UKeiG Workshop: Intranet Governance

Venue: CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE
Date: Thursday 9th October 2008, 9.30-16.30

Course outline

Most organisations have strategies and policies for just about every aspect of operations, but rarely for the intranet. Intranets have now become essential information platforms, and need to be resourced appropriately.

The objective of this workshop is to set out the key elements of an intranet governance strategy. The workshop will cover:

• Making a business case for an intranet
• Developing an intranet strategy
• Turning a strategy into an operational plan
• Creating and managing the intranet team
• Supporting the work of content authors
• Achieving intranet impact
• Developing and undertaking usability tests
• Gaining user feedback

As well as copies of the presentations delegates will be provided with a template for an intranet governance strategy. The workshop will include some group work and good opportunities to share ideas and experiences.

Who should attend

Intranet managers who recognise that they need to develop business cases for investment in intranet staff and other resources, or who need to write corporate policy documents for intranet operations.

Course Presenter

The course will be given by Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd. who has a wide experience of intranet strategy issues based on over 50 intranet projects carried out in the UK, Europe, the USA and the Middle East.

For more information or to book a place on this course, please visit http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/October/IntranetGovernance.html or email meetings@ukeig.org.uk

UKeiG workshop (Liverpool):Searching the Internet - Google and Beyond

Due to a last minute cancellation we now have one place available on our workshop 'Searching the Internet: Google and Beyond'.

Venue: The Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool, 1 Brownlow Street, Liverpool

Date and time: Friday, 16th May 2008, 09.30 - 16.30

Workshop outline:
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2008/May/beyondgoogle.html

Please contact Christine Baker if you are interested in attending.
Tel & Fax: 01969 625751 +44 1969 625751
Email: CABaker@ukeig.org.uk

Further details:

With the major search engines claiming coverage of over 20 billion web pages in their databases, it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate relevant information. Most of us head straight for Google when we want to search the Internet but Google is not the only search tool, and the competition is hotting up. This workshop looks at recent developments at Google and the alternatives, especially the new kids on the block and Web 2.0 'stuff'. There will be advice on locating serious blogs, RSS feeds, audio, video and podcasts of news broadcasts and interviews. Karen Blakeman will take you through the best of the search engine world and highlight how they can be used to significantly improve your results. By the end of the day, participants will have a vital toolkit to help them search more effectively, including key search tools, comparisons, top tips and essential search techniques.

Topics to be covered include:

* different types of search tools and how they work
* making the most of Google and new features
* alternatives to Google
* advanced search techniques to help you track down the "hidden web"
* image, audio, video and news
* Blogs, RSS, wikis and Web 2.0 resources
* tracking down pages that have disappeared

Participants will have ample opportunity to test out advanced search techniques and to compare different search engines. A significant part of the day will be taken up with practical sessions; exercises will be provided but delegates are free to try out searches of their own. This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience. The techniques and approaches covered can be applied to all subject areas.

Course Presenter: Karen Blakeman

Karen Blakeman has worked in the information profession for over twenty years and has been a freelance consultant since 1989. Her company (RBA Information Services) provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet, and on accessing and managing information resources. Karen writes for "Business Information Searcher.” She also publishes a monthly, electronic newsletter called "Tales from the Terminal Room.” Her publications include "Search Strategies for the Internet,” now in its sixth edition. She is a Fellow of CILIP and in 2002 she received the Information World Review Information Professional of the Year award.

Top Business Research Tips (2)

Yes, it's another Business Information workshop Top Tips. This one was a rerun of the UKeiG event held on 2nd April, 2008. The participant mix was half private, half public sector. At the end of the day they were asked to come with a list of top sites and search tips. Between them, those attending the workshop spent half the day trying out hundreds of web sites - some of them not even mentioned by me. This is their collective list of sites that they felt were worth considering as key resources. In some cases I have also included the comments from the people nominating the site. It is interesting that there are only two sources that appear in both lists, and one of them does not really count: it was my own site, from which some of the course notes were derived so you might consider the delegates to have been brainwashed!

1. Silobreaker.com http://www.silobreaker.com/. One of the two sites that appears in both the April 2nd and this list. A relatively new service pulling together information from newspapers, journals, blogs, video and audio. In addition It offers geographical hotspots, trends and a network visualisation tool that was singled out by several workshop participants as being particularly useful.
   
   
2. OFFSTATS http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/ The new set of web pages for the University of Auckland Library providing information on Official Statistics on the Web and at a new address. An excellent starting point for official statistics by country and subject/industry. As well as the makeover, there have been many additions to the collection of resources.
   
   
3. Research Wikis http://www.researchwikis.com/. This is a wiki covering market and industry data that is in the public domain; several workshop delegates commented that it looks promising. The content is variable in quality. Some reports are highly structured and detailed while others are just a "stub", many are US biased, and the sources of the data are not always cited. Nevertheless, the reports do give you an idea of the issues affecting the sector and the terminology that is used. One of the University based delegates thought that the site's recommended structure and headings for a report would be useful to students who are new to carrying out industry and market research.
   
   
4. Bureau van Dijk's (BvD) "A Taste of Mint" http://mintportal.bvdep.com/ A free directory from BvD giving basic information on companies world-wide. Comment from one experienced researcher: "It found the company I have been looking for when every other directory has failed!"
   
