March 2006 Archives

I decided several months ago to turn off the Outlook desktop alert feature, and I'm glad I did. In Outlook 2003, the alerts pop up in the lower right-hand side of the screen each time an email arrives in your inbox, which for me was just about every 2 minutes. The brief interruption inevitably messed with my train of thought.

If you're a frequent user of web conferencing software, beware of the Outlook alert. I've been a participant in several web conferences lately where the presentation has been interrupted by an Outlook alert on the presenter's desktop, displaying text from a message that the the presenter would have most likely preferred to keep to him/herself. I won't name any names, but I've personally seen this happen twice in the last week.

You can be forgiven if you don't know how to turn off this email alert feature, which is turned on by default in Outlook 2003, as it's quite buried in the Outlook menus. Select "Tools - Options", then click on "Email Options", then "Advanced Options." and remove the checkmark next to "Display a New Desktop Alert."

So be kind to those who are sending you what they expect are private emails, and either exit out of Outlook before hosting a web conference, or turn the darn thing off forever.

Let's face it, most of us have never been satisfied with providing subject access to our books exclusively via Library of Congress subject headings. Though they provide a level of consistency that's important, the terms used haven't always been, how should I say it, intuitive. Many firm libraries enhance the subject headings with more popular terms. I guess you could say, they've been tagging for some time.

Now there's talk about letting your catalog users add tags and comments to cataloging records. There was an interesting thread on Web4Lib on this topic. (See The Shifted Librarian - OPAC Tagging - Who's it?) You can see tagging in action on the Penn Library Catalog. (Scroll down to the bottom.)

While I really like the idea of using tags and other feedback options in a law firm library catalog, it's always debatable whether any will actually contribute. At any rate, it would certainly be nice to have the option to extend knowledge management to the library catalog.

Sometimes it really is a good idea to have a live person edit the news instead of a computer. At least that seems to be the moral of the story told by Rich Wiggins on "How to Spam Google News" Part 1 & 2.

In a nutshell, Rich figured out that a political candidate was planting what the average reader would undoubtedly consider to be "non-stories" on Google News , for what I guess are obvious reasons. Rich and a few of his friends tried issuing press releases to see if they, too, could get their stuff carried by Google News, and low and behold, it worked. The word spread, as these things do on the Internet, resulting in several fake stories with misinformation being posted to Google News. It makes for fascinating reading, so see Wigblog for the full-details.

Beleaguered newspaper editors should feel somewhat vindicated. There is actually a reason for their existence. On the other hand, maybe people find fake news to be more interesting than the real thing!

The new Nexis interface was introduced in the U.S. earlier this month, according to an InfoToday Newsbreak by Marydee Ojala.

I can't help but be a bit frustrated reading the features list, which includes customized content based on the user's country, an Easy Search interface with check boxes for limiting search results to news, company, industry, people, and/or countries. And, how cool is this, clustering technology that suggests other articles on similar topics. But why am I frustrated? Because legal customers, at least currently, don't have access to the Nexis platform, which, as far as I can tell from screenshots, was more intuitive and easy to use than the News section of Lexis.com, even before the facelift.

I hope I'm wrong about that, and we all get to use these improvements sometime soon!