Two new articles on the new SMI Press Citizen Engineer book!

• Engineers need to get the message across
  By Greg Papadopoulos and David Douglas of Sun Microsystems
  Finantical Times
  Published: March 5 2009 12:32 | Last updated: March 5 2009 12:32
• The Mercury News interview: Greg Papadopoulos and David Douglas
  By Brandon Bailey
  Mercury News
  Posted: 12/19/2008 12:00:00 PM PST

See the previous blog entry with details on access to the eBook version!

Learn and enjoy!

Christy

Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering

This new SMI Press book, authored by Sun's Dave Douglas, Greg Papadopoulos and John Boutelle, is titled Citizen Engineer and early Rough Cut access is available to Sun employees via Safari Books Online. (Sun employees here | Non Sun employees purchase here)

Here is a summary of the book:

Being an engineer today means being far more than an engineer. You need to consider not only the design requirements of your projects but the full impact of your work--from an ecological perspective, an intellectual property perspective, a business perspective, and a sociological perspective. And you must coordinate your efforts with many other engineers, sometimes hundreds of them. In short, we've entered an age that demands socially responsible engineering on a whole new scale. The era of the Citizen Engineer.

This engaging and thought-provoking book focuses on two topics that are becoming vitally important in the day-to-day work of engineers today: eco engineering and intellectual property (IP). The book also examines how and why the world of engineering has changed and provides practical advice to help engineers of all types master the new era of engineering and start thinking like Citizen Engineers.

This access is prior to the print version of the book coming out in June 2009. Sun employees will be able to purchase a print copy at a 40% discount towards the end of April but anyone can purchase at www.sun.com/books when it's published.

For Sun employees: you can download specific chapters for offline reading and even access those downloaded chapters via your iPhone or iPod Touch (see blog on Safari Bookbag application)

Since this is a Rough Cut (pre-published access to book content), you can choose to receive an email alert when the final version is available as well as make comments to the authors about the book before it's published! See snapshot of those features below.

We hope to have the authors do an author chat soon so will keep you posted on that opportunity to talk to Greg, Dave and John about the book.

Thanks!

Christy Confetti Higgins
Digital Library Program - Sun Learning Services

Sun's Digital Libraries & Research team, part of Sun Learning Services, is partnering on an internal pilot of Sun's Project Wonderland with Sun's Services Marketing organization.

The library team (as we call ourselves) will be conducting a workshop in this internal instance of Wonderland, for Sun employees to learn about market and competitive information services. Part of the session will be slides and part will be live demo in this engaging and dynamic virtual world setting.

Participants will also be able to learn from pre-programmed bots in this open library space as well as interact with internal library resources via the Firefox browner in-world.

A key benefit we see is that the attendees will not only have the opportunity to learn, but to interact with each other as a community drawn together by their shared interest in market and competitive information.

This is a pilot so we hope to learn a lot about how we can leverage this for employee learning of library resources, information and knowledge sharing and more dynamic/immersive experiences related to information.

Wish us luck!

Digital Libraries & Research Team!
http://twitter.com/libraryresearch

It's been a while since we've talked about knowledge management (KM) - and there have been two recent comments on the last posting, so let's revisit the topic.

We've had the opportunity a couple of times in the last few months to talk about KM to different outside audiences. In September, I had the chance to talk with some library and information science students at the University of Denver about KM, and specifically KM at Sun. Then, at the end of October, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a site visit from APQC, along with Terry McKenzie and Peter Reiser, to talk about Sun and social networking and expertise location - yet another opportunity to essentially talk about KM.

A common theme between these two presentations has been the lessons learned - probably more accurately, the lessons we keep re-learning. Here are some of the thoughts we shared with them:

We, as information professionals, need to continue to think differently and flexibly about information management, knowledge management, expertise - and what we bring to the conversation. What do we bring to the conversation? A couple of things:

• A broad, 'big picture' perspective. We bring this perspective in two ways. Since we provide information resources and consulting across the entire organization, we are able to have a 'pulse' on the company. Because we get requests from all over Sun, we have a sense of what the company is thinking and what the important initiatives are at any given point. The way this ties into expertise location and knowledge sharing is that we have the ability to connect individuals or groups in the company who are working on similar initiatives. The individuals or groups might not have known that others in the company were working on similar issues, and we are often able to bring them together for more productive and complete work.

  The other broad perspective we bring is from the information industry as a whole. Because we're keeping track of what's going on in the information industry outside of Sun, we can bring those trends to bear within the company where appropriate. Because we often have the opportunity to benchmark with information professionals in other organizations, we can make sure we're staying on top of things in relation to other top companies in the world.

  
  


• The ability to identify and locate key authoritative content. This is a reason why many folks within Sun turn to us when they need authoritative and business-critical content. Sure, it's easy enough to do a Google search to find information. Often, you can find the information you need that's 'good enough'. But what if you need the REALLY good stuff? The stuff you simply can't find on the open web? What if you don't know if the information you've found is authoritative? That's where we come in. If we have it, we'll get it to you. If you don't know what the 'good stuff' is, we can help identify it for you. (In fact, for a while we used the phrase 'we've got the good stuff' in our internal presentations.)

What are our other lessons learned?

