Let me explain my holiday shopping experience to you.

First, I received a print catalog through the mail from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in mid-November.

Now, I’m not sure how they got my work address or even knew that I might be inclined to shop in their store–I haven’t been to New York in years and I am not a current member of their museum.

I suspect that my subscription to our Houston Museums and being a member of a firm that supports our local museum may have meant that my name and work address might have been sold to them.

After perusing the catalog’s glossy pages for several days and admiring the beautiful colors of a particular piece that I thought that my mother might like, I finally logged into their web site to check out their site, any current deals and examined the one item more closely.

I finally took the catalog home on the first week-end of December.

That Sunday, I went online with the intent to buy. I ended up doing all of my Christmas shopping for my entire list with the store and, in the interest of future discounts, became a museum member, to boot. In the last few minutes of my shopping, I made a quick call to the museum’s customer service department to confirm discount codes.

My shopping was done in about 15 minutes. But in reality, the purchases had been percolating for weeks.

The lesson? My very large spend–well, for me, anyways–was a result of both print and digital efforts. Marketing is not limited to just one touch–it is multiple touches by multiple channels.

If you review my interaction with the Museum, you will see that I met with them in nearly every way possible but physically: print, PC, Android tablet and iPhone.

Don’t put all of your eggs in any one basket be they print, digital, email, mailers, catalogs or whatever. They should all work in tandem.

As a marketer recently told me, we have all these different paint colors on our palette and we have to mix them just right. Otherwise, all you’ll get is a really ugly brown.

photo [cc] shootingbrooklyn

Big tip-o-the-hat to Out of the Jungle blogger Marie S. Newman for pointing out an interesting decision against the Brooklyn Public library in her post “Judge Throws book at Brooklyn Public Library.” I’ll try not to re-hash what Marie pointed out, but there were some very interesting parts within the decision, one in which it seems that Supreme Court Justice Arthur Schack took personal offense. Justice Schack blasted the defense counsel from Wilson Elser argument as being “disingenuous” and went on to say that the argument “borders upon being frivolous, because it is completely without merit in law.” He even puts in a final punch toward the end of the opinion by saying, “The Court finds it interesting that defendants BPL and WHITTAKER did not make their disingenuous lack of a notice of claim argument until they were represented by their new counsel, Wilson, Elser.” Ouch…

But wait. It gets better.

Justice Schack gives a history of the public library system in New York and how that “prior to 1901, robber baron-turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie offered more than $5,000,000 to the City of New York to erect public libraries.” Perhaps that is how New Yorkers refer to Andrew Carnegie… “robber baron-turned philanthropist,” or perhaps Justice Schack’s Grandfather lost some money to Carnegie in the 19th Century??

Justice Schack continues his history lesson and points out that the argument that the Brooklyn Public Library is neither a Municipal Corporation, nor are its employees employed by the city.

But wait. It gets nastier.

Justice Schack then starts in on the finances of the Brooklyn Public Library. I’m not sure of the relevance of this part of the decision to the municipal corporation claim… which the Justice has already rejected… but, it sure makes for some interesting reading.

Apparently, Brooklyn Public Library is running a $1.1 million deficit, and the judge immediately points to nine reasons that he thinks are behind the deficit. And he names each of them along with their salaries that add up to over $1.7 million dollars:

$254,959 to Dionne Mack–Harvin, then Executive Director; $228,757 to John Vitali, Deputy Director of Business Administration; $221,258 to Judith Nichols, Deputy Director of External Affairs [a euphemism for a lobbyist]; $214,858 to Mary Graham, Deputy Director of Public Service; $196,086 to Lawrence Jennings, Director of Human Resources; $172,033 to Selvon Smith, Director of Information Technology; $166,672 to Lay Cheng Lee, Director of Information Technology; $164,788 to Aron Bukspan, Director of Major & Capital Giving [a professional fundraiser]; and, $162,275 to Vintress Brown, Director of Finance.

But wait. Then it gets personal.

Justice Schack apparently doesn’t care for the fact that, despite running a huge deficit, the Brooklyn Public Library has a “professional fundraiser, who receives more in compensation that every New York State judge, including the Chief Judge of the State of New York.” At this point it just seems that Justice Schack is just piling on.

But wait. Then comes the pièce de résistance… a quote from Mel Brooks:

To paraphrase Mel Brooks’ famous quote, “It’s good to be the king!”, when he played King Louis XVI of France prior to the French Revolution, in the 1981 film satire, History of the World: Part I, “It’s good to be operating a deficit running non-profit, receiving 62% of its revenue from the financially challenged City of New York!”

