Quote: "You may have just built a brand new intranet, or re-invigorated your existing intranet. Either way, the challenge is now to ensure that the current quality, level of use, and value of the intranet is maintained well into the future."

Comment: Another "Column Two" piece. [Serious Instructional Technology]

Just noting this for myself for future reference...

Protocols and Rubrics for online discussion from a class at  George Mason University... Useful little page. [via Serious Instructional Technology]

Basic, general gGuidelines for contributing to online discussions, posting boards, and how to evaluate participation in those discussions. 

Reason Number 352,934 Why I Love The Internet from The Shifted Librarian.

Now you can immortalize yourself or your loved ones as bobbleheads at ItsYouSmall.com!

"The perfect gift for birthdays, retirements, and commemorations or just for fun! Most caricature art is 2-dimensional, but now you can see that drawing come alive! Sculptor Bryan Guise has taken caricature art from a flat plane to a whole new 3-dimensional level.

Three months and $150 later, you have your very own mini-me.  How can you resist?

--Except, when I just visited the site, it listed the price as $200.  That's a lot of inflation in two hours...

Advice from a Law Firm KM Project Manager. Quoted from Brint.com's KM Discussion Forum (via excited utterances):

I was the Proj. Mgr. on a team of Lotus developers who designed, developed, and deployed a Lotus K-Station solution for a law firm. Our biggest hurdle was cultural. The law firm we implemented the solution in is one of the larger New York (and International) law firms. Just as our project was ready to deploy, the managing partner retired and handed the baton over to a much more traditional (read, "anti-technology") partner.

The second largest hurdle we faced was organizational and political. The IT department we worked with was constantly faced with ridiculous demands form the partners. Creating a fire brigade mentality and completely subverting the project planning process.

My advice to you is, ensure you have committed, long-term support from an "executive" sponsor and that the sponsor(s) is actively involved in the success of the project.

Secondly, make sure all critical resources -- i.e. Librarians, IT leads, etc. -- are identified and their time is committed to the project during the design phase and regularly throughout the development and deployment phases.

Lastly, don't underestimate the amount of design time you will need. If anything, overestimate. Law firms run on unique schedules. You will often find it hard to get people together in a timely fashion and you will need to somewhat flexible.

Man, don't I know it.   Law firm KM, or anything that implies sharing was has been traditionally considered proprietary information, is difficult in the best of times, and entirely impossible with the kind of support highlighted above.   The most important factor, though, is to be implementing a solution.  This implies that there was an identified problem or need to begin with.  KM for the sake of KM--whether it is CRM, a case management database, or whatever--needs to be something that is needed or wanted by people who are willing to contribute as well as reap the benefits of the sharing.  Otherwise, it's not going to work.

Gale Launches E-Books with OCLC's netLibrary via The Shifted Librarian: Ebooks Still Down For The Count.  (all between dividers from TSL) 

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"Gale Group a business unit of Thomson Corp., has launched an e-book program that will make a large collection of its reference material available to online library patrons through netLibrary. Any library with a netLibrary account can access the Gale e-books. At press time no list of titles was available, but the company plans to offer 30 to 50 of them sometime this fall with hundreds more scheduled for the future. Initial titles will include single-volume and multivolume reference works, some from the Macmillan and Scribner lines. Prices for e-book versions of the Gale collection will increase the prices of the print versions....

According to [Allen] Paschal, none of the titles under development already has a Web or CD-ROM version available. Searching features on Gale e-books will generally apply the standard formatting used by netLibrary, with some customization for the series, but not for individual titles. Basically, as Paschal and Barnes describe it, users will have the access points they would have from using the print source—tables of contents, browsable layouts, back-of-the-book indexes, etc.—plus the free-text searching capabilities of Adobe Acrobat Reader’s PDF resource." [Infotoday Newsbreaks, via Library Stuff]

This sounds well and good, and normally it would bring a cheer from me, however the kicker later in the press release shows why this is NOT the step forward it appears to be. (Emphasis below is mine.)

Gale e-books will be sold as individual units or in bundles with print titles. Although final prices are not yet set, Barnes indicated that libraries purchasing only the e-book version would generally pay around 10-percent more than the price for the print, while purchasers of both print and e-book versions could expect to pay 150 percent of the print-only price. He admitted to having heard librarian complaints about higher charges for electronic versions, but assured me that the costs of hosting, maintaining, and supporting electronic products ran higher than printing, binding, and shipping costs.

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Very interesting (I know, I say that about a lot of stuff, and I suppose it goes without saying that I find something interesting if it makes it onto this page).  I wonder, though, what technology they are going to use and how (if?) they are going to prevent copying, how they'll distinguish between books that have entered the public domain and those that are still protected by copyright.  It sounds like Gale Group is providing exclusively reference materials through this method, so the question might be moot at the moment, but you have to wonder how long that will be the case.

Further reading seems to indicate that the eBooks will viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader, which allows some restrictions on the copying and pasting of the materials, along with Save As functionality.