Start small and move forward from there. As I specifically told the student group at DU, the word 'pilot' is your friend. Pilots are relatively benign. If a pilot fails, it's just that - a pilot that failed. It's not a failed project, it's not a smudge on your reputation - in fact, you get a gold star almost any way you look at it, because you're trying out new things! Good for you!

In doing pilots and 'starting small', it's important, if possible, to work with existing pain points and needs. There is so much opportunity in working with existing pain points, for a number of reasons. One, usually almost anything you can do is better than what currently exists. Two, when people are in pain, they are much more willing to be flexible, try new solutions and buy into your solution. Three, if you solve it, even a little bit - well, you're a hero again, and you have the opportunity to add that win to your portfolio of wins, and to potentially have a new group advocating for you in the company as well. How can you stand being so good?

Partnering and connecting – in every sense – is essential for success. Because KM is so bound up with social networking and 2.0 tools today, KM projects are inherently social in nature. They need people and groups to interact. What you're building is essentially a social system, based around information. So, it's important to build your connections and to get buy-in.

The recent Sun author chats in Second Life are a great example of this. We work with the SMI Press authors, the SMI press team and others to create these very popular events. There is no way we could do this effectively on our own. It is our partnerships that allow these events to be effective and valuable.

Additionally, because KM solutions will have some piece of technology associated with them, the IT department - or at least people who have IT skills - really become important colleagues and partners. Foster these connections - a good IT person on your side, as you likely know, is a wonderful thing.

Last, continue to experiment with new tools and stay on top of technology trends – this whole space is still evolving quickly. Emphasis here is on trends. That means, thankfully, you don't have to feel compelled to check out every single new tool and beta version of the latest social networking software that comes out. Do, however, keep an eye and an ear out for what the latest buzz is, and pay particular attention to those things that continue to come to your attention. To use an older example, at one point we kept hearing about Twitter. Several different colleagues, internally and externally to Sun, were mentioning it, and we'd seen it discussed on a couple of aliases. Well, we figured that maybe it was time to check it out, to see what it was all about, and to start thinking about how we might be able to use it. The result: the birth of our libraryresearch Twitter.  

To wrap up, here's an incident that really struck me lately about how far Sun has come in its evolution and use of social networking and 2.0 tools. I was talking with someone in a government setting recently about social networking tools and showing them some of the Sun tools available on the open web. We logged on to blogs.sun.com. All of a sudden, he jumped up for a closer look and got really excited about it. He was pointing to the 'Popular Blogs' section of blogs.sun.com, the part that tells you which blogs have the most number of hits for the day.

I'm paraphrasing badly, but he said something along the lines of 'that's your expertise! Those are your go-to people in the organization!'

I looked at it more closely and I realized he was right. I remember when Jonathan's blog was regularly and reliably the number one blog. Nowadays, he's typically in the top five, but he's no longer consistently number one. Instead, Jim Grisanzio, Simon Phipps, Bryan Cantrill and Geertjan Wielenga are often holding the top spots, along with many other Sun experts.

His excitement gave me a renewed appreciation for blogs.sun.com - a tool that had previously felt old to me, but suddenly felt new and really exciting. In fact, it suddenly felt like a tool that had added value, because it has some history to it. Though it's a relatively 'new' tool, it has become firmly embedded in Sun's culture. At least over 4000 Sun bloggers feel that way.

I also felt a renewed appreciation for Sun's commitment to social networking tools. It's interesting to reflect on the evolution of the use of these tools in Sun, from blogs to wikis to the use of Facebook for Sun groups, to leading edge tools like SunSpace and Sun Learning eXchange. Sun has always been a leading-edge adopter in many ways, and its adoption of social networking tools is no exception.

Where will the future take us? What are the next steps? Stay tuned...

Scott Brown, Sr. Information Specialist

A team at Sun has been working on the creation of a game that will connect people from all over the world - a fabulous example of social networking, participation and connecting people to people!

The game is a Facebook game called myPicks Beijing 2008 and allows people to predict winners at the Olympics.

This game was created on Zembly - the world's first and easiest Facebook development environment. Zembly is built from the ground up on Sun's industry-leading stack of enterprise hardware and software, including Solaris, Java, Glassfish, and MySQL, and running on Network.com's next-generation cloud-computing platform.

Sun also created an interactive widget that gives you some quick stats on the number of people playing for a particular country.

Check it out and participate today in the 2008 Olympic games!

Christy

So let's run through a few additional considerations as social networking and other 2.0 tools take off. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but just some of the effects as more and more people adopt these tools.  

“Ultra-customization”: If everyone has just the information they want - through RSS feeds, widgets, page customization, etc. - how do you get important information to everyone? How do you get everyone on the same page?

On a broad basis, this ties into the authority discussion. For organizations, this becomes a real challenge. Many organizations, Sun included, often have a "required" channel on an internal web page that can be customized - so everyone looks at the same thing. But how do you reach someone who doesn't look at that web page, ever - who gets their information primarily through another landing page, RSS feeds, etc.? Interestingly enough, often times the solution is sending an all-company email - reverting back to "old" technology. (Now, whether that actually reaches folks who email inbox is in the thousands of messages is another question.)

The point here is that organizations are already dealing with these kinds of issues. As customization becomes more and more prevelant, creating consistency for business needs is going to become an even more complex issue to address. When one is simply customizing information for one's personal use, this is a non-issue. Within an organization, it becomes a tension between what should I be looking at vs. what do I want to be looking at.

