No big surprises from a study on teleconferences that reported 90% of conference call participants are regularly distracted. About 70% do unrelated work while on the teleconferences, over a quarter surf the Web, and over a third talk to others while using the mute button.

Mind you, the survey was commissioned by a web conferencing company, but the distraction problem is real. Organizations badly need to improve the productivity of teleconferences, and a visual component may help. As Raindance Communications says, “an incredibly large number of business professionals need help staying focused on the discussion at hand”.

Another major Google initative has been announced today by the University of Michigan and others. Google is digitizing all 7 million volumes in U-M's library and making them fully searchable on the web. U-M's President stated that “This project signals an era when the printed record of civilization is accessible to every person in the world with Internet access”. The books that are in the public domain will be available to everyone. Other books will be searchable so that researchers can quickly locate relevant information and then get a copy of the books from their own libraries. The project will take about 6 years.

According to the Detroit Free Press, ”Besides digitizing U-M's massive collection, Google plans to scan parts of other research libraries, including those at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford University in England and the New York Public Library. Those projects are much smaller in scope than Google's plans for U-M. At Harvard, for example, only 40,000 of the university's 15 million volumes will be digitized.”

It is not clear whether the books will only be searchable on Google's new academic search engine - Google Scholar – or on the regular Google search engine, or both.

Posted on Charity Village December 8, 2004.

New Google search for scholarly literature

Google has launched Google Scholar, a specialized search engine restricted to scholarly literature, such as peer reviewed articles, technical reports, theses and abstracts. It includes results from subscription-based online journals that are hidden from the public web. For more information, see Google Scholar's  FAQ.

Google is offering to include posted reports from eligible professional associations. This is an opportunity for the voluntary sector to disseminate research and reports without big investments in OAI compliant archives, as I recommended in an earlier article. If a website such as www.nonprofitscan.ca was included in Google Scholar, it could instantly provide a free search function on its own site at the same time as joining the international scholarly literature.

Post your reports on Google Scholar!

Anyone doing research in the voluntary sector is constantly frustrated by the difficulty in finding relevant publications. Yet hundreds of reports and studies are written annually, many of them posted on individual agency web sites. Some studies are submitted to research journals and thereby disappear from public view – unless you belong to a university and can get access through the library.

'Grey literature' is the term for scholarly papers that are not published in a public journal. Most of the research in the sector is in the form of grey literature, and while some of it is of poor quality, some is excellent.

Google Scholar may provide an inexpensive way to make this literature searchable and accessible. It includes both published and grey literature, and even books that are not online, or journal articles that are only in hard copy. The search is designed to provide the kind of information that researchers look for, such as the number of times other researchers have cited the article.

In the case of many published journal articles, Scholar will link to an abstract and then give you the link to the publisher's site, where you can buy the full text. Scholar now includes the full catalogs of 29 major academic publishers, with more to come.

Books or hard copy articles are also listed, as long as they are cited in an online article that is posted on Google Scholar. Scholar will even help you find a library that stocks the book.

In the case of posted grey literature, Scholar will link directly to the text. So if a nonprofit agency is able to post its reports, searchers will be able to quickly find it while simultaneously searching for the more conventional academic papers. The voluntary sector needs to do three things before it can use Google Scholar. First, we need a few gatekeeper organizations that will define, approve, and post eligible documents, and convince Google to include its repositories in its scholarly database. We don't want to see service brochures or annual reports listed as scholarly literature. The new organization that is emerging from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy and the Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations would be a natural choice for this role, but there could be many others.

Second, there should be a quality control mechanism to allow users to filter their searches. In academia, a peer review process is the accepted way that readers can be sure a report was evaluated for quality and relevance. The voluntary sector should develop a similar process, possibly its own peer review, to increase the legitimacy of the best material – the documents that are worthy of being included in the international scholarly literature. Future Google Scholar features will (I believe) include a way to search only in peer-reviewed articles, and the sector should prepare for that.

Finally, there should be a stable archive for the posted documents using DOI or some other persistent identity so that the documents don't vanish every time an agency redesigns its web site. The simple first step would be for one major nonprofit research organization like NonprofitsCAN or the Canadian Council on Social Development to submit its existing research papers to Google and see what happens.

