without new funding, CFACS will shut down by March 2010 and 24 research networks that have studied climate change and related issues will close down with it.

Meanwhile, NSERC's priorities do not involve funding climate-change research, he said, "and there are not many places you can go to for this money."

"As a citizen I have to question whether upgrading facilities is a good idea if there's no one there to run them," said Dr. Drummond. "I don't want to demonize anybody, but you have to question the wisdom."

*snip*

"I think it's a fundamental philosophy of the Conservative government that they don't see the value in basic research," said Dr. Boone. "We'd like to stay in Canada," he adds, "but there's only two options: You stick it out and wait till the government changes or you go somewhere else."

Computing Surveys on cheminformatics, online community success and web page classification

From the latest issue, v41i2:

• Chemoinformatics—an introduction for computer scientists by Nathan Brown
  
  
• Web page classification: Features and algorithms by Xiaoguang Qi, Brian D. Davison (OA version)
  
  
• A life-cycle perspective on online community success by Alicia Iriberri, Gondy Leroy (OA version)

Twenty-nine reports about the future of academic libraries

First of all, apologies for the insanely long list of reports, white papers, etc. I'm clearly obsessed. I think they are all freely available, although a couple may require registration to demonstrate a higher ed institutional affiliation.

1. Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education
   
   
2. How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content: Comparing the changing user
   behaviour between 2005 and 2008 and its impact on publisher web site design and function
   
   
3. College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources
   
   
4. Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World
   
   
5. Generations Online in 2009
   
   
6. The Future of the Internet III
   
   
7. Networked Workers: Most workers use the internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them
   
   
8. Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services
   
9. 2009 Horizon Report
   
   
10. Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development
    
    
11. National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data
    
    
12. Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries
    
    
13. Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources
    
    
14. Skills, Role & Career Structure of Data Scientists & Curators: Assessment of Current Practice & Future Needs
    
    
15. Semantic Enrichment: The Key to Successful Knowledge Extraction from STM Literature
    
    
16. No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century
    
    
17. Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization
    A White Paper
    
    
18. A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States
    
    
19. Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space
    
    
20. Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication: Results of an Investigation Conducted by Ithaka for the Association of Research Libraries
    
    
21. The Next Generation of Academics: A Report on a Study Conducted at the University of Rochester
    
    
22. Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
    
    
23. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008
    
    
24. Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits
    
    
25. More People, Not Just More Stuff: Developing a New Vision for Research Cyberinfrastructure
    
    
26. Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences
    
    
27. Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
    
    
28. Transformational Times:. An Environmental Scan Prepared for the ARL Strategic Plan Review Task Force
    
    
29. Finding Context: What Today’s College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age

Sorry about the science-centric nature of many of the reports I've mentioned. My interest in the future of academic libraries is much broader than just a scitech focus so I would really appreciate any readers out there who can suggest reports that are relevant to the various other academic areas: business, humanities, social science, arts, etc.

Zotero 1.5 Beta with multi-computer syncing is released

This is a potential game-changer in the citation management wars.

The Beta version of Zotero 1.5 has been released.

The most notable new features are:

Syncing

• Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
  
• Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
  
• Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a WebDAV server (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).

Other New Features

• Automatic detection of PDF metadata.
  
• Automatic detection and support for proxy servers.
  
• Trash can with restore item functionality
  
• Rich-text notes
  
• A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.
  
• Support for Endnote® export styles

Syncing being the feature that pretty well everybody was waiting for.

This is really interesting for a number of reasons. Most of all, Zotero is a free and open source software package, so it can potentially be customized to work for local groups. Zotero is now a very real competitor to RefWorks and others for consortial and institutional site licenses and local implementations.

Looking forward, if I were interested in designing and building a cradle to grave research environment for researchers, Zotero has to be a candidate for the citation management component.

Two things I'd still like to see are some social sharing features like with Del.icio.us or Connotea. Looking forward to that seamless research environment, it would also be great if they could work out integration to an online document preparation system like Google Docs or Zoho.

I'm about to start some pretty intense literature reviewing myself pretty soon, and I have to admit I was still unsure which way I would go, citation management-wise. Now I'm thinking I'll give Zotero a shot.

Friday Fun: Expo 67!

Wow, is this ever a blast from the past.

For over 150 years, world's fairs have fascinated the general public with their blend of futuristic optimism and desire to entertain the masses. In 1967, the city of Montreal played host to Expo 67 from April to October. This particular world's fair also set a single-day attendance record when 569,000 visitors came on the third day it was open. The Library and Archives of Canada has created this virtual tour of the fair, complete with information about all the pavilions, activities, and special guests. In the "Pavilions" section, visitors can watch a movie about these unique structures, and also learn about how each country chose to represent their nation at the fair. Another section that's well-worth checking out is the "News Report" area. Here visitors can read some of the news headlines from that heady time. You won't want to leave the site without downloading the Expo 67 logo for your screen saver or checking out the theme song to the fair, "Hey Friend, Say Friend".

The virtual exhibition, created by the Library and Archives Canada along with the Archives of the City of Montreal, is absolutely fantastic. It really gives a feel what it was like to be there.

I should know. I was there. Born in 1962, of course, I was only a little kid at the time, not quite 5 during that summer. However, my father worked as an engineer at Expo so we could get in for free. I remember going an awful lot that summer. I also very clearly remember tons of family from across Canada staying with us during Expo; we even took had some families we didn't know stay with us, which I think was probably quite common during that more innocent era.

Lots more links here and there's also a solid article in Wikipedia.

(via The Scout Report.)

If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume (Part 3)

Yes, I know, I only planned two parts to this series but I have to admit that it's something that really interests me and I'm passionate about and I do keep finding more interesting posts to highlight. In that spirit, I hearby declare this series open-ended.

Once again, as Daniel Lemire so aptly puts it, Blogging is really part of our day jobs!:

I decided to copy Daniel Tunkelang’s idea and maintain a list of some people who read my blog. This is not meant to be an ego-boosting or name-dropping project. My goal is to prove that blogging is a serious business. Blogging is part of my day job! Indeed, this list proves that professional networking results from my blog.

Don't worry, I'm not tempted to start a similar list for this blog. But it you want to unlurk or declare yourself a scitech liblog reader, feel free to do so in the comments.

And speaking of students, I believe that blogging has a lot of benefits for building reputation at the very outset of a career, as it can really help to distinguish one candidate from another. In other words: Blogs as E-portfolios: Better for the Students, Cheaper for the .edu.

The original idea of an e-portfolio was to help students keep a record of the work they did. This was intended to help them learn and show progress (the faculty and institution value) and get a job (the student's value). While there is some tension between the faculty and the students with their respective values, both are good simple goals.

Companies were set up to build technology to facilitate this collection and distribution of information, but times changed and new methods have become clear, easier, more effective, and cheaper.

Blogs are a much better way to go.

A simple rule of thumb: it's not an e-portfolio if Google can't find it. (emphasis added)

There's lots of good stuff about the benefits of blogging for students as well as some discussion of possible drawbacks.

When it all comes down to it, this is all really about something called a Personal Marketing Plan. From an academia point of view, putting it that way can seem a bit crass and distasteful. On the other hand, it's also a reality that academia is about reputation and reputation management. And that's what marketing is about too.

Some think marketing yourself is what you do when you need a new job, but in fact that’s not the case at all - it’s actually about having a voice in our industry, creating a name and reputation for yourself, and shaping the future. Also, there is a symbiotic relationship between any company you work for and your personal brand. Smart companies embrace this behavior because they understand the value in nurturing talent. Ideally, all parties win.

Take on marketing yourself as your personal challenge and an ongoing project with no end date. If you were an interior designer, would you hire someone else to furnish your house? I doubt it, what would that say about your skills as a designer? An interior designer’s proudest work should be their own interior, just as you should be your own personal case study of success.

