Infostructure Tools - eRider Starter Kit

eRider Starter Kit
July 2005

Tactical Technology Collective

A guide to starting, managing, and running an eRider project has been released by the Tactical Technology Collective with funding from OSI's Information Program.

A movement of technology assistance providers working in developing and transition countries has been emerging since 1997. Known as eRiders, their work is based on the Circuit Rider model used successfully in the United States to provide nonprofit organizations with assistance in using technology to build capacities. The eRiding model has been effectively used internationally to bring struggling organizations up to speed in the use of technology to fulfill their mission.Continue Reading...

Pull and Push Communications: Ranganathan's Laws re-interpreted

I strongly feel that Ranganathan's Second and Third Law of Library Science have a direct relationship with pull and push communications strategies. A clarification on this is necessary (to avoid any clash of ideas). There is a bit of overlap in the implications of these two laws. This overlap may sound logical, because, the Second Law is about the choice of information (including seeking behavior and end-user's priorities), and the Third Law is about the choice of medium (including skills) for outreach of the message.***

In short, in both these situations, whether you try to pull or push, you are aiming at establishing a network between the messenger, message, medium and end-user--albeit, with a balance (lest, the Guru, Marshall McLuhan said, message is lost in the medium)

And, here is an excellent piece on the pull strategies, in relation to library marketing situations:

In communications there are two primary models for reaching target audiences. One is called "pull" communications and the other is called "push" communications. We'll outline pull communications now, and in the next issue of Marketing Treasures, we'll talk about push communications.

In talking about the push and pull models, we are not referring to the underlying technology such as RSS, but instead, on the user experience. To embark upon a pull communications strategy is to allow members of your target audience to "pull" your communications at their discretion. In the brick and mortar world, pull communications are used by advertisers to draw customers into retail establishments to receive messages. People elect when and how they will act on the messages in the pull model of communications. In the virtual world, pull communications is exemplified by blogs, wikis, and web sites. Continue reading Marketing Treasures July 2006

Related approaches to understand Web, Marketing and the nexus:

The Five Laws of Web Marketing
1. The Law of Dead--End Street
2. The Law of Giving and Selling
3. The Law of trust
4. The Law of Pull and Push
5. The Law of the Niche [continue reading [pdf]]

The Five Mutable Laws of Web Marketing

[PDF] EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR INFORMATION EMPOWERMENT SPECIALISTS IN THE NETWORKED SOCIETY: INDIAN EXPERIENCE, C.R. Karisiddappa
... should therefore be seen to some extent as reflecting the ‘Pull-Push Effect’ of ... Ranganathan who infused scientific method in the field and that marked ...

Digital libraries, digital containers, “library patrons”, and visions for the future, Wallace Koehler
I am going to suggest that Ranganathan's five laws are as valid today and ... of automated push and or pull services from libraries and from a distance. ...

Library Media & PRs' 10 Tips for Marketing Virtual Reference Services

See my other posts:

Visualizing the Emerging Nexus: Five Laws of Ranganathan and the WWW Era

Market Research Resources via Libraries
--------
*** Thus spake the Law Giver, Ranganathan:
Second Law: Every Reader His or Her Book
Clearly, it is the business of librarians to know the reader, to know the books, and to actively help in the finding by every person of his or her book.

Third Law: Every Book its Reader
This law addresses the fundamental issue of open access. Open access means that the collection can be examined with as much freedom as if it was the reader's private library.
Source

Prof. A. Neelamgehan was kind enough to add a few words to this post:
Dear Dr. Md. Taher:
As you are aware in most library’s only about 75% of the collection get used frequently. Dr.S R Ranganathan’s Third Law is more concerned with those documents that are not frequently used; what measures that the library / librarian should undertake to push and bring those items to the potential users’ attention – including special exhibitions, lectures by scholars about these resources, etc.
Best wishes
A. Neelameghan

Blog: Vanity Presses or Archives of Human Thought

Librarians, archivists and other information professionals are getting interested in the debate. Here is one more live discussion:

Blogs: Vanity Presses or Archives of Human Thought? Nancy McCormack & Paola Durando. COLAJ:
Canadian Online Library and Archives Journal, Volume 1, Number 1 (2005 ? - )

Blogs, or weblogs, are a highly popular and influential means of communication. Should librarians enter the blogosphere to better communicate with colleagues and users, or are blogs a waste of time? Nancy McCormack, Law Librarian at Queen's University at Kingston and her colleague Paola Durando, a Health Sciences Librarian at the same institution, argue both sides.