Increasing available knowledge does not mean people are going to use it - otherwise known as information overload. As we all know, there is more and more information being produced, and at an increasing rate. Thanks to tools like wikis, blogs, and social networks, everyone - anyone - now has the ability to create content and make it available on the open Web. This is a great democratizer of the Internet, as it allows everyone a "voice", so to speak.

But do concepts of democracy apply to information? Is all information created equal? Is all information equally useful, or are we littering up the Internet with a bunch of low-level information?

A specific example is what I call “wiki information death”. Wikis have become a very popular tool for creating and sharing content, which is wonderful. To me, it feels very much like the mid- to late-90s, when everyone was creating a web page on the Internet. Remember when you'd come across pages called things like "Bert's page" with horrible flashing graphics? To a large extent, we're seeing that phenomenon again today, with wikis (for groups), blogs (for individuals), and MySpace and Facebook pages (for both). True, most of the time the horrible graphics are gone (with the exception of MySpace).

The bottom line is that folks are putting up a lot of information - and a large percentage of that information is never going to be updated again. The person or group loses interest, there's nothing new to add, it was only an experiment in the first place - for whatever reason(s), this "information" is being put out there and then being essentially abandoned.

Undoubtedly you could derive a sense of what Internet users are thinking at a broad level, through mining all of the information available, useful or not. I'm sure there are many information discoveries to be made there, discoveries that I can't comprehend. But I can't help but think that a lot of "information" is actually just cluttering up the place.

Same content in multiple places. Weren't we just solving this problem with content management systems? With wikis in particular, you have the responsibility of keeping track of - and managing, and updating - your own content in your head. Yes, there is some hierarchy there, but wikis are pretty flat. Additionally, since you potentially have multiple people adding content, how do you prevent duplication?

You see the complications. I'm not arguing that social networking tools don't bring a lot of value - they do. As I've mentioned earlier, these tools are delivering the promise of KM. But they also bring complications that need to be addressed. They affect the answer to the question: What does one year, three years, five years from now look like for information, KM and IM?

Can we foresee and address all the gaps and needs areas we know about? No, not all at once, certainly. So let's look at what's important, right here and now. What can we do today to help address some of these issues?
Maintenance - or maybe I should say, dedication and responsibility. It's really easy to start a blog, wiki, or network. What's hard is putting the time into it: creating entries, blogging regularly, building a community around a wiki, keeping a network alive. In an ideal world, a network doesn't necessarily need a "leader". In reality, the network is made up of the people in that network, and some people will naturally emerge as leaders. Those that have a passion around the topic will help drive it. Be aware of the need to "feed and care for" your social networking tool, and be ready to dedicate the time to maintain it so it remains usable and valuable.

Related to this is managing the information lifecycle - particularly maintenance and the end of the cycle. Librarians have been concerned - and rightly so - with preserving and archiving information since the beginning of libraries. This still is an important function. Often, the "library" is the final destination for information that has become outdated or is no longer needed - until someone really needs it again. That's one of the instances where the library becomes the lifesaver.

But archiving and preservation can't be indiscriminate. With all the potential "information litter" around, it becomes more important than ever to be able to get rid of information.

I can hear a gasp from some of you - "get rid of information???" On the face of things, this goes against our sensibilities. What if you need that information later? Of course, you need to follow your legal guidelines and records retention rules. What I'm suggesting is that we need to be more decisive and active in scoping what information we should keep, and be willing to take action in actually getting rid of information. Of course I'm not talking about getting rid of the Constitution - but think about whether you really need that old project wiki, with all the detail around the meeting notes, etc. Necessary? It might feel like it today. Review your old information regularly and get rid of what's lost its relevance.

Flexibility, and a willingness to let go. An example of this that I absolutely love is Marcy Phelps' Power Networking for Introverts blog. Marcy started this blog in 2007 - and then she ended it in April of this year. Here's an excerpt from her last entry:

I started blogging about networking because it interested me. I built my business by networking, and I learned a lot along the way. But it takes a lot of reading to keep up with a topic in order to write and speak about it - especially one that is not exactly your specialty.

I love this. To me, this exemplifies information creation and sharing at its best. Marcy started because she had a passion around the topic. She stopped because, well, in my view, her passion and life priorities shifted. She left behind a great source of information - but she doesn't feel compelled to keep it going if she can't dedicate the time to it. So she let it go.

Dedication, responsibility, lifecycle management, and letting go - to me, all encapsulated in this blog and in this information practitioner.

Management of information - knowledge management, information management, content management, search,
discovery, social media, metadata - is only going to become more critical moving forward. We'll continue to explore how information management is changing and evolving, and how we can change and evolve along with it. 

Earlier this year I attended an event sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of SLA. The speaker was Karl Fisch, who created the "Did You Know?" video, something you've probably seen, at least in part. Karl used the video and the statistics contained within it to help his faculty understand what students are going to need to be successful in the 21st century.

In any case, at the presentation, Karl mentioned that he was floored when he recently saw a newspaper piece that cited Wikipedia as a source.

For anyone familiar with Wikipedia, this should floor you, too, since you know that anyone can potentially add anything - anonymously - to Wikipedia.