This post is generally excellent and I think well worth reading in its entirety and I think the final point is a very powerful one:

The real trick isn’t to make it about you

Here’s a hint: market others, share their content, put them in the spotlight - don’t even worry about directly promoting yourself. The smartest way to market yourself is actually to make it not about you.

It's our passion for our profession that builds our reputation, not the other way around.

Friday Fun: Chess Biathalon?

Ok, this is seriously odd:

What a great idea! In an area where there is lots of snow, and where most people are accomplished Nordic skiers, why not mobilise the chess enthusiasts amongst them to take part in a Chess Biathlon. You ski and stop, not to shoot at targets, but to solve chess puzzles. Is this the first time that such an event was staged? It is certainly worth emulating.

*snip*

As the students navigated the course, they stopped to write down solutions for the mate puzzles at the different stations. Some worked in pairs, others were solo. At the finish line everyone's course time was recorded. They each turned in their solutions sheets to the trail assistant. For each correct solution time was subtracted from their finishing mark. Incorrect solutions added time to the finish. Skipped puzzles added double the time.

Of course, not as odd as chess boxing.

Sixteen books about the future of academic libraries

And how come none of them have librar* in the title?

Here's a bunch of books I've read (or will be reading) to help me figure out what's going on.

1. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
   
   
2. The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
   
   
3. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
   
   
4. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville
   
   
5. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
   
   
6. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
   
   
7. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
   
   
8. Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow
   
   
9. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
   
   
10. The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
    
    
11. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler
    
    
12. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
    
    
13. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle
    
    
14. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn
    
    
15. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo
    
    
16. Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now by Gary Hall
    

It could just as easily been twenty or thirty. They're also evenly split between books I've already read and ones that I feel I need to read. The books I haven't read would constitute an entry in the "Books I'd Like to Read" category. (The Doctorow book I've read but not reviewed yet.) As usual, if you know of any books out there that I should read but haven't listed, feel free to let me know in the comments.

And what's up with me choosing teh ye olde paeper bookes for looking into the future anyway -- shouldn't I have chosen blogs, wikis, podcasts, video and ejournals and the like? Go on, set me straight. What should I be reading?

(Next up, I think I'll see if I can round up a list of relatively recent reports and white papers that look interesting. Yes, I'm obsessed, so shoot me.)

If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume (Part 2)

Welcome to Part II of my musings on how a blog can help you in your professional life. Before going any further, you might want to check out Part I if you haven't seen that already.

I'd also like to be more explicit about chicken/egg of interplay between our passion and commitment to the profession that blogging brings out and how that directly feeds into concrete reputation-building and the benefits that may result. In general, I believe that if you blog to become famous (in other words, to explicitly build your reputation, with cynicism not passion), that will be your reputation. If you blog to share and grow and explore, it's that passion that will hopefully influence your reputation-building efforts and that any concrete benefits that you accrue will reflect that.

Blogging isn't for everyone. Blog because it's what you want to do, not because you feel you have to.


That being said, I really I really like how bluntly Neville Hobson puts it: Your Blog is Your CV.

What do you want people to find out about you? Time to think about that. And if there’s anything you’ve posted about yourself that you’d rather clean up, let’s say, read Scoble’s post as it has some good advice on what to do to sort that out.

Hmm, let’s change the title of this post. This works better: Google is your CV.

Kyle Lacy also gives a couple of good nuts-and-bolts Top 10 lists of what we can learn from blogging, Ben Barden's and his own, in the post 20 Things We Have Learned from Blogging. Let's take a look at a couple from both lists:

Barden

1. You Need to Choose a Topic You Know and Like. (This is number one)

2. You need to enjoy Writing. (You need to enjoy thought promotion and learning. I hated writing before I started blogging. Just believe in what you are writing about)

6. You don’t usually get links by asking for them.

8. Your posts need to be different

10. You’ll meet some great people. (Amen)


Lacy

4. Use Google Alerts for content ideas. It has worked for me numerous times.

6. Get out into the community and network offline. It will help build further support

7. You should always put your blog URL on your business card and email signature.

8. Always measure the time you are spending online. If the return is not there… switch up your strategy.

9. Do not focus too intently on content. Get the thing written and change it later.

Scientist David De Roure has a new blog and this is some of what his rationale is for blogging (and really, I can't think of a better way to explain the drive to blog that De Roure's): Reasons to be Blogging 1 2 3
.