   
5. Google Finance http://www.google.co.uk/finance/, http://www.google.com/finance/ [This was not covered in the 2nd April workshop. Until now, it has been so awful and unreliable hat I have ignored it]. This is a possible competitor to Yahoo Finance. It has been steadily improving over the last 18 months since its initial launch but still does not quite have the authoritative "feel" of Yahoo Finance. Also it does not appear to have the individual stock exchange coverage of Yahoo. It does, though, beat Yahoo when it comes to the share price graph and historical downloads options. The share price graphs are 'annotated' with labels at the appropriate time on the graph and these link to news articles that are listed to the right of the graph. Yahoo Finance's downloadable historical share price data in figures goes back 5 years: Google's goes back to 1996.
   
   
6. Google News. For the UK go to http://news.google.co.uk/ but there are a plethora of country versions. Good coverage of the last 30 days of free world-wide, national, local and industry news resources. One workshop participant said that Google News found a breaking story that the industry press and her subscription services had not yet picked up.
   
   
7. The Wayback Machine - The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/. The Wayback Machine takes periodic snapshots of the Internet. Ideal for seeing how a company portrayed itself on the Internet in the past and for tracking down sites, pages or documents that have disappeared.
   
   
8. Chipwrapper http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/ a Custom Google Search Engine that searches across the UK’s major national newspapers: The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The People, News of the World, The Scotsman, Daily Star, The Telegraph and The Times. It also searches the BBC News web site, ITN and Sky. There is a review of Chipwrapper on my blog at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2007/12/29/chipwrapper-search-uk-newspapers/
   
   
9. UK National Statistics http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ We will not go into the confusion users suffered when UK government official statistics web sites were re-organised on 1st April 2008 [No, it was not an April Fool's]. Work your way through the new menus and you will eventually end up on the on the old statistics.gov.uk pages. Even without the frequent design changes, the site can be difficult to navigate. Nevertheless, there is an incredible amount of good quality data here. For the web based 'stuff' and formatted documents (PDF. DOC, XLS, PPT) it is often easier to go to the Google Advanced Search page, type in your terms in the search box at the top of the page and in the 'Search within a site or domain' box type in statistics.gov.uk . If you want to look for specific file formats, select the file extension from the drop down menu under 'File type'. The 'Time Series' data have to be search from within the statistics.gov.uk site itself.
   
   
10. Companies House http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/. The UK official companies registry. This is the closest you can get to the original company documents that a registered company has to file. Some information is provided free of charge (Use the Webcheck service). Documents are charged for on a pay as you go basis.
    
    
11. RBA Sources of Business Information http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/. Selected sources of business information organised by type e.g. statistics, share prices, company registers.

Business Information on the Internet

To be held at Kings College London, Guy's Campus, London Bridge, London

Date: Wednesday, 2nd April 2008, 9.30 - 16.30

Course outline

This one day workshop looks at key sources of business information available on the Internet. It will compare what is available for free with pay-as-you-go and subscription services, and highlight quality, coverage, functionality and price.

Topics to be covered include:

• key starting points, evaluated listings and portals
• company information, including information on SMEs
• directories and marketing resources
• news, blogs, alerts and RSS
• official statistics and market data
• key search techniques

On completing this course you will

• have the key starting points at your fingertips
• have essential resources for the different types of business information
• be able to search more effectively and quickly for business information
• be able to assess when you will have to start paying for information
• have compiled your own Top 10 business resources

Course Presenter: Karen Blakeman

Karen Blakeman has worked in the information profession for over twenty years and has been a freelance consultant since 1989. Her company (RBA Information Services) provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet, and on accessing and managing information resources. Karen writes for "Business Information Searcher.” She also publishes a monthly, electronic newsletter called "Tales from the Terminal Room.” Her publications include "Search Strategies for the Internet,” now in its sixth edition. She is a Fellow of CILIP and in 2002 she received the Information World Review Information Professional of the Year award.

Further details are available on the UKeiG website.

Image Management in Bio- and Environmental Sciences: New Directions

Image Management in Bio- and Environmental Sciences: New Directions

to be held at

The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester
Thursday, 31st May, 2007, 9.30 – 16.30

Workshop Outline
The bio- and environmental sciences cover a broad spectrum from taxonomy to bioinformatics, farming to climate change, with a correspondingly wide range of information resources ranging from historic manuscripts to genomic databanks. Images form an important component of all these and achieving holistic management of diverse resources to allow easy correlation of their information content is challenging, especially for small information units and ‘one-man-bands’. Developing technologies offer new opportunities but can themselves produce new demands in devising effective strategies for their use. This workshop aims to share experiences and float ideas in areas where there are as yet no ‘right answers’!

Details and a booking form can be found on the UKeiG web site, or contact Christine Baker for further details on Tel & Fax: +44 (0)1969 625751, email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk

RSS, Blogs and Wikis - additional date and venue

The workshop on RSS, Blogs and Wikis being run on 27th April, 10th May and 17th May are now fully booked but the event is being re-run in Newcastle on Wednesday, 11th July 2007. Details and a booking form can be found on the UKeiG web site, or contact Christine Baker for further details on Tel & Fax: +44 (0)1969 625751, email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk