Words of the day

One of the most common sources of new words is the field of management. Here are two words, each of which has several things to communicate. An old favourite, provided by Rebecca from the Communities in Control Conference held recently, is incentivise. This has been around a long time, and can be defined as a policy of "funding those who agree with us, and taxing those who don't." It can also be defined more prosaically as to provide an incentive - a less appealing version of the carrot part of the carrot and stick metaphor.

Also from this verbally prolific conference, speechify, as in "the community sector has a tendency to speechify." I guess that means to turn some other form of activity into a verbal activity. Many dictionaries define this as simply the act of making a speech, and this unaware definition has apparently been assumed by SpeechWorks in using the word for its new text-to-speech product which turns turns text into speech "with more personality than previously thought possible." The product has been licensed by Microsoft. A better definition is from the Urban Dictionary -"to speechify is to incessantly, superfluously bloviate in regards to an issue that usually calls for more direct action (or a change of course)." For example: "President Bush's strategy to combat the Iraq war's unpopularity is to speechify."

Word of the day

Cathart, a verb, and many thanks to Professor Geoff Scott from UWS, who used the word this morning at the Workshop on Learning Leaders in Times of Change as smoothly and naturally as if it were already in broad common use. Maybe Geoff invented it, maybe not. It appears on the language creation website with the following definition. I am surprised that such a useful word isn't used a great deal more.

cathart v. catharting, catharted [Back formation <>

Coined By: Acquaintance of person submitting

State of the art ILMS - oxymoron?

My library has an end-of-life integrated library management system (ILMS), Dynix Classic. Every library has an ILMS. An ILMS is a good thing - functional integration, management of resources, efficient workflows, adherence to standards, and so on. But the feature of them all that strikes the librarian venturing into this territory is that they no longer function effectively at the user end and, to the newer user, they just look out of date. They have failed to incorporate features which are commonplace in daily Web use. The development cycle for a conventional ILMS is too long to keep up to date with fast-moving areas of change, such as those loosely described by the term Web 2.0.

Lorcan Dempsey has a recent brief post - and many previous - on the ILMS and he refers to the enquiry into the state of the ILMS recently commissioned in the UK by JISC and SCONUL - a focus on the higher education sector, but relevant to anyone. A new discussion paper on the ILMS from the University of Windsor (Ontario) defines them as "proprietary monolithic systems encompassing the major operations of the library." Windsor, like many others, is not only evaluating its ILMS, but questioning the concept. Since then, Windsor has announced that it is partnering with Georgia Public Library Service in developing acquisitions software for the NZ open source software, Evergreen; there is a nice presentation about this. Also in Canada, the British Columbia public library system is running with BC Pines, a project for "The phased implementation of the Evergreen Open ILS for all of BC . . . over the next 5 years."

There is clearly a lot going on in the ILMS zone, and there seems to be much more willingness to contemplate open source solutions, and other new approaches too. For all of us, the dilemma is that we wish to retain the back end efficiencies and workflows of the conventional, slowly evolving ILMS, but we would also like to achieve the functionality and agility that open source can provide at the user access end.

Another factor: at Swinburne loans of books account for 15-20% of our total managed "transactions" (loans, uses, full text downloads, repository use, online reserve). The ILMS is primarily a tool for managing physical items and material we pay for. As book use declines as a proportion of total use, developers and vendors of the traditional ILMS must surely sense a new business model coming?
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At Swinburne we are taking stock, and we are particularly interested in academic libraries which are doing the same kind of thing.

Word of the Day

Here's the most popular word in the past month from a rival word of the day. It is meh, and is a term indicating indifference, to be used when one simply doesn't care. For example:
A: What do you want for dinner?
B: Meh.
The word is now sweeping the Internet, according to the Guardian. Used in the Simpsons. Defined by Danny Katz as "totally blank-brained can't-be-stuffed indifference." Scored a startling 5934 positive votes and only 514 negative in the Urban Dictionary, a prolific (too prolific) source of new words of all kinds. It is "a slang dictionary. With your definitions." Thanks Debbie for the source.

Getup

Is this a word of the day or just a post? I heard a spokesperson for Getup on the radio this morning. Getup aims to "bring participation back into our democracy" and its members "use the latest online tools to act on important issues facing the country." It claims to have more members than all the political parties put together - not that difficult. It claims to be at the "progressive" end of politics, and also "independent" and otherwise apolitical. Have a look.

Convenience is King

At the DA Information Services re-launch gig last night (Wednesday) Richard Siegersma kindly attributed to me the saying "Convenience is king". The context is the older saying, Content is King. But the underlying point for librarians and their friends is that content, in the sense of the quality of content, is no longer as important to the user as convenience. Anything available right now is better than anything available tomorrow. I think that that was always the case, but we ignored it. It is impossible to ignore now, because the Web highlights conflicts of convenience versus content.

I see that www.contentisking.com has been taken, but www.convenienceisking.com is still available (and so is www.kontentisking.com). Richard?

Word of the day

Today's expression is heads up, meaning a briefing or short announcement - "pay attention, I have something to say." I remember exactly when I encountered this expression - someone used it as if everyone knew exactly what it meant, and I didn't. And why has it just suddently started to be almost universally used? And is it a runtogether, or does it take a hyphen, or not?

Interestingly, it is featured in the ABC News Radio word pages. They point out that the US meaning is quite different, referring to being alert and watchful. As you can see from a search of the word, its use has become very diffuse. In New Zealand the Labour Party has the domain name; for the .com domain it is an online music store; in .co.uk a neurological physiotherapy practice has the name, and in Germany its about motor sports. Meanwhile in Tuvalu, the headsup domain name goes to . . . roar, a US advertising site.