Here’s the link to the full opinion from Justice Schack, who may want to paraphrase Woody Allen on its impact:

If my decisions make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

I think he’s accomplished that here.

image [cc] johndal

I had a conversation with a techie librarian yesterday that has found there is a dividing line between the IT and Library when it comes to support for creative ideas that originate in the Library. It’s an old story, but one that seems to continue in an age where the IT mantra is focused primarily on the issues of Security and Up-Time. Not that Security and Up-Time are not important, they are critical pieces of the technology puzzle, but they are not the only pieces.

The whole IT process has become a road-block for those creative and ingenious ideas, as many of those ideas are viewed as “security risks” or not supportable in the current infrastructure. Ideas are suffocated in the extremely bureaucratic process of getting it on the IT schedule… which allocates it to some future Quarter of the next fiscal year. IT has become a slave to the Gantt chart, and has caused the creative projects that require flexibility to go underground.

Chances are there are a number of “underground” projects going on in your firm right now. Unofficial SQL databases; web servers running off of an internal PC; MS Access databases being shared across a network folder; external services hosting internal data… the list goes on and on. Many of these are known to the IT department, tolerated, but not supported. However, as time goes on, and the procedure for getting items on the “IT Calendar” gets harder and harder, and the implementation dates for approved projects are pushed further and further down the line, the underground projects start becoming more elusive. Underground projects that started off as work-around’s, suddenly become critical tool to certain departments or lawyers. Critical tools that are unregulated by IT.

How can there be a happy medium in this scenario? First of all, it would seem that IT has to understand that there are those in the organization that will find work around’s to the roadblocks they set up in the name of up-time and security. Instead of viewing these as rouge employees that need to be shut down, perhaps it would be better to have some type of IT liaison to go out and discuss why a work around is needed in the first place, and  work with others to determine a safe way to manage the project that minimizes the security and up-time risks, while also suggesting official alternatives that may already be in place. Maybe the reason for the work around is a lack of knowledge of existing resources or training, rather than the non-existence of a resource. The key is communications. Ignorance may be bliss, but only if that ignorance doesn’t cause other systems to shutdown, or key confidential data from leaving the secured network.

IT cannot do everything. It does not have the budget, the people or the resources.

Work around’s are not always good ideas either. Some work around’s are huge security risks, or waste limited resources on projects that return very limited value.

This brings me right back to the communication solution. IT cannot continue to hide behind the bureaucratic processes as a way to stifle potential projects that originate from outside the department. Doing so will only create more incentive for those with ideas to completely shut out IT and go create them on their own, or simply give up on a creative and ingenious project simply because they know IT will shut them down.

Security and up-time are critically important, but so is creativity and ingenuity. These ideas should dove-tail together, not be at war with each other. IT needs to walk out from behind that secure set of doors that divide them from the rest of the office and start communicating with the people that have been creating the work around’s. There is value in that relationship… the first step is to start a dialog.

Looking through the Microsoft survey on “The Future of Government Work,” [download PDF] it would seem that there is a bipolar view of what communication tools workers “prefer” to use versus what they would “like to use.” Take a look at the answers provided on questions 9 and 10 when it comes to “new” media such as Social Media, Online Collaboration tools, and even video conferencing:

Q9: How do you prefer to communicate with colleagues?

  • Videoconferencing = 3%
  • Social Media = 3%
  • Intranet page (w/shared documents) = 2%
Q10: Which collaboration tools would you like to use?
  • Videoconferencing = 29%
  • Social Media = N/A
  • Collaborative Doc Editing = 32%
  • Intranet = 12%
Granted, there is the difference in verbiage of “communicate/collaborate” but I think we are looking at two sides of the same coin here. How is it that the answers to these two question be so far apart? My guess (and that’s all it is), is that what we are looking at in question 9 is “how do you communicate/collaborate now” versus question 10’s “how would you like to communicate/collaborate if you could.” It would seem that there is a desire to use more videoconferencing, non-email electronic communications (aka chat), and collaborative document editing resources. The survey also points out that these resources are needed components of any telecommuting policies and procedures that an office may implement.
Now I should mention that the survey was conducted by Microsoft, and their MS Office 365, Cloud-Based platform solution, so the questions may be worded in such a way as to feed the answers into the “solution” they are providing. One of the glaring facts of this is that Q9 includes a social media answer, where it is completely missing from the Q10 responses. It could be that workers don’t like social media resources… but, it’s more likely from the fact that there isn’t a social media product included in the Office 365 platform (yeah, call me a cynic.) 