But I want to. I lead a hectic (possibly crazy…) academic life where I get to work with experts in many disciplines - I get a unique, perhaps privileged, view of the world and it’s one I want to share. For example, when I’ve been in a good panel, there is information to be shared and debate to be continued too - time to blog. And from where I sit, not only do I get to see things but I get to see the connections between things - what better mechanism than a blog for communicating that interconnectedness? So for me it’s not ego, it’s duty and the appropriate tool.

And it’s part of my research - research is about connectedness and i want to understand how to achieve it. I see a compelling analogy between the informal communications of the great scientists of old - the “invisible college” communicating by letter and annotated book margin - and the emerging research practices of open science and Science 2.0. I see the benefit in understanding how the scholarly knowledge cycle can evolve, especially in the context of the shift to digital and data-centric research.

To sum up these two laundry list posts, to answer the questions of "why blog" or "isn't twitter better than real blogging", I really like what Hutch Carpenter has to say: Why Professionals Should Continue to Blog in the Era of Twitter. I'm only including the first of Carpenter's main points, but the whole post is terrific and definitely worth reading.

But blogs are the professional’s curriculum vitae. They are a standing record of strong thin king about a subject. When you devote the time to put together a blog post covering your field, you’re likely doing this:

• Research
  
• Analysis
  
• Linking to others
  
• Establishing your voice
  
• Influencing the thinking of others
  
• Showing the ability to pull together longer form thinking, a requirement in professional work

My own experience is that if you blog, every so often you pop out a signature piece. The kind of post that resonates with others and establishes your position in your field. These blog posts receive a lot of views, get linked to and turn up in Google searches. When you get one of these, congratulations! You have successfully put your flag in the ground for your field.

Tweets don’t do that. Tweets create a tapestry of someone, they foster ambient awareness. This has value in its own right. But they’re not vehicles for heavier thinking. They don’t demonstrate your capacity to size up an issue or idea and bring it home.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn now lets you add blogs to your professional profile. What’s going to be more valuable to you when people are running searches? Tweets or well-thought blog posts?

So, there we go. My feelings on blogging. Decide for yourself whether or not you could integrate blogging into your own professional development plan. It's definitely worth it for pretty well anyone to at least give it a try. And if you don't have a professional development plan, I have to say that blogging will help you define and refine your goals and interests. Believe it or not, just writing a little about a lot of different things really will help you figure out what's important to you.

BookCamp Toronto

I just registered for something called BookCamp Toronto:

BookCampToronto is a free unconference about:

The future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

DETAILS:
Date: Saturday, June 6, 2009 (9am-5pm)
Location: MaRS Centre 101 College Street [map]
Cost: FREE!
What to bring: Your ideas about the future of books.

For more info see:
http://bookcampto.pbwiki.com

or, contact:
Hugh McGuire
hugh@bookoven.com
+1.514.464.2047

I don't know much about it or the organizers, but it looks like it's going to be a very lively and interesting event.

One of the few great things about FaceBook is that sometimes someone else in your network can surface these kinds of things for you. Also, take a look at the Globe and Mail story. Registration is apparently capped at 150 and it seems to be at about 125 now. I imagine they'll set up a waiting list or even let the registration drift a bit higher as free unconferences usually have a lot of no-shows. On the other hand, why risk it. If you're interested, register while you can.

Cool engineering conferences

A couple of conference announcements have crossed my real and virtual desks lately and I think that they are both more than interesting enough to warrant a mention.