This is an issue of basic information literacy, something most librarians are quite familiar with. (Thomson Reuters has a good page on the basics of determining web site authority.) Social networking adds a new spin on it. So, for this example, how do you determine authority in Wikipedia - where there is no identified author or authority?

Well, essentially, you don't. Wikipedia can be a great starting point for getting oriented quickly to a topic. Would I ever quote it directly? Probably not. When we're doing training in this area, we point people to the links off of the Wikipedia entry - that's where you're going to find the sites where you can dig into authority.

Let's take, for example, Digital Divide. Wikipedia is actually quite good on this; the page has sections on origins of the term, digital divide and education, global digital divide and overcoming the digital divide. Now, a couple of things. Take the statement, "European Union study from 2005 conduc(t)ed in 14 European countries and focused on the issue of digital divide found that within the EU, the digital divide is primarily a matter of age and education."

Would you take that as a quote and put it in a presentation? Well, you could, but probably best to try to chase this back to the source. This piece of the Wikipedia entry is good, because it footnotes the EU study and provides a link to the source study.


Note, though, when I viewed this entry, that link to the EU study is broken. To do my due diligence, I should do a Google (or Eurostat) search, and then I'll find the newsletter source. Now, is this a reliable and credible source? You bet.

The other great thing about a good Wikipedia entry that helps you with finding authoritative information is an "External links" section. Here's where you can really start to pursue your information search. Again, be sure to use caution - just because a link is included here doesn't mean it's necessarily credible. And, there may be additional authoritative resources not included that you should seek out. Use these external links and citations to continue your search.

So what does this little tangent have to do with KM, IM and CM? We hope to illustrate simply that the issues and challenges around KM, IM and CM become more complicated with social networking tools, primarily because they blur the boundaries around knowledge and information. Is a Wikipedia entry a "valid" piece of information? What if you have a wiki page behind your firewall, that has only been created by your organization - is that  a more "valid" piece of knowledge? Does the value and validity of the content of a wiki change depending upon its context?

How do social networking tools, and the information contained therein, affect your view of your corporate knowledge?

How will we ever deal with all of this?

Before we plunge into despair, let's look at some other challenges posed by social networking tools...

In the previous entry, we looked at the resurgence of interest in knowledge management (KM) and how social networking tools such as wikis and blogs are driving this resurgence. In this entry, we'll start to dive into the stickier questions, such as: What is knowledge? What do we include as 'knowledge' to be managed? What's the difference between knowledge management (KM), information management (IM), and content management (CM) - especially when so many folks are using these (or at least thinking about these) interchangeably?

First, let's settle on some definitions of what we're talking about. The Ark Group published a recent report that defines KM as 'a discipline and technology enabling people to share their knowledge through agreed-upon processes for identifying, capturing, storing, retrieving, creating and evaluating an organisation’s information assets'.

Fair enough. Depending upon the context (and whom I'm trying to sell the concept to), I would emphasize different parts of this statement. Here, I would emphasize 'an organisation's information assets'. Broadly defined, this could encompass ANYTHING that could possibly be considered 'information' within an organisation: internally-generated information, any information the organisation has purchased, intellectual property, any little piece of information that might come from anyone's head. For our purposes here, let's stick with internally-generated information: information that has been created by the organization. This is still a huge universe of information - but at least we're not including all the information created outside of the walls of the organisation.

Outsell, an outstanding firm which covers the information industry and trends in the industry, sees KM as a component of IM (and acknowledges that IM and KM are often used interchangably in discussion and in the literature). Forrester, a top IT market research firm, addresses the area as Information & Knowledge Management (I&KM), which seems to cover everything pretty well.

Digital Libraries & Research (DL&R) provides IM services for Sun. For DL&R, some of these functions include managing and facilitating access to external content (hey! That's content management or CM), creating and managing web sites, providing information training, and providing research and information consulting services.

OK, so we've got our terminology sorted to some extent. Now let's go back to KM. Where DL&R doesn't have much current investment is in the KM realm, if we're talking strictly about internal information. We do have a high knowledge of internal information at Sun. We don't currently take a formal role in providing high-level strategy and management of that information.

Theoretically, we could dive head-long into the KM realm, spread our arms wide, and declare, 'Yes! We are ready to take over KM at Sun! Whatever that means!'

But what would that mean? You talk to some people and they bring up things like expert databases. Others talk about intellectual property. Others mention content management, or records management, or business intelligence, or information architecture or taxonomy or tagging or oral histories or...

You get the picture. What is it exactly that we're talking about, when we talk about KM?

The good news is that, when you talk about KM in the organisation, the scope is ultimately defined by the organisation. Inevitably, I believe that the introduction of social networking tools in your organisation will open up the discussion around KM at some point.

Why is this a good thing? You, as the information specialist, can play a role in influencing and defining (or redefining) what that scope is. The opportunity may be there for you to take a role in connecting with your stakeholders and asking them what they think KM is and what they would include in a KM strategy in your organisation. Are we talking about capturing every single piece of information captured on a wiki? Is there a pressing need to find experts in the company? Is there an opportunity to solve a long-term problem with a new social networking tool? Even better - is there a particular group, project, or set of information that is just crying out for your help?

The best business case for driving KM in your organisation could be a well-timed, smaller-scope project that can illustrate the benefits of good knowledge management. You never know what visibility - and resources - could result from applying your skill sets to a key collection of internal information.

