One of the things we’ve seen in our profession which is increasingly common is the shift to independent consulting / contracting / freelancing. In the workforce in general, this accounts for 20-23% of all work, a number forecast to increase, as mentioned in today’s Wall Street Journal and as supported by recent reports on outlets such as CNN. Today’s article is a good read for those who are preparing for, or thinking of, moving to independent work, and goes on:
We can rightly bemoan the loss of security, the shifting of economic risk from institutions to individuals. But crying foul will not change the circumstances that many Americans find themselves facing. Righteous indignation will not turn back time. We can, however, better prepare ourselves for the future….So, what do these thriving solo artists have in common? What is the recipe for their good fortune? My research points to five ingredients to keep in mind.
Read the entire article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704825504574581900293220092.html
For those interested in use of APIs, here’s an example of Hong Kong University using the Scopus API to monitor researchers’ publications and citations. This can easily be shifted to monitoring certain KOLs as business dictates…
Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has selected its Scopus search Application Programming Interface (API) technology to continuously update its institutional repository and expert profiling system with information on where and how often researchers are being cited…. HKU is the first institution to show Scopus h-index, and counts of citations, documents, and co-authors for each current HKU author across the institution, in its local institutional repository, The HKU Scholars Hub (The Hub). These details are shown on The Hub ResearcherPages, an expert profiling system which showcases the research of each current HKU author. HKU uses the Scopus API to build these pages, and update them in real time.
Full press release here.
A reminder – applications are due next week.
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The SLA’s Division of Pharmaceutical and Health Technology would like to provide financial assistance to students and professional members of P&HT, who are interested in attending the 2010 SLA Annual Meeting (in New Orleans, LA) and/or to the PHTD Spring Meeting (in Philadelphia, PA)
An award stipend of up to $1,500 will be granted to a maximum of 3 qualified applicants.
Applications are due by Friday, February 12.
For more information about the application please visit:
http://units.sla.org/division/dpht/division_info/awards-travwin.shtml
For those looking for additional uses of Twitter – Pixels & Pills just released to the public Health Tweeder, a “beautiful disease-state focused twitter visualization tool”.
Generally, this is probably more relevant to the patient, but imagine, for one, doing market research on a specific therapeutic area and wanting to get instant consumer feedback or buzz. This might be a tool to help those needs…
(Submitted by Margaret Basket)
The following are the 10 Spotlight sessions at the upcoming SLA Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA. Especially of note is that as Spotlight sessions, these sessions will be virtualized – so if you cannot make the Annual Conference, you can still view these sessions (virtual attendees will pay $200 for access to all of these).
- Your Personal Brand & Social Media (Kim Doherty)
- Knowledge Continuity & Opportunites (Patrick Lamb; cosponsored by PHT)
- Brand You and Web 2.0 (Mary Ellen Bates)
- Tenure: How to Get It, What It Does for Your Career (Panel discussion)
- Negotiating Up: Achieving Your Goals with Internal Clients (Mary Ellen Bates)
- Emerging Technologies: Real Time Search
- The Science of Hot Sauce
- Ask the Competitive Intelligence Experts Panel (Panel discussion)
- Competitive Intelligence Transitions for LIS Pros (Panel discussion)
- Negotiating Content Purchases (cosponsored by PHT)
Some bullet points from Day Two of the SLA Leadership Summit:
- SLA’s CEO, Janice Lachance, agreed to a new 5 year contract.
- In addition to the task force created to release an Alignment toolkit, another task force was also formed to look at structural changes to revenue models, so that SLA can be more self-sustaining in the future.
- Part of the financial actions is because last year, SLA took a 20% reduction in revenue. While no programs or services were cut, budgets were trimmed and SLA lost 25% of staff. This year, the revenue projections are “a lot more conservative” and the Board of Directors is comfortable that we will be able to hit those projections this year.
- A question came up – can we see more of the research around Alignment that was conducted? According to Janice Lachance, all of the research and backup data is out on the website, so that is available for review. The next step is to create the Alignment toolbox, the efforts of which are ongoing.
High level bullet points from Day One of the Leadership Summit:
- “SLA’s strategy for 2010 is to develop the tools you need to demonstrate your value in the workplace” (Janice Lachance)
- There will be a virtual conference component to the 2010 SLA Annual Meeting. Details still being ironed out, but word is that a few asynchronous sessions will be available.
- Did you know that the money spent by SLA on each member is $571.43? Don’t forget about all the membership benefits of SLA (and there are many!). These include chapter/division benefits, career center, Click U webinars, free ExecUBooks, and career coaching – and many, many more. (Expect to hear more from your leadership throughout the year on this)
- One of the things to help Information Outlook improve is the Information Outlook Advisory Council. Results from the IO survey will be released later, but in the meantime, they are looking for any / all comments. Specifically, they’re looking for thoughts on the upcoming April/May issue on “social networking.” Contribute your comments here.
- Anne Caputo, President of SLA this year, presented her vision for SLA for the year. Partial slides available here.
- Next steps on the Alignment Project:
- [Seek input on and] Adopt new mission/vision/core values statements for SLA
- Continue “Actions You Can Take Now” series
- Create a Uniform Visual Identity and Common Language Guidelines
- Create Common Templates for Use by SLA Units (branding)
- Task force created by Anne (headed by Mary Ellen Bates) to create a toolkit out of the Alignment Project – tools you can use at your workplace.
Oh, and feel free to follow the Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23slaleads
Questions/Thoughts? Feel free to use the comments section here or contact the PHT Board members!
One of the more anticipated items in the computing world was yesterday’s announcement of the Apple iPad, the next device from Apple. The best way to think about it is probably as a large format (7.5″ x 9.5″) iPod Touch, with a few major additional features: wireless access (optional), productivity software (Powerpoint/Keynote, Pages, & Excel/Sheets), and the ability to read e-books with its own e-book store. Brief summary here.
This probably isn’t a breakthrough innovation for the library, but it may be for publishing (time will tell). It’s also worth thinking about along with implementation of the Kindle and other mobile devices.
Following on the heels of the NY Times decision to go to the pay model, an interesting blurb today about the results of another New York paper, New York Newsday. Apparently after three months, $4 million and a new website, there are only 35 paying subscribers.
(Of note is that many who have cable through the parent organization get access for free)
From Mashable, a nice addition to be aware of:
RSS technology makes it possible for anyone to keep up with fresh content without having to visit the site in question. Now the same holds for webpages without RSS thanks to a new Google Reader feature.
Today Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google Reader
that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don’t already have them. So you can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.