First of all, thanks to Sharon Murphy of Queens for bringing The Sixth International Conference on Innovation and Practices in Engineering Design and Engineering Education to my attention at OLA this past week. The conference is July 27 - 29, 2009 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

From the general call for papers:

The sixth CDEN International Design Engineering Conference will focus on design innovation and engineering education that are such essential ingredients of creating a new future for the people of Canada and the world. Submissions can include, but are not limited to, the philosophy of design; tools and techniques for effective and successful design; methods and tools for designing to meet needs; methods for and research into the assessment of design; teaching and promoting design; humanitarian design; design successes and failures; tear-downs of designs and design-processes; the infrastructure required for design; lessons and methods used in non-engineering design fields; design for commercialization; and related topics.

The goal of the conference is to explore design practice and teaching that leads to better lives for Canadians.

Sharon's coordinating the technical session on "Information Research and Knowledge Management" and would love to see proposals from librarians. You can contact her at murphys at queensu dot ca.


The other cool conference is Engineer of the Future 2.0: Summit on Transforming Engineering Education, on March 31 & April 1, 2009.

Although curriculum reform has been on engineering minds for some time, it is clear that reforms are difficult to sustain and diffuse, and often even when innovations are won, it is difficult to maintain the organizational will to continually improve and adapt. Indeed, the problem of effective educational transformation is as much organizational and political as it is pedagogical and curricular; and it may be the case that effective engineering education transformation requires not a top-down approach, but rather an open-source approach in which diverse voices gather at the grassroots with a variety of views and methodological approaches and openly and actively share best practices.

To explore this possibility, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and the University of Illinois have joined forces to put on the Summit on the Engineer of the Future 2.0. The event will be held on April 1, 2009 (Wednesday, with opening reception the night before) at Olin College in Needham, MA and will feature a keynote talk by Dean Karan Watson, Texas A&M, a panel discussion of successful engineers of the future (recent grads 5-10 years out with a track record of entrepreneurial, corporate, organizational, or societal success), and brainstorming and involvement sessions in the afternoon. The event will be followed on Thursday with the opportunity to visit Olin College.

Submissions here.

Both conferences look fabulous and unfortunately I won't be at either. It's doubly disappointing because Hamilton is in my back yard but the time is right in the middle of my summer vacation this year.

If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume (Part 1)

I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an interesting way to frame this rather long list of links I've collected over the last little while.

The point here is to make the case that blogging is good for your career. It's been good for me and it's been good for a lot of other people and I think it has potential for everyone.

Now, is everyone a blogger-in-waiting? Of course not. Would absolutely everyone actually benefit from blogging? Probably not. And if absolutely everyone did take up blogging, would the massive amount of noise generated actually cancel itself out and end up hardly benefiting anyone at all? Probably.

That being said, let's take a look at what's been making me think about blogging lately.

First of all, let's take a look at the Wired article that started all the fuss:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

As Walt Crawford said during his recent OLA presentation, you know for sure that blogs have entered the useful tools stage of the technology life cycle when Wired says that they're dead, buried and useless because it's no longer possible to become a famous blogger overnight.

Well, I don't know about you, but I long ago gave up on being an A-list blog. So, does blogging actually offer anything to the average person? Is it possible to use a blog to build a reputation in a niche area?

Let's see what the blogosphere is telling us about these questions:

What's the motivation for any user-generated content on the web anyways? Why toil away in obscurity, commenting on YouTube videos or gaming sites or anywhere? Because there truly is a reputation economy out there that is divorced from money. And if you can build reputation that way, it's often possible to leverage that for real-world benefit (or just egoboo): Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free-Labor Economy

Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others.

Of course, a lot of what happens is merely attention seeking, shouting "me me me" into the void. What's the point of attracting attention?

Attention is easy to measure:

• You can record the number of people subscribing to your blog.
  
• You can count the number of people citing your research papers.
  
• You can point to your number of followers on Twitter or your number of friends on Facebook.

