Acronym of the day

When the Commonwealth Government was the new government, it changed the names of all the departments. We had become familiar with DCITA (which we pronounced d'keeta), the Department of Comnmunications, Information Technology and the Arts, and DEST (the Department of Education, Science and Training). Their pronounceable acronyms somehow humanised them.

But the new government, apparently unaware of the humanising effect of pronounceability, gave its new departments a different style of name - DCITA morphed into the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), and it was quite clear that it couldn't be pronounced at all. So it was heartening, at a Canberra meeting, to hear people referring to it as BACARDE (or perhaps Bacardi). Not strictly an acronym, since the D for Department has been dropped, and vowells have been changed in order to turn the acronymn into a homonym of a well known spirit (you can find out about it here, but you have to be over 18). But more human. Up to a point.

Word of the day

Today's word is frolleague, which is a work colleague who invites you to be an online friend. Thank you to Tom for spotting it.

The Inquirer used the word in a scare story run recently: "A frolleague epidemic is upon us." But how can friendship be seen as a threat to us all? Apparently this sort of thing "runs the risk of damaging careers" or "could be absolutely life-threatening", according to

"Although rather alien now Frolleagues is expected to become a far more familiar term soon enough, as due to the epidemic in Britain, the Oxford English Dictionary is considering it for inclusion in its next revision."

The Urban Dictionary provides some further definition and this example of usage "My Frolleague, Bert, is really connected but I would not be seen dead with him at a bar, so I'll invite him to join my LinkedIn network. While I drink and work with Betty so she gets the Facebook invite." In the absence of better grounded advice, that's the latest word on frolleagues.

Striking achievements from the National Library

I was so immensely impressed by the National Library of Australia's new Australian Newspapers BETA search service that I sent a message out about it in the irregular newsletter I send to staff. Someone found a relative in a newspaper overnight (they wouldn't do that kind of searching at work) and reported in. And since then I have come across several more happy users.

The service - see http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ - is available and working now. It is freely available to the public and currently (several weeks ago) contains 73,000 out of copyright newspaper pages (approx 730,000 individual articles) from 1803 onwards. Another 20,000 digitised newspaper pages will be added each week to the service. The goal is to provide the full text of a daily newspaper for each state and territory up to about 1955, in both image and machine-readable form. You can also go and look at the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP) website for more information – at http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/project_details/ The site has a huge amount of information about the program.

Most of you, I assume, will just want to go to the site and try it out. One of the great strengths of the ANDP is that it is national; if your subject of interest is not nailed down in a specific state, the default search is national, across multiple newspaper titles. The text of the newspapers appears in all cases both as an image, and as scanned text using OCR. And because of the vagaries of OCR, if you spot errors (and there are plenty) and itch to correct them, you can. You can register as a user, and this enables you to correct the text - more crowdsourcing. The service even has a list of Top Text-Correctors.

You can add tags, ask questions, and use facets to refine your search, which is relevance ranked. In other words, the tools for accessing information through the Australian Newspapers service are definitely superior to the average library catalogue.

Word of the day

Today's word is crowdsourcing, and thank you to Rebecca for pointing it out, and to the JISC posting which we both saw. I was sure that I had used it before in this blog, but I haven't. I have just remembered where I did use the word, which was in the text of this library's IT Strategic Framework, developed early in 2007. So the word has been around for a while.

According to the Wikipedia, it means "the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." Crowdsourcing has been coined along the lines of outsourcing, with which it is compared and contrasted. For us, crowdsourcing is most often applied to user-contributed keywords, or tags. There is an interesting article in Boingboing about the Library of Congress "using Flickr to crowdsource tagging and organizing its photo archive." And Flickr is the great example of user-generated subject descriptors - billions of them.

There are discussions amongst librarians about whether user-contributed tags are "better" than structured subject headings. Here is the definitive answer to that question: yes, and no. They do different things, both useful.

Word of the day

Today's word is wetware. This was created in the 1990s by analogy with hardware and software, and refers to the human brain. Merriam-Webster dfines it as "the human brain or a human being considered especially with respect to human logical and computational capabilities." Wikipedia has a much more complex definition, which refers to the way in which mind and brain interact.

The Merriam-Webster definition has the virtue of simplicity, but the disadvantage of particularly annoying pop-ups. It refers the user to Britannica Online, which has absolutely no information, but even more annoying pop-ups. You may well be able to do without this word, but if you do want to use it, the financial side of Wikipedia (a very small request for donations) is easier to handle.

Word of the day

Today's word is vagueing up, from yesterday's article in The Age by Michelle Grattan, headed "Nelson fudges 2012 date for start of carbon trade." Grattan uses the term in this sentence: "This is a vagueing up of the line of recent months, which said the scheme should start "not later than 2012". One Liberal later said the 2012 date was now "aspirational"." The alternative spelling, vaguing up, occurs in an article by Roger Clarke on research ethics. Roger refers to "withholding and/or vaguing up" research information to preserve a commercial advantage.

However, this invaluable term seems to have been coined anew by Michelle Grattan - yet another in her many contributions to the expression of Australian political life - I can think of many possible uses already. I guess that a definition of the term would run something like "redefining a policy or course of action so as to make its meaning less clear". The expression has been formed by analogy with similar expressions, like dressing up or sexed up.

As for the spelling, that is a dilemma. Related words like queueing can be spelled both ways (with or without the e). I'm not sure which I prefer - simplicity would lean me to the version without the e, but the version with the e looks righter. And I'm a Gemini. You decide.

Request for Advice

One of the things Roxanne Missingham gave me when she handed over the ALIA presidency in May this year was the ALIA Facebook Group. Go to http://www.facebook.com and then to the group ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association). We have 272 members and nine photographs. This is about 5% of our membership (assuming they are all members) – a start, but a long way to go.

I was hugely impressed to hear of the success of Michael Geist’s Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, which has grown to 88,000 members in a short time. The group has been so successful that members have actually met in, well, groups of people, physically. The Facebook group now has chapters. Have a look.

I asked Kathryn Greenhill, Murdoch University’s - and Australia's - online guru, and she suggested that photographs might work. So how about it? One of the features of the more lively Facebook groups I belong to is the proliferation of photographs, which bring people together.

In fact the liveliest group I belong to is the Swinburne Chapter of the Golden Key Society. This is a student society, and its members are mostly undergraduate students (my role is Advisor, liaison with the University). It is quite clear that they use Facebook in quite a different way to the way, er, librarians do. They use it daily as a primary means of communication.

But bear in mind how librarians use Facebook, and please send me your suggestions as to how we can make the ALIA Facebook group lively and relevant.

Why not start by putting a nice photograph of a horse in a library onto the site on Friday? Its their birthday (horses, not libraries), and you'll have great fun taking the picture, too.