UKeiG Intranets forum meeting: 14 March 2007

Date for your diary. The next free intranets forum meeting for UKeiG members will be on Wednesday 14th March 2007, 3 to 4.30pm, at the Royal College of Nursing, 20 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0RN.

The theme will be Planning Your Intranet Strategy

Further details to follow.

CILIP's Principles of Governance

As a first step in the process of changing the governance structures at CILIP, the Implementation Group has published the Principles which will act as the benchmark against which all governance activities are judged. The principles are divided into those which relate directly to governance and those which relate to organisational communications.

The principles can be found at:
http://www.cilip.org.uk/aboutcilip/governance/ governanceimplementation.htm

Cut in Capitation for CILIP Special Interest Groups and Branches

Some of you may already have heard that on December 7th CILIP Council agreed and accepted a paper on a new business model for CILIP. One of the changes for 2007 is the 50 per cent reduction in capitation for Groups and Branches; this is the amount that CILIP pays to Groups and Branches for each of their members who join via CILIP.

On behalf of the UKeiG Management Committee, I would like to reassure UKeiG members that this will not affect the services and activities that we offer. UKeiG has always believed in being self-supporting, especially as the current capitation formula nowhere near covers the costs of maintaining and supporting a member in the way we wish to do so.

As far as UKeiG is concerned, it is business as usual in 2007!

--
Karen Blakeman, CILIP UKeiG Councillor
88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK
t: +44 118 947 2256 m: +44 7764 936733 f: +44 20 8020 0253
Mailto:Karen.Blakeman@rba.co.uk, Web - http://www.rba.co.uk/

Online 2006 free search seminars

If you weren't able to get to Online Information this week in London, Karen Blakeman's two sessions on search are now available as Powerpoint files. They are 'Top tips and tricks for better web search' and 'What's new in search'.

Please note that these are the original Powerpoint slides and are not annotated. So unless you were present at the seminars, the significance of some of the screen shots may not be immediately obvious - in fact they may be downright obscure. Also, she compiled these using the latest Microsoft Office 2007 suite - silly person, as an Hon Fellow of CILIP she should know better! - and in the conversion to the more commonly used versions of Office some of the slides lost something in the translation. [Ed: a pity they did not lose a couple of the slightly 'unsafe' images of Richard Branson:-)]

'Keep on trucking' - Online with Eugene G :-)

Karen Blakeman and I are still recovering from the International Information Industry Awards which - for our sins - we attended on behalf of UKeiG. In the midst of lipstick-stained champagne flutes, stiff bow ties and a palpable sense of corporate anxiety and anticipation, the most poignant and exciting moment came with the Lifetime Achievement Award, which went to ISI's Eugene Garfield.

The jist of his acceptance speech was: 'Keep on trucking.'The profession thinks that it has attained Nirvana with all the new search tools but in reality we are nowhere near it. He said he was not retiring and had every intention of carrying on for many more years and hinted he was working on something new. So keep a close eye on his website: site www.eugenegarfield.com

With so much current interest in bibliometrics and citation databases (Scopus versus Web of Science versus Google Scholar, and so on...) this was a timely award given to the great man who set the whole thing in motion.

John Sergeant gave a spirited performance as the celebrity presenter, and there were awards in a number of areas including innovation in knowledge and content management, best user experience and IWR information professional of the year - Rachael Kolsky. Best STM information product went to the Springer eBooks collection. Best specialist search product to Trexy.com, surprising as there were so many big players on the short list, including Exalead, Factiva Search 2.0 and Vivisimo. Congrats as well to the British Library's Business & IP Centre, who won the best team in the academic and public sectors. Best wishes to the Open University Library & Teaching team who, despite not receiving the award, were great company at our table.

I think everybody had one glass too many... but it was worth it :-)