However, I do not blog or write research papers merely to grab attention. Instead, I seek to increase my reputation. While attention fluctuates depending on your current actions, reputation builds up over time based on your reliability, your honesty, and your transparency. To build a good reputation, you do not need to do anything extraordinary: you just need to be consistent over a long time.

So, blogging can build your reputation.

What does a library school student have to say about the benefits. These ideas are certainly applicable to anyone starting out in a new career or even faced with a potential job hunt mid-career:

A list of reasons why every library school student should become a blogger:

1. Self-promotion.
   Let's face it: when you apply for your first full-time gig after graduation, your potential employer will be going through a stack of CVs from people just like you, and every single candidate will have an MLIS, and the vast majority of them will have some experience working in the field. If you don't make your CV stand out, it will never make it to the top of the pile, so you need something to show how special you are. Blogging shows that you're interested in the field and have ideas to contribute, so when you include your blog's URL on your CV, employers will take notice...
   
   
2. Becoming part of the community
   As students, we're already part of a community; library programs tend to be small enough that we get to know most of our classmates, and this is important since we will likely work with many of these people in the future. But wouldn't it be great to have a network of contacts outside of school, made up of people who share your interests and are able to provide advice and support?...
   
   
3. The opportunity to put your thoughts into writing
   If you're like me and enjoy writing, then keeping a blog is a fun way to organize your thoughts. If you're not like me, then keeping a blog is a way to encourage yourself to practice your writing.

There also seem to be a lot of caveats to the whole blogging thing in academia, though. Are the downsides real or just myths?

Blogging is dangerous for non-tenured faculty: Blogging will not get you tenure. Neither will giving talks worldwide. Tenure is usually granted because you were able to hold a decent research program, and you showed respect for the students. However, if blogging prevents you from getting tenure, something is very wrong with your blogging or your school...

Serious researchers have no time for blogging: Indeed, there is always another paper to write and more time to spend at the library, isn’t there? Let me quote Downes on this: If you are spending time in meetings, spending time traveling or commuting to work, spending time reading books and magazines, spending time telephoning people (or worse, on hold, or playing phone tag) then you are wasting time that you could be spending connecting to people online.

Blogging distracts you away from the research: bloggers do not tend to write about their latest research results. We tend to write about ideas that will not make it into our research papers. Is it a distraction? It might be, but does blogging cause you to lose focus in your research? I doubt it...

That's it for now. Next time we'll have four more posts that take a look at the concrete benefits of blogging.

Update 2009.02.11: Part 2!

Best Science Books 2008: Strategy + Business

Thanks to Kris Fitzpatrick of the IEEE for pointing me to this rather extensive list of business books from 2008.

The catagories include General, Strategy, Life Stories, Marketing, Rhetoric, Innovation, Globalization, Human Capital, Capitalism and Community, Management and Miscellany.

In particular, there are a number of very interesting-looking books on community building. The relevant ones from all the lists are here:

• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
  
  
• Sony vs. Samsung: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants’ Battle for Global Supremacy by Sea-Jin Chang
  
  
• Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer
  
  
• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen
  
  
• The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan
  
  
• The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Stephen A. Marglin
  
  
• Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

OLA2009: My session on Science 2.0 & community building

My presentation was this morning and I thought it went very well. The attendance was around 30-35, which is pretty good for a niche topic in a conference with so many parallel sessions. There were some good questions, the timing worked out ok (which is good for me as I can tend to run longer that planned), the audience seemed to be following and nodding in the appropriate ways at the appropriate time. Also, at the end a few people came up to the front and had some very kind things to say.

So, a success.

Here are the slides:



The non-embedded version is here.

For those that are interested, I'll include the references I read but didn't link in the presentation here:

http://del.icio.us/jdupuis/science2.0
http://del.icio.us/jdupuis/escience
http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2008/09/science-in-21st-century-reading-list.html

Finally, I'd like to thank Alison Stirling for convening my session and for her very kind and generous introduction.