So - start the conversation. Show your expertise. Most importantly, engage your stakeholders. Information - reliable, authoritative, spot-on information - isn't always getting easier to find, it's getting harder. For you information specialists and librarians out there who already do KM, this is nothing new to you. For those of you looking at this topic again, this may be a time of great opportunity for you to influence your organisation. Undoubtedly you'll hear more from us as we pursue this further within Sun.

Next entry, we'll look at little bit into some of the challenges that are already arising with these tools, and what additional challenges may be ahead.

Knowledge management - KM - is experiencing a resurgence of interest here at Sun, at least a resurgence of buzz. We had this interest and buzz back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but most of that buzz died away over a few years.

But now, KM seems to be back! Why is that?

Much of KM the first time around was about capturing 'tacit' knowledge - the knowledge that essentially never gets published. The processes and information floating around in peoples' heads. In the enterprise, that meant capturing the company knowledge and making it available.

Part of what's driving the KM discussion this time is all the social networking tools available today. Blogs, wikis, networking tools like LinkedIn and Facebook and more are now actually capturing that tacit knowledge. Today, people and groups have ways to easily record their output and to record all that stuff floating around in their heads. In many instances, it's easier to find people now more than ever, so you can quickly find and connect with experts. Communities and networks spring up around anything and everything. All this is exactly what KM was trying to accomplish the first time around - but it was usually too hard to participate back then. Social media tools have become an important part of KM and are driving interest in KM again.

But - social media tools both enhance and complicate the KM picture. Yes, they are capturing a lot of this knowledge. But at the same time, they're adding yet another layer of information to the already enormous information universe. True, the technology to find information is getting better, our ability to store information is getting greater, and the computing power to search larger and larger pools of information is continually growing. But as the universe of information grows larger, the opportunities and challenges of finding the information one is seeking grow larger as well.

Over the next few entries, I'll be exploring topics such as:

• What is knowledge? What do we include as 'knowledge'?

• What's the difference between knowledge management (KM), information management (IM), content management (CM) - especially when so many folks are using these (or at least thinking about these) interchangeably?

• How does one determine authority in a social setting? What's right? What's accurate?

• If everyone has just the information they want, how do you get important information to everyone? How do you get everyone on the same page?

• What does one year, three years, five years from now look like for information, KM and IM?
  

We don't have any ready answers for these questions. But we'll be sharing with you a little about what we're thinking around these areas, and what some possible next steps might look like.

Scott Brown, Sr. Information Specialist

Over a week ago, on April 29, 2008, Sun employees were invited to the first-ever Sun Open House in Second Life called "Sun Employees Connect in Second Life".

This event was Sun's largest foray yet into Second Life. Our Digital Libraries & Research (DL&R) training sessions prior to the Open House attracted the most registrants we’ve ever had – well over 200 employees registering for the webinar, and untold others accessing the online information on getting set up in Second Life. We also had an in-world tour prior to the April 29 Open House, to get people into Second Life for the first time.

In addition, the DL&R team were amongst the Sun in SL mentors providing 101 workshops to employees to get up to speed while in Second Life - these sessions were very well attended and hopefully made their experience at the event a better one.

The Open House was an amazing experience in many ways!

Employees from Sun’s recent acquisitions, MySQL, Vaau and innotek were invited to be a part of the Open House.

Sun Second Life mentors helped create avatars for nearly all of Sun’s chief executives, including Jonathan Schwartz, Rich Green, Bill MacGowan, Karie Willyerd, and many others. All of the executives gathered in a room in Menlo Park, California to give the keynote speeches in Second Life. Audio of the executives was streamed into the room; employees could ask questions via text, and a moderator sitting with the executives was able to repeat the questions to the executives. This gave the keynotes a truly physical and interactive feeling.

Several groups within Sun, including DL&R, had 'booths' near the keynote spaces, which were staffed by avatars. In addition to being able to interact with a 'live' person, attendees could also get a notecard from the booths with a brief description of the services available from that group.

For fun, there was Alpine skiing, skating and snowboarding; car racing; games like Phrase Invaders; and of course, after hours, lots of groovy dancing and great tunes at Club Java.

It was a very good learning experience for DL&R to be part of the planning team and to experience such an event - lots of learning, information and knowledge sharing which we LOVE to see

Scott Brown

For our employee training sessions through 2007, we're going a bit outside of our usual realm of training topics. In the past, we've typically covered information resources offered through Sun Learning Services and Digital Libraries & Research, and how best to use those resources.

But in the sessions we're doing now and throughout the rest of 2007, we're covering things like Second Life, and Web 2.0 and social networking tools. Why are we bothering with these things when they don't appear to be directly related to information and resources currently available?

There are a few reasons. The most immediate reason is because we get asked about this stuff. The Digital Libraries & Research (DL&R) staff have recently done some recorded sessions for Sun's Employee Communications and Communities group, helping get them up-to-speed on technologies like wikis, RSS, virtual worlds and other social networking tools.

Why did they turn to Digital Libraries & Research? Well, because we work with a lot of different groups within Sun who are already playing around with these technologies - and we're also early investigators and adopters ourselves. The information profession has been investigating and dealing with a lot of these tools for a few years now and following developments very closely. As information professionals (aka librarians), it's our role to ensure that our customers can connect with quality information (in whatever form) from where and when they need it. Social networking tools allow us the ability to drive information and content in various forms in new and exciting ways - ways that people just coming into the workforce expect it to be.

