The Corporate Librarian

Meredith Farkas has started analyzing results from her survey of 839 librarians and their blogs. You should check out her post, but a few things were of interest to me.

• A bit more than half (55%) of her sample started blogging between 2005 and 2007
• Women are more likely to be anonymous bloggers than men (is this due to the jobs they find themselves in?)
• Over half (54%) of the bloggers have published professionally and almost three-quarters (73%) of bloggers who have had their blogs for two or more years have published professionally.
• Corporate and public librarian bloggers expressed the lowest levels of job satisfaction
• The percentage of women librarian bloggers is growing more rapidly than the percentage of male bloggers
• The average age of librarian bloggers is increasing (37% over 40, up from 28% of the 165 respondents in 2005)

I did a survey of corporate librarian bloggers back in July 2006, but it only had 17 respondents. Perhaps it’s worth asking Meredith if I can have a copy of the data for corporate librarian bloggers and seeing what sort of analyses I can do with it.
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KPO, for those of you who haven’t heard of it before, stands for Knowledge Process Outsourcing. It’s a subclass of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) which deals with processes relating to knowledge-intensive industries (such as database development, design work, investment banking research, legal research, managing clinical trials, etc.).

I briefly referred to it before in a post on outsourcing - Wikipedia’s added a lot more sources and fleshed out the article on it since.

TPI, a firm which provides advisory services around sourcing, has published a report last month looking at the market that does a nice job of deflating some of the hype. Note that they don’t cover a number of services which are either embryonic markets or which will be addressed in future studies: design and animation services, engineering services legal process outsourcing, publishing outsourcing and tele-radiology (digital transmission of images for radiologists offshore to review).

Will there be challenges to white-collar occupations, including some research positions, from KPO? Sure - the fact I’m looking for a job now points to that. But TPI’s done a nice job of addressing the complexity of providing those services, so that people can have a better idea of how to react.

Last week I got an e-mail from Sheri Larsen of Northern Light about a new product they’re offering, Analyst Direct. I mention this not to preen and go “How cool am I?,” but to see what questions you’d like answered about it.

From the little I played with it before Library Camp, it looks to be a decent search engine for and aggregator of IT market research - rather than opening a tab for Forrester Research’s site, for IDC’s site, etc. you can enter your site logins and access lots of IT research through Analyst Direct. And even if you don’t subscribe to a given company’s research, you can still see basic information on reports and purchase them. I’ve got permission to use screenshots, so check out a few snaps I took below.

There’s also a feature I haven’t played with at all, which auto-magically extracts business issues and analyst sentiment on companies and industries from industry trade periodical coverage.

I’m on a Mac and don’t have Windows handy, so I’m afraid I can’t experiment with how it works in different browsers on a PC. I do have Flock (Mozilla-based) and Safari, and could probably scare up a copy of Internet Explorer.

Screenshots (apologies for the other tabs):

Library Camp NYC ended 5 hours ago - Rachel should have the final count next week, but about 117 attendees, one all the way from New Zealand!

Content will be in a state of flux on the wiki for a while, as more pictures get added, program notes get tidied up, lessons learned get added, etc.. Nevertheless, please feel free to explore.

I have to thank Stephen Francoeur and Rachel Watstein (who needs a web presence, damn it) once again for doing all the heavy lifting, John Blyberg for starting off the whole Library Camp thing and all the attendees for making Library Camp NYC 2007 a success.

I will be moving to California (Mountain View, specifically) this month, after Library Camp NYC. No luck on the job front so far, but I’ve only spent 1 1/2 months actually in California (June 13th-July 31st) looking, so I likely have a few months ahead of me yet. Thanks to David Holloway for the offer, along with everyone else who’s provided moral support and resources.

I’ve got a place lined up already, thanks to an old friend from my college days, so at this point it’s “pack and ship stuff,” followed by “try to sell off remaining furniture, kitchen items,” “hire a cleaning service,” and “hire someone to cart out stuff not sold.”

Also, I turned 38 yesterday. Which is somewhat depressing, but certainly better than the alternative.

The beautiful but deadly Rikhei asked on a chat room I hang out on:

So, is there a list somewhere of databases and which vendors provide them? That says, for example, Hey, Ebsco, OVID, etc. provide access to Medline?

This would seem something tailor-made for a wiki. Anyone know:

• If such a source already exists?
• If not, which existing library-related wiki might be suitable?

And if there is a suitable wiki (or one can be hosted), who’s interested in helping Rikhei build the list?