There are many ways you can read these survey results, but there is a theme here that we’ve all been seeing anecdotally for the past few years. Given the right tools, the location of your people shouldn’t matter in order for them to be successful. Not only that, but many workers have the desire to use these resources in order to make their work lives better… probably making their home lives better at the same time. It is no longer a requirement for companies to require their workforce be physically in a company office, sitting in a company seat, using a company PC, and working with company software. The time has come to start looking at the way we work through a different lens. 

I’ve been testing out an interesting product this morning called Vocalyze. The gist of Vocalyze is to take web content and covert it into audio and play it as new articles are published. Vocalyze is pretty simple to use, and works on the desktop, iOS and Android platform. There are a number of options to read specific featured blogs or individual blogs that have embedded the Vocalyze widget into their WordPress platform blogs. You can also connect your Twitter or ReadItLater posts into Vocalyze and have it read those posts in real time.

What I wanted to see was if Vocalyze would actually take my RSS feed and monitor it for new content and read that to me as new blog post are pushed out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a direct way to link my Google Reader to Vocalyze… but, I did discover a two-step work-around that does practically the same thing.

For a number of months now, I’ve automated my RSS feed into a Twitter stream using Google Reader and an automated Twitter feed product called dlvr.it. I created a Twitter account and named it @xlambertg and used dlvr.it to connect my Google Reader account’s RSS address. The initial process is pretty easy to set up:

  • Create a Public Folder in your Google Reader, and place any of the blogs you want to automatically feed in that folder. View the “Details and Statistics” in the dropdown list for that folder, and copy the Feed URL.
  • Go to dlvr.it and sign up for a free account. Then link that Feed URL to the Twitter account (I created an unmonitored Twitter account to do this so that it didn’t conflict with my regular account.
There are some additional bells and whistles that dlvr.it does, but I keep it pretty simple. Although the @xlambertg twitter account is unmonitored, it still has almost 200 followers as of this morning, so others seem to like my RSS feed list, too.
Now, back to Vocalyze. 
Vocalyze allows you to enter a specific Twitter account into your playlist, so I simply entered my @xlambertg account and it pulls up the latest feeds and starts reading them out to me. Very cool!
I’m still in the initial stages of testing this out, but so far I can tell you that I like the switching between male and female voices between each new blog post. In my opinion, the male voice is a little more realistic than the female, but both are pretty decent sounding automated voices. Right now I’m listening to “Web Law Predictions for 2012” from Steven Matthews at Slaw, and the Vocalyze reading of the post is pretty easy to listen to and understand. 
Go give Vocalyze a try and let me know if you have any additional tips and tricks for how you can use this product to automate blog posts into audio content.

The Google Zeitgeist 2011 has a list of the top ten search results by region. Luckily, my home city of Houston was included.

Or maybe not so luckily, actually.

Our search results are as follows:

  1. Houston Rodeo – an annual cowboy event
  2. Memorial Hermann – a hospital
  3. HCAD – the county appraisal district
  4. Houston Workforce Commission – unemployment office
  5. San Jacinto College – local junior college
  6. Klein ISD – school district in a northwest suburb
  7. Greensheet – classified ads
  8. Harris Country Jail – no clarification required
  9. Katy ISD – a school district in a western suburb
  10. HAR – an online site for Houston real estate
Johanna Wright, Google’s Director of Product Management, writes “Searches for school districts, universities and local libraries made the list in ten states . . .  .”

I will let the readers draw their own conclusions from Houston’s list.  May I just say that I grew up in Ohio? 

Maybe I should move to Minneapolis. The county library made it to number 3 on their list.

It’s Christmas time and joy abounds
A time for toys and gifts all around.
Toby wants the next generation iPhone,
Greg said he does too,
But Lisa’s thinking about Droid,
So what do you do?
We can’t split the baby
And turn an Apple into a Droid;
Plus we’re all too cheap to get both.
I know!
Problem solved.
Instead of buying them for us,
In the spirit of Christmas
We’ll give gifts to you:
Like in the Gift of the Magi,
We wrote this blog post for you!

Merry Christmas!

Image [cc] Tigershungry

There’s a saying that if you hear something once, it’s a fluke, twice is a trend, and if you hear it three times it’s a habit. I’ve now heard a similar tale being told by three different administrative groups in law firms when it comes to leveraging the skills of their librarians. It is usually presented to a group of peers like this:

“shhh… I’ve uncovered a secret resource… It’s called the Library.” 

The three different areas I’ve heard this from are Knowledge Management, Alternative Fees, and finally Matter Intake and Conflicts.