And, the DL&R team likes to experiment with cutting edge tools to see how we can adopt these technologies for keeping Sun informed about our information resources and services. They also allow us to embed ourselves deeper into the communities at Sun.

The next reason is that we continue to see a demand out there from Sun employees to get up-to-date on what's going on with these developments. In other words, the Communications and Communities group isn't the only one interested in this stuff - we all seem to be fascinated by what's going on with the explosion of these social networking technologies. What are they? Why would you use them? How do I get started using them? How is Sun using them? A good example is the recently launched wikis.sun.com site, a wiki tool that Sun employees can use to build a community with Sun customers and partners - as well as anyone else who would like to participate.

The answers to the 'what', 'why' and 'how' of these tools are continually changing and evolving, which requires the DL&R team to stay current in this space - and to continue to offer regular updates on these technologies through our training sessions.

Next, these are learning and stretch opportunities for us, too. While we're certainly familiar with a lot of this technology, we're continually learning more about them. In order to present knowledgeably about these things, we gotta know what we're talking about, right? I personally find that I need to really dig into these technologies before doing a training session on them. And that's a great learning opportunity for me, too.

And the more we learn about these technologies, the more actively we'll be able to bring Sun employees information through these new tools. For example, we're already experimenting with the micro-blogging tool Twitter to communicate about our training sessions and other information of interest to Sun employees. We see this as a new way to not only market what we do, but to actively bring information to employees' attention through the channels they're already using.

Lastly - these technologies are fun. It's fascinating to see how some of these online communities get built out, what connections you can make, and the many, many innovative ways people use these tools. Have you seen 43 things, for example? It's a tool to help you think about what your goals are in life, but in a social way - so that you can track your progress, connect with others who have the same goal, etc.

In our training sessions, we only have about an hour to review the broad spectrum of Web 2.0 and social networking tools, so we aren't able to get too detailed. But these sessions are already sparking interest among Sun employees.

Scott Brown
Digital Libraries & Research

In the May and June Digital Libraries & Research learning events on finding market research and finding internal Sun information, and in recent posts, we've emphasized the need to use both search and browse strategies for effectively finding information.

My general approach, which I first heard from Cindy Hill, is what Cindy calls an 'and/plus' approach rather than an 'either/or' approach. Related to the recent training, to effectively find information, you need search and browse, not just one or the other. This entry is about the 'and/plus' principle in relation to the need for effective current information management tools and the newer social media tools.

I think a lot of people - myself included, up until the last few years - think of browse as stodgy and old-fashioned. Does anyone use Yahoo!'s directory structure any longer? (They took it off the front page so long ago, I have a hard time remembering what it looked like. I couldn't even find it from their current front page - I had to type in http://directory.yahoo.com.)

Frankly, I do still use it, when the need calls for it. Recently I had a request where the person needed a list of vendors in a particular niche IT area. There was NOTHING available through the traditional sources I'd go to - OneSource, Hoover's, the market research firms or even MarketResearch.com. So what was left?

That's right - directory listings. I found two great directories through Yahoo! and through DMOZ (remember DMOZ? Wow, that seems old), which provided me 85% of the companies I needed to know about, and provided leads to the next 10%.

I've asked the hypothetical question before: could I have just conducted a search for this and found it? No way - my search NEVER would have turned up even 50% of the companies I found using these relatively authoritative directories.

In the networked information world, we're seeing an explosion of new technologies, and, even more extraordinary, widespread adoption of a number of these technologies. Social publishing and networking tools like Ning, Twitter, wikis and blogs are either in widespread use, or are quickly moving there. While this flood of new technologies does occasionally seem overwhelming, they are adding new dimensions and capabilities in creating, communicating and connecting with information, particularly the social knowledge and expertise that has been difficult to capture up to this point. This is truly an exciting time to be in information work!

The 'and/plus' approach applies to a lot of the areas and technologies you see in the information arena today. It becomes a matter of balancing the technologies and tools we already have that work well with the best features of the emerging technologies. For example, in tagging and categorizing information, folksonomies shouldn't supplant taxonomies - effective tagging systems will have elements of both.

Why? Because you need standardization in order to link stuff together, particularly to link out to other sources and make information findable across resources. But you also need the flexibility and currency of folksonomies. Folksonomies can respond much faster to new topics, buzz and trends than taxonomies can.

You also need a balance between relatively static, authoritative landing sites and social tools. It's phenomenal to have tools like wikis, because they offer the unparalleled ability to create group knowledge. Knowledge management, as a practice, has struggled for years with the idea of "tacit knowledge" - that intangible, hard-to-capture information that is in people's heads. Well, wikis and blogs have proven to be a giant step in the right direction for capturing tacit knowledge. Now you're starting to see wiki and blog search engines, because people are mining all of that tacit knowledge.

But again, the most effective solutions may be a balance of authoritative sources and portals - the central places for people to start - with social knowledge tools. When people need to know something with confidence - just to use a simple example, when they need to follow a standard or a law - they need to know THE place to go for that information.

