Nine Wikipedia articles, only historical entries, were compared against articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Dictionary of American History and American National Biography Online to compare Wikipedia’s accuracy. and the conclusions as expressed by Holman Rector:
“Wikipedia’s accuracy rate was 80 percent compared with 95-96 percent accuracy within the other sources. This study does support the claim that Wikipedia is less reliable than other reference resources”.
I was told afterwards I did a “american failure”. I didn’t discover it myself you see. In Sweden at least our view of americans are they do not know anything about geography outside the States. It refers to a documentary TV clip from the late 70’s or early 80’s at the swedish DDR-public-service-television (at that time we just had two channels) where a middleaged lady pointed out Sweden on the map, but pointing to Iran.
I apparently pointed out Austria at slide 5 and saying Germany and making Oliver Obst confused. It wasn’t one of my “Borat way of jokes” ;-) Maybe it was the light, maybe it was that I’m colour-blind, they have problems with light green and dark green I think. No, I’ll stop with finding excuses here.
It felt like I was running 100 meters trying to hold the time of 15 minutes and also trying to say something at least half-clever at the end. With that stern but justifying look of EAHIL-evalutor of Eva Alopaeus keeping track on me and my statements or whatever that gang of evaluators are happen to evaluate ;-)
Thanks to you listeners. The interaction from you during and after my talks are one the most important parts for me. I will try to keep on as long as you don’t throw tomates at me. (Implicit: It’s the only way to get rid of me).
Well, I maybe hadn’t that exhaustive answers to your questions afterwards, but I didn’t want to infer on my followers time and I was just exhausted in that bunker. Next time I will demand for a microphone attached at my ear and not like that singsong microphone. I mean I’m no singer as you may did discover. It’s not that I don’t like microphones, I just like similar to italians to wave my hands freely. In a non-typically northern Sweden-way.
We did chat some at the check pub near the railway station saturday afternoon and “Eureka”, I had my new title for the call of papers of some cosy librarian conference: Could men get pregnant? - information use and critical appraisal in medical librarianship. If you steal the title I already have a patent licensed as number 6,7677678688768,876876768768,76767868,76876786 in Über States.
-Many librarians think EBLIP is to time-consuming. Although I will try to inspire you to start with EBLIP, said Lotta Haglund from Karolinska Institutet University Library (KIB), Sweden when presenting her (and David Herron’s) paper: Implementing EBLIP to stimulate professional development.
She presented three bigger efforts they made in EBLIP at KIB. First was the so called Journal club. There are several models on having a journal club. She explaind their model. Here is a brief description. First they scan literature to find interested articles and specially they try to find hot topics. Every participating staff member read and evaluate the article for about 2 hours. The journal club meeting then takes about 1 hour and about 6 persons participating. They look at the quality of the journal generally, what type of publication is it, who are the authors and have they published before?, the impact of the research like has it been cited before, the robustness of the content and how do it stand up to critical appraisal, objectives of the article and of course some more other aspects of the article.
“Critical Skills Training in Appraisal for Librarians (CRISTAL) used purpose-specific checklists based on the Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature”.
And the outcome of the journal club was for example increased reading of professional literature, changes to postgraduate teaching, changed perspective to evidence.
Next thing they’ve done is production of evidence called the palpus program. Objectives were to find out students need of services. It started last spring and they indentified 4 groups.
Undergraduate students that were interviewed (and bribed with a pay-for-lunch ;-) and answered to a questionnaire. Students talked a lot about how they’ve been treated by the librarians in the library.
PhD students was asked at the end of a course. They wanted academic writing support in all aspects. But my question is how much support should librarians give here? They also wanted updates about databases changes etc.
Structured interviews with academic teachers. They wanted increased support functions for just-in-time help.
At last 8 biomedical researchers were shadowed by observation and also interviews. How do they search was the important question? They had little knowledge about library competencies and Google is their king.
The results of these findings were for example: suggesting well defined activities to the library management, suggesting methods for evaluating these activities.
-We have to try even harder to know what they want, Lotta Haglund said.
At last they also made some collaborative writing to try help the academic author. General support areas like word processing, information retrieval, reference management, making figures, language correction, writing the english summary. The Effects of the collaborative writing were increased knowledge about how to support academics in their writings.
Total conclusion of both journal club, palpus program and collaborative writing were for example:
Increased overall knowledge about EBLIP.
Increased interest in reading LIS literature.
Increased knowledge about critical appraisal.
Increased interest in writing publications in academic journals.
And finally Lotta showed this tremendous Social Media marketing commercial of the EBLIP5 conference in Stockholm next year:
Today Friday 27th June 9.00 Oliver Obst was talking about “Marketing virtual services” at the EAHIL Conference 2008 in Helsinki, FInland. He talked about the libraries and the loss of information monopoly, loss of face-to-face interaction and need for a ROI-philosophy. “How much money is the library saving with their efforts?”, he thought was an important question in this case. He also said libraries are in competition with free resources like Google Books and other services. Some librarians see for example companies offering free resources as a truly cooperating partner like free is always good. I don’t agree with that and as I understood Oliver he has a critical eye of that also.
