Universities's Intellectual Property

In Kopenhagen the first conference on Universities' Intellectual Property took place: COPENMIND (1. - 3. September 2008). The organizer Muldow said in "University Journal" that universities worldwide are inadequately communicating their innovations to the industry. Therefore he has founded the conference as a kind of marketplace for building of close university-industry relationships that holds many unexploited opportunities. This is important for efforts that should result in a commercial product or service. But what about libraries: is such a conference of interest for libraries?
Depends on the participating organizations, one could say. The truth is: Libraries need to be in contact with other organizations from other fields. Why bnot cooperating with companies like Oracle: Such a company could create the technical infrastructure, whereas librarians are responsible for the contents.
Besides libraries have to strengthen their position in their environment. For instance, researchers have to recognize the academic library through their services. Libraries have to offer the right services to establish the library as a brand so that faculty members are saying: "Yes, I am a fan of the 'LIBRARY' !"
If libraries want to be the central information provider they have to offer services that justifies it. (This is one of the things I highlighted in my final dissertation.)

The problem of inadequatly communication is existing in the LIS-environment, too. Moreover, academic libraries are challenged more than ever:

1. there is a fast and easy access to information via the Internet


2. there is a rising number of information providers


3. statistics and studies show that libraries' users and/or visits are in a decrease


4. the library has to provide a better information supply while budgets are in a decrease.

The article "Libraries in the Converging Worlds of Open Data, E-Research, and Web 2.0" presents some of the key technologies, tools, and organizations within the open data movement and conclude that these have the potential to not only increase possibilities of knowledge transfer, but ultimately generate new knowledge.

The efforts that libraries take to better their services lead to a more positive image of the library (which would be good for all stakeholders).

The library of the McMaster University is providing the "2.0 toolbox" to their faculty and staff members

That's what I have found a few minutes ago:

The library of the McMaster University hosts blogs and wikis for their staff and faculty members. Their reasons for hosting blogs and wikis are these:

"It’s the library’s core mission to provide and manage access to the university’s academic resources and scholarly information. In a world where web technologies are changing the face of scholarly communication and the creation of the scholarly artifact, we feel that providing a platform for faculty to harness new technologies to facilitate their teaching & research makes a lot of sense for the library. It allows us to continue our role as stewards of that scholarly content. In addition, we see our provision of these tools as an extension of our role in upholding and advocating for intellectual and academic freedom."

That sounds good. Especially because its the first noncommercial and nonprofit hoster that I heard of. To develop services for the specific needs of the library's users should be the major goal of all libraries.

The McMaster library acts as a real service provider for if a blog or wiki does not have a feature that staff or faculuty members need, or if the blog or wiki is not behaving in a way that works for them, they can tell the library staff about it!

In future the library wants to add other tools to the 2.0 Toolbox. At the moment, we’re looking into possibly adding a social bookmarking tool. The faculty and staff members are asked to mention other specific technologies that they would like to have.
- Well, in this case the library is a service provider in a new way: putting up 2.0-tools for their faculty members.

Voting search results at Google in near future

In near future users can vote search results at Google: Users vote search results up or down - a down vote makes it dissapear with a “poof,” an up vote moves the result to the first page.
Google is also testing comments, with linked user names, and others can vote those comments up and down. In effect, this bucket test shows a Google that combines their search algorithm with every important feature of Digg.

Google was working nearly a year on these new features. For further information see "Is this the future search?" on Techchrunch.


This manipulation of search results leaves lots of thoughts:
Will this manipulation work out in negative way so that businesses manipulate their own sites' range? (Probably) If so, will it influence the search results more than other manipulation tools?

What is also worrying me: If you leave your footprints there by voting other can see your profile. - Another step to a surveillance society?