It may not be able to reside on a wiki where it can be changed; it can't come up in a set of search results that are indistinguishable in authority from each other. People will always need THE ANSWER to many of their questions. That's why there are standards, guidelines and laws - they are the authoritative and acknowledged rules for doing something. For example, I don't want the Colorado State Driver's Handbook posted on a wiki, do you? It would make for a most interesting commute.

However, a wiki could be very effectively used as a collaboration tool linked off of a central site in order to get input, ideas, and to share experiences that relate to that topic. These authoritative sites - such as an internal competitive site or a subscription to IEEE conference proceedings - could integrate some of these social tools so users can read the trusted content and then rate, comment, share and discuss that information. These authoritative types of content could also use social tools such as blogs or microblogging tools to help keep users aware of the high value content they can access.

So, we believe that many current tools PLUS the new social media tools is what is going to be a powerful combination. It's not 'either/or' - it's 'and/plus'.

Scott Brown
Digital Libraries & Research

So we've talked about library as social setting and findability. Let's talk now about something a little more slippery: the concept of serendipity in discovering information.

Silly Putty was created while trying to find a substitute for rubber. The idea for the microwave oven was born when a scientist noticed that the candy bar in his pocket melted when exposed to radar waves. Serendipity happens all the time in chemistry, physics, pharmacology and medicine.

I think the definition that someone put into Wikipedia is quite good: "Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely." In fact, the Wikipedia article goes on to talk initially about the role of serendipity in science and technology, and provides several examples - a couple of which are above.

Now, when I need a specific data point - if I really just need to know, for example, how many broadband subscribers there were in the US in 2006 - I only need to find that information. I don't need to know that US broadband penetration was 72% - at least not for my purposes at this moment. I know exactly what data I need, and I need to find that exact data. That's the goal of findability.

But serendipity is different - it's about finding what you don't even know exists. It's about discovery, but it's about not knowing what you might discover. It's about the unplanned. So how do you plan for that?

To a large extent, by definition, you don't. You simply can't.

But to build upon the idea that "chance favors the prepared mind", you can create an environment for it to happen more readily - you can increase the chances that it can happen.

This is where collections of knowledge come into play, and where serendipity applies to libraries and other information collections. If you put a lot of information together, so that you can browse and wander through it, either physically or virtually, won't the chances increase that you'll find something extraordinary, something extraordinarily useful?

The answer is yes - and I state this through my own recurring experiences as a librarian and researcher. I know you've had these experiences, too. Often, I will have just finished working on a research request and, while working on a completely different request, I will run across a report or article that is unquestionably related to the previous request - but not in the way that I, or my requester, was thinking about it. It seems to come out of the blue, but is extremely relevant.

Could I have searched for it and found it? NO - because I didn't know I was looking for it.

Sometimes it's more ordinary - I'm going through a familiar resource, but something new has been added. For example, I was recently looking for information on the IT market and going through IDC.com. Suddenly, I ran across a press release for market sizing for the IT leasing market - exactly the thing that I was addressing with the previous requester.

Now, this isn't earthshaking serendipity - this kind of "ordinary" serendipity isn't world-changing. This level of serendipity is more along the lines of Lawrence Block's quote: "Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for."

But what happens when you have a collection of millions of documents or pieces of information - like Google, like IEEE Electronic Library, like the British Library - and you can browse through them, virtually or physically, just to see what you can find? To see where you might find connections or patterns where there weren't connections before?

While physical libraries provide certain kinds of opportunities for serendipity, tools like Grokker (we have an exterprise version at Sun called Sun Grokker) provide the virtual experience of serendipity. Grokker and the variety of mashups coming out these days are starting to break open the physical constraints and allow information to interact in new ways. And this enhances serendipity.

There is no question, at least in my mind, that information in isolated collections can be useful. Discrete collections can provide focus, a concentration of information, which is particularly useful for specialized audiences.

But when you start to bring a lot of disparate information together, surprising and world-changing things can happen. Suddenly you get to experience what Sir Isaac Newton might have felt like, getting hit on the head by the apple. New ideas are born. Innovative products are produced. New lands are discovered. The game changes.

And that's just another reason why I love what I do. That's part of the reason why I truly have the best job at Sun. What we do helps the folks at Sun have those serendipitous moments, the "AHA!" moments that make Sun the unique company and workplace that it is.

That, and I get to work with some of the most amazing and fun people in the company

Scott Brown
Digital Libraries & Research
Sun Learning Services

In my last entry, I talked about library as social setting. Here I get to talk about the two additional points Hal Stern brought out in his blog entry: 1) the organization and preservation of knowledge for findability, and 2) the concept of serendipity in discovering information.

In the age of Google, of information almost literally at your fingertips, Hal states that "you need libraries and the organization they impose to an even greater extent." I believe that, too. But why is that?

All of us have experienced the crush and incoherency of too much information. Say I want to find out information on outsourcing. If I do a Google search at 10am Mountain Time on May 14, 2007, I get over 58 million hits.

The first two "sponsored" links are for CapGemini (a consulting services group) and Nortel (the Google or Services folks might know why this comes up, but I sure don't). I also get image search results for outsourcing. (Why do I need images for outsourcing?)

I get the Wikipedia entry for outsourcing, which is good; Wikipedia's always a fairly reliable place to get up to speed on a topic. On this first page of results, I also get The Outsourcing Institute, a BusinessWeek article, and InformationWeek's Outsourcing center - all good.