See my previous posts on an information professional's perpectives:

Visualizing Traffic At My Blog Via Mapping The Pathways

Visualizing Comments on Blogs

Blog-to Show

Google Trend - Another Way to Visualize the Blogosphere

Blog As A Teaching Tool

The Technique of Song and Sound Visualization -- see also: the Laughing Librarian's Blogga song

Blogging Spree: Trends in Information Visualization

What's a blog - WYSIWYG

Infostructure Conferences

This will be a running post: Updated 6 Sept., 2006
Here, infostructure, is used in context of the a) digital libraries and b) search process (capturing, seeking, searching, browsing, matching, finding, sorting, storing, retrieving, etc.). Infostructure, all-ado-about information, per se, is much more important, than the infrastructure (aka technology).
Infostructure is gradually emarging with new faces, interfaces in today's information society.

DRTC/ISI announces International conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries. February 21-23, 2007 at Bangalore, India. contact details:

A.R.D.Prasad
Convener, ICSD -2007
Documentation Research and Training Centre,
Indian Statistical Institute,
8th Mile, Mysore Road, Bangalore - 560 059
Karnataka, INDIA
Phone: 91-80-28483002/3/4 extsn no. 496
Fax : 91-80-28484265
email: ard@drtc.isibang.ac.in
website:http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/DRTC/ardcv.html

Report of 2006 Search Engine Meeting, by Martin White, @ The Intranet Focus:

Until the recent arrival of the Enterprise Search Summit the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting was the conference to attend if you wanted to track what was happening in the technology and business of search. ...
Many of the papers at the conference were concerned with how to effectively search 'the long tail' a major issue in enterprise search because a searcher has to be confident that they have found all relevant documents, not just a sample. Which leads me neatly into an excellent paper by Steve Arnold on the way in which search engines are 'managing' relevance. An essay based on his presentation is an essential read. Steve may have slightly overstated the case, but not by much.
The main sessions at the conference were on Searchers and Search Behaviour, Faceted and Federated Search, Text Mining, the World of the Web and finally Web Tools and Intelligent Tools. Virtually all the papers (but not the Google paper) can be downloaded but many are quite substantial files. Continue reading

SHARP 2007 Conference: "Open the Book, Open the Mind,"
The fifteenth annual conference of the Society for the History of
Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) will be held in Minneapolis
at the University of Minnesota on July 11-15, 2007. SHARP is the
leading international association for historians of print culture, enlisting
more than 1,200 scholars world-wide; its members study "the creation,
dissemination, and reception of script and print, including newspapers,
periodicals, and ephemera," as well as the history of books. The
forthcoming conference is organized in cooperation with the College of
Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota; University of Minnesota
Libraries; Minneapolis Public Library; Minnesota Historical Society,
and Minnesota Center for Book Arts -- a part of Open Book.

My previous posts:

Searching Revisited: Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal, etc.

Searching Is Polarized; Will The Five Laws Get a New Revised ...

Visualizing the Web Infostructure I - Cites, Insights, Farsights

Visualizing the Innernet or Visual Display of the Website's Infostructure

Market Research Resources via Libraries

Book review from my desk:
Mary Ellen Bates. Building & running a successful research business: a guide for the independent information professional. Edited by Reva Basch. CyberAge Books, 2003 -- (new edition: Building & running a successful research business: a guide for the independent information professional, 2010) Information Resources Management Journal

Technocrati tags:
Internet Industry, Information Industry, infostructure, information society, Return On Investment, ROI, libraries, AltRef, Ubiquitous Reference, Reference Service

Google: Infostructure Conference
Infrastructure Conference

Top Ten Ways to Find a Law Library Job

Connie's Top Ten Ways to Find a Law Library Job (for students & new librarians)
Connie Crosby, a law librarian in Toronto, Canada, has a blog where she posted her "Top Ten Tips to Find a Law Library Job." Her tips are good for all job seekeers, not just law librarians.

Becoming an indexer

professional outlook series

Becoming an indexer, The Indexer The international journal of Indexing

If you are embarking on an indexing training course or considering turning to indexing as a career, why not take a look at Becoming an indexer. This is a collection of articles which appeared in the October 2005 issue of The Indexer under the auspices of the ‘Yellow Spots’ (a name deriving from the identifying stickers worn by those attending their first Society of Indexers’ conference). Contributors describe their very different experiences as they have taken up the indexing challenge. Do read what they have to say about why becoming an indexer is such a challenge, but why it’s all worth while. Continue reading