The Knowledge Management statement is probably not a surprise to any of us. KM and Library have had close relations for many years. In fact, I argue that the original KM developers were librarians. When it comes to KM analysis, librarian skill sets are well suited for this type of work. The Alternative Fee statement may be a little surprising to some of you (mostly because having an Alternative Fee group may be still in the development stages for many firms), but the argument is really the same — AFA’s need analytics, good library research staffers know how to analyze. Finally, the Conflicts/Matter Intake argument falls under the same analytical argument as the other two. For Conflicts, the ability to use someone with both an MLS and a JD works to soothe the nerves of Partners that want someone they feel comfortable with in analyzing conflicts data, as well as the administrative director that wants someone that they are comfortable with doing high-quality research and analysis.

You wouldn’t think that using library staff in these three areas would be such a big deal, but to listen to how KM, AFA and Conflict/Matter Intake leaders tell these stories, you would think that they somehow unearthed some magical potion that no one else knows about. It is told in ways that sound like they have tricked the library into being more than it is. The stories are told with great pride, sometimes in a hushed tone that implies that the library was tricked into doing something that is outside of its mandate.

So why do other department leaders believe they’ve found some secret ingredient to make their individual processes better? There are probably two good, and very different answers to this. First, the leadership in the library listened to them and came up with the suggestion of using the library to fill the need. That is the good one. The bad one is if the administrative leader had to covertly use the library for the process, and after a few successes, got approval from the COO or a Partner to continue using the library staff for this purpose.
How can you tell which of these is happening? Usually take a look at what happened to the library staffer. If they are still in the library, then most likely the library was proactive in working with the other departments to get the work flow organized and make sure that the library is ready and able to help with the business task. If on the other hand, you see that the staffer is suddenly in another department, then most likely the library leadership did not take a proactive stance, and as a result lost the staffer… and probably didn’t get the approval to replace that position once it was removed.

There is a trend for the administrative side of the law firm to be much more involved in promoting the business of law, and the work flow/efficiency/effectiveness of how law firms take on, process, and analyze the way we work. Librarians have an important role to play in these goals… especially in the area of analytics. Forward thinking librarian leaders are engaging with other administrative leaders to fill these demands, while others are sitting back waiting for someone to ask them for their help. Hopefully, your library leadership is in the “forward thinking” category. If not, watch as the trickle of library research staff leaks out of the library and into the other departments.

I saw this morning where Law.com was now available on the new Google Currents platform for Android and iOS devices. In checking out that news, I discovered that we could also add 3 Geeks and a Law Blog to the list of publishers available on Google Currents, so I jumped at the opportunity. Set up was very easy, and within about ten minutes (probably less) it was up and running.

Go check out the new Google Currents publication app and let us know what you think (search on the word “law” to find our Currents page.) I’ve tested it on my iPad, but haven’t seen what it looks like on an Android or iPhone platform yet (other than the template Google provides in its Producer page.) It looks pretty cool to me on the iPad, but I may be caught up in the afterglow of being able to put the blog out there so easily.

If you’re a blogger and want to get your blog out there on Google Currents, you can go to the “Producer” page and fill out all of the information. It is fast and easy (and free!), so there isn’t much of a reason to not test it out.

In Kevin Miles’ article, “Library on a Credenza” [PDF], he talks about the “Deskbooks” (some refer to them as “Desk Copies”) that attorneys have on their credenza to help them in their day-to-day practice. Whenever most librarians I know speak of Deskbooks, they usually cringe and think of the giant hole in their budget each time a new attorney comes in and asks for a complete set for their specific practice area. Miles, on the other hand, actually looks at the Deskbooks in a much more measured and practical way and wonders if there is a better way of delivering the information housed in the Deskbook.

Deskbooks can cost the firm hundreds of dollars a year in upkeep, so with that much of an investment per lawyer, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves (both librarians and lawyers) a few questions about our best practices when it comes to Deskbooks? Kevin emailed me this morning and wondered if we should be asking ourselves the following:

  • What is the value of a deskbook?
  • What is the best practices model for a deskbook?
  • Should a best practices model be taught in Library or Law School?
  • Should they be the starting point in a research project? 
  • Should deskbooks migrate over to eBooks?
  • How should an eDeskbook collection be managed?

Are you addressing these issues when it comes to Deskbooks, or are you simply processing them and routing them to the attorneys year after year? Are there other best practices questions we should ask? Most of us think of Deskbooks as a “necessary evil” in the practice of law, but does it really have to be evil? Perhaps thinking of Deskbooks in a new way may provide value in ways we hadn’t thought of before.

Take a look at Kevin Miles’ article, “Library on a Credenza” [PDF], and let us know if you are already acting on some of the best practices issues discussed here and in the article.