Oliver showed an investigation of the Münster Medical library products and customer satisfaction with them. The homepage, the teaching and the opening hours as the worst and document delivery, e-journals and handheld computers as the best.
Then he showed all the ways they used to market their library. Let me say it was impressing. They have a blog maintained since 2003. An e-newsletter maintained since 1997, sent out every friday. It has 800 subscribers and they have produced 520 Issues. They have a 3-monthly journal, each issue about 12-16 pages and 45 issues published this far. He also showed how they worked with the content of the articles. Often it’s interviews with user statements and in the text they promote extra-ordinary library services. They also have an URL near the article content to the blog.
They have what he called a knowledge wiki, where the users can get answers of the library services. Their own toolbar for webbrowsing and -searching at: zbmed.ourtoolbar.com. They also produce a podcast irregulary but he said nothing more about that experience during the talk so I asked him afterwards.
Tell me more about your podcast?
-The podcasts are 3 minutes but unfortunately it takes about 2 hours to make. It takes time to cut and read same parts over again. I usually audio record my speeches at conferences and publish it as a podcast. The audio recorder I have with me is excellent. I also have jingles in my podcast. For example I use the sound from a pinball computer game.
Can anyone edit in your knowledge wiki? For example me? :-)
-You have to register and I decide who’s allowed to edit the wiki.
Do you see the wiki as a replacement of the usual textbased web pages?
-Something like that in the future maybe.
Update:
Oliver’s talk at EAHIL recorded by Guus van den Brekel and uploaded at Blip.tv:
On my Linux laptop Amarok is my first chocie for listening to music, which unfortunately isn’t to often these days. I love it and know they also have built in video support in Amarok 2. But Mark Kretschmann says it’s only meant for watching music videos, because their intention is not to be yet another movie player for linux.
Not satisfied with the microblogging tool Twitter mobile version at m.twitter.com? Well, why don’t try Slandr. Library Clips writes about what’s missing in Twitter Mobile and suggests Slandr that uses the Twitter API to make something better. I normally use Jaiku for my swedish microblogging and just sometimes Twitter for english microblogging. Though Jaiku mobile version is good beside one thing: using QWERTY keyboard on my SonyEricsson W960i makes Jaiku veeeery lazy and I heard others with same problem.
“According to Bard we won’t have effort to surf web sites like YouTube to find good content. Instead we will trust someone who will do it for us, for example media companies and bigger players at the market with financial support”.
“Alexander: It is the guy who finds the content that gets paid. Esther: But your friends will do it for free. Alexander: No, they won’t do it for free. In the music industry the idea that record companies is ridiculous because I don’t have the time to go through YouTube to find the talent. YouTube is for the underclass, this is not for the mass media. Somebody has to sort out who has talent and who does not”.
The guy who finds the content gets paid? Well, librarians get paid by taxes (in most cases) and even if there are guys working as librarians (I’m one of them) most of them are females. But Bard perhaps see a future for information searching and gathering entreprenuers.
On the website Videolectures.net I found an interesting lecture by Doug Cutting on Yahoo (former Xerox Research):”Experiences with the Nutch search engine“. He talks about open source and search engines with Lucence, Nucth and Hadoop as examples. If you’re interested in knowing more about using Nutch I highly recommend this talk, lecture, speech or whatever you want to call it.
Steve Burnard, business developer at Adobe says in .net October issue 2007:
“I would remove blogs, for the followiing reasons: They’re personal opinions, usually by people who are unqualified to have an objective opinion. They can be out of date, yet will still be reference as valid”.
David Meerman Scott suggests in a column in Econtent september 2007 vol. 30 No 7, that corporations should hire a journalist instead of having the marketing department or copy writers producing “corporate bullshit” (My words!) as usual:
“A good journalist can create interesting stories about how an organization solves customer problems and then delivers those stories in a variety of forms such as articles, ebooks, web content, podcasts, and video. Consumers will love it. How refreshing to read, listen to, and watch these products of journalistic expertise instead of the usual product come-ons that typical corporations produce”.
He continues:
“…a journalist can be hired at the cost of a typical marketing campaign that usually falls flat anyway”.
Channel Register reports a french man was delivered an Acer laptop with pre-loaded windows and refused to pay for that OS. Now he won the lawsuit in French court. Yesterday I was checking upp Dell.se to look for pre-loaded Linux (Ubuntu) as they offer it in US for their customers. No Linux and I had to choose either Windows XP or Windows vista. When will their be a lawsuit for this in Sweden?
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