So I'm off to a good start. But say what I really want is some definitive guides on outsourcing. Suppose I want some case studies and best practices around outsourcing. Will I find things like The outsourcing handbook: how to implement a successful outsourcing process, by Mark J. Power, Kevin C. Desouza, and Carlo Bonifazi? If this does come up in my Google search, how will I access it? Do I have to buy it? How do I know the eBook version exists from NetLibrary and do I need to buy it?

In the end, how much is it going to cost me - and how much time will I need to spend - to get knowledgable about outsourcing - without having to wade through the massive amounts of information about outsourcing out there?

It all comes down to this: how do I find what I'm looking for, even when I may not be exactly sure of what I'm looking for?

Peter Morville recently coined the word findability. Findability essentially is a word expressing the characteristic of how easy it is to, well, find something. If you need a piece of information, how easily and quickly can you get access to it?

Libraries - in whatever form, and in whatever setting, whether the function is called a "library" or not - are all about findability. That's our JOB. That's our profession - and it has been for many many years. First, we identify and find the information, and then we make it findable for others. (This is one of the driving ideas behind a lot of the Web 2.0 tools and social tools out there: finding and connecting people and information in a variety of different ways, getting your hands on the information when and where you need it.)

Because of this basic fact of our profession, we're constantly trying to improve findability - not only for you, our customer, but also for ourselves. After all, if I'm doing research and I can't find something - even something I KNOW exists - I'm stuck. I can't find it, so it might as well not exist.

But if we've done a good job, then you can lay your hands on the information you need quickly. Or we can lay our hands on it quickly and get it to you.

And that's magic. That's the opposite experience I like to think we've all had. You need that critical piece of information, right now, and, bang, all of a sudden someone hands it to you, or it pops right up for you. It's a beautiful moment. It's a gratifying moment for everyone involved.

So next time you need to find something? You know where to go - to your librarians in your corporation, university or community. Unless it's your car keys. We can't help you there. Unless you tagged them with a social tagging tool. Did you look on the couch?

Next up: Serendipity.

Scott Brown
Digital Libraries & Research
Sun Learning Services

In a recent blog posting, Hal Stern asked rhetorically, "When you have Google, who needs a library?"

While his question was rhetorical, this is a very real question for us as librarians - one we face regularly. The question is really just a spin on the old "everything can be found on the Web" urban legend.

The refreshing thing about Hal's answer to his own question is that he touches on three things that people don't always think of when they think "libraries":

* "Library" as a social setting (see also Beyond Google, The Journal of EDS Agility Alliance, Sun Microsystems' piece in The Road to Innovation issue)
* The organization and preservation of knowledge for findability
* Serendipity, or discovering information rather than searching for it

I'd like to say a bit more about each of these, but won't do so in one long posting. So in this posting (which in itself is a bit long), I'll address the first one: "library" as social setting.

Digital Libraries & Research recently went 100% digital. For years, we have concentrated on bringing more and more digital resources into Sun, because we realized Sun employees need digital, always-on access. Sun employees work everywhere and "everywhen". We want to make sure that as many Sun folks have access to the information they need as soon as they need it, and digital resources perform this function well.

As more and more information has become digitized, however, we've noticed two interesting trends:

1) People didn't want just digital or just print; they wanted both. It wasn't a case of "either/or" - it was "and/plus". Sun folks want to be able to get to the information they need quickly and digitally, but they also want to have the print available to them. Not a lot of people want to read a whole book on-screen - and if you're reading in bed at night, holding up a laptop can get pretty tiring (though the last Harry Potter hardback book weighed almost as much as a laptop).

2) Even though we provide digital resources online, and also used to ship print material to Sun employees wherever they were, people still continued to come into the library space.

This second piece is most intriguing. If you don't have to come to the library, if you can get what you need online, why would you come into the library?

Because it is a "space" with a meaning - a space that represents and encourages thought, research and inspiration. The library space is a separation from work space - you're away from your phone and email, you're surrounded by information, and it's very attractive to be there and know you've got the time and space to really dig into information. You can search for specific things, but you can also stumble upon information you didn't know existed - sometimes information that's key to what you're doing. For those of us who used the library in university or college, it's also reminiscent of the kind of deep research and thinking that we did there.

At the same time, it can be a social setting - a place to meet your colleagues, to work together in an information-filled space, to collaborate and generate ideas, to get things done. It's a place to run into someone you haven't seen in a while and reconnect, and it's a place to meet new people who are interested in the same work you're doing. It's a place to make connections - people to information, people to people, and information to information.

These characteristics - the library as an inspirational place, and as a meeting place - make library spaces unique, and those unique qualities will never entirely be replicated by a Google search.

But as more social networking and Web 2.0 tools come online, they begin to create an interesting challenge and opportunity: how do we create these kinds of virtual "spaces", where there is the combination of the serendipity of discovery, the atmosphere of research, and the social interaction components?

The Digital Libraries & Research team has always looked to new technologies coming online to address this kind of opportunity. That's why we're looking into opportunites for providing information and information consulting through Second Life, actively using wikis, blogs and tags, and continuing to look at new tools (like Ning.com and other social networking tools) to bring new "library" experiences to life, for all the Sun Learning Services audiences: employees, partners, customers and community.

Next post, I'll talk about the importance of findability.

Scott Brown
Digital Libraries & Research
Sun Learning Services