Librarian of Fortune

Carrot2 - Clustering tool

My latest InfoTip newsletter looks at Carrot2, a way-cool search results clustering tool. I love this tool!

Steal This Wi-Fi

Here is a great column from Wired magazine about why  Bruce Schneier doesn't secure his home wifi network.   I don't secure mine, either... mostly because of karma. I appreciate using free wifi when I'm on the road, and I figure that I should return the favor. Of course, I live out in the boondocks, so my hunch is that only 3 or 4 neighbors are close enough to take advantage of my generosity. But if their ISP croaks one day, they've at least got a backup. And yes, all of them have secured wifi networks.

library metrics

On BUSLIB (a business librarians' email discussion list), someone asked for suggestions in what and how to measure her library's activities. My thoughts:

The first thing to keep in mind is to count things that matter to the bottom line. Upper management doesn't care how many ILLs you did, how many books you accessioned or how many journal ToCs you routed. In fact, I'm in the middle of a best-practice study and have found that most librarians aren't doing as much counting as they are collecting -- instead of telling their management that they handled X research requests, they tell stories about the project that saved the company from going into an unprofitable market, identified a new competitor, and so on. Solicit these from your patrons after EVERY job by using my famous MEB Evaluation Form:
Ask only three questions:

• Did we meet your information need?
• Would you like us to do any additional work on this, or set up an alert?
• How was this information useful for you?

Not everyone will respond, but you will wind up collecting some great testimonials. These are what really tell the story of the value of the library, not just numbers.  Write up a quarterly report to your management, telling them 4 or 5 of the "best" stories, along with a summary of new initiatives you're exploring (an internal blog? RSS feeds of relevant news? a wiki of industry acronyms? etc).

Another option is to develop some kind of multiplier for how much time your research saves the other employees. It takes some work to figure out a number, but I've seen libraries use multipliers of 3 to 8 - that is, they found that one hour of a librarian's time (at $X/hour) saved another employee 5 hours (at $X*2/hour). At one library I worked at, instead of reporting the number of research hours we did, we reported the value of time saved, and it would often be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The bottom line is to think about how other overhead departments report their activities. For example, I'll bet that HR doesn't talk about number of job postings processed but looks at increased employee retention or other metrics that matter to the bottom line. In fact, you might want to chat with someone in HR, the general counsel's office, financial office, investor relations, etc. and find out how they report their activities to the C-suite. Steal (er, borrow) all the best ideas. Focus on providing the same kind of value-add metrics as other departments within your company.

Live.com does sentiment analysis

I just discovered that Live.com is trying to actually understand consumer reviews of popular computer and electronic products such as cameras, printers, cell phones, and so on.

So, here's how it works.  Type in a query like canon digital cameras. Just below the sponsored sites, there's a box for "Most popular products" with images and links for individual camera models. Click any of these links and you'll see a summary of the camera, consumer reviews scraped from C|net.com, eBay reviews, NewEgg.com, Amazon.com and so on. Interestingly, there are also graphs showing the percent of positive comments on factors such as size, ease of use, photo quality, features, price and so on. Click on any of those factors and you will see just the review comments about that particular feature.

What I think is cool is that it's an aggregated site with feedback from a number of sources, and that it's a public effort at  sentiment analysis, always a challenging exercise.

Power Networking for Introverts: The Introvert Advantage

Marcy Phelps, a friend and colleague, just blogged a review of Power Networking for Introverts: The Introvert Advantage. As a fellow-"innie", I'm finding the book very helpful, particularly in understanding how I can feel perfectly comfortable in a public speaking role, but hate the receptions afterward.