**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

Tenbyten offers an instant profile of world news through a 10 by 10 matrix of photos and keywords. Every day, the site pulls up the top words that are being used in three major news sources, and links them to the associated headlines. Today for example, the top five words were iraqi, EU, peace, military and iraq. Number 93 was 'Ozzy', reflecting the shooting of a heavy metal guitarist this week. 'Killed' is probably a popular and commonly occuring keyword; it's number 9 today, and the headlines cover a wide range of stories.

You can look up keywords from the past; for example, on November 6 the top word was 'Iraq' and 'killed' was number 15. For some reason #83 was 'blue'.

I've just seen a wonderful list of etiquette rules for remote participants on videoconferences, presented by Megaconference VI: The worldwide videoconference. These guys clearly know what they are talking about. I suggest that videoconference hosts study the list for a glimpse into the major things that go wrong, and how to deal with them.

Here are a few excerpts:  

A new study reports that “African-American preschoolers whose parents say they don't believe racism is a problem are more likley to be depressed or anxious…. Parents who responded to racism by confronting the people involved or taking some kind of action were less likely to report that their children had behavior problems.”

The study states that racism is real (citing other research), that it must be acknowledged and coped with, and that young children become anxious and depressed when their parents' statements don't match their own experience.

 [Posted on Charity Village in November 2004]

Telephone systems, as I've often said in these columns, are the most important communication technologies in our daily lives. They are so integrated into our work and relationships that we don't even think of them as being 'information technology'. Yet our phone systems keep getting more complex and functional (look at how mobile phones and voice mail have changed our lives) and there are more big changes on the horizon. The biggest transformation in the next five years or so will involve Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP.

VOIP sends spoken conversation over the Internet instead of over regular phone lines. Several instant messaging clients like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger offer VOIP for computer-to-computer conversations, in which people talk to each other through computer headsets. VOIP has had a bad reputation because of often-poor audio quality, but it's finally improved to the point where major corporations are switching away from Plain Old Telephone Service (often called POTS) to VOIP. And you don't need a computer to use it anymore; you can buy IP phones that plug into your Internet connection just like your regular phone plugs into the phone jack.

With the new VOIP services, agencies can:

• Get rid of their current phone systems entirely, and replace them with Internet-based phones that use their broadband Internet connection. Or add Internet-based phone services to their existing system for telecommuters, offsite locations and project staff.
• Eliminate long distance charges for staff who work in different cities or even continents. If you work frequently with an organization in India, for example, you could give it a local Toronto phone number. With a broadband Internet connection, your Indian colleagues could call any number in the Toronto calling area for free – and you could call them.
• Assign staff to satellite locations like libraries, shopping malls or home offices, and allow phone calls to follow them wherever they go.
• Move to another location without changing your phone number, whether it's to permanent new offices or to a temporary space for a couple of weeks while your agency's plumbing problems are fixed.
• Set up complicated routing rules so that callers can be automatically forwarded to different phone numbers based on their phone numbers or the time of day. So, for example, your phone extension might ring at the shopping mall on Mondays and Wednesdays, at the library on Tuesdays, and go to voice mail the rest of the time – unless it was from your child's school, in which case it would automatically be forwarded to your office phone.
• Get phone numbers for new project staff instantly, and cancel the service as soon as the project is finished. No waiting for a month to get phone lines set up.

These features have been available for a couple of years for companies that are willing to buy and manage the hardware and software to run their own phone systems. They are also available to individuals through services like Vonage. But until now, they haven't been accessible to small organizations and businesses that need a hosted service.

I'm now looking at a new hosted VOIP phone service that, as far as I know, is the first in Canada that is suitable for entire organizations. It's offered by Congruent IP Communications and is based on Nortel's MCS 5200 Communication Server. I haven't finished testing it yet, so I'm not endorsing it, but it's a good example of the services that will be widespread very soon. At a cost of up to $55 CAD/month per user depending on the service package, Congruent offers a full corporate phone system based on broadband Internet. I've heard that Quartet Communications offers a similar service also based on Nortel's technology, but I wasn't able to reach them before this article was written.

Like a regular office PBX, you get a central number with extensions and voice mail. You also get individual direct dial phone numbers for each person, fax-to-email service, voice mail messages that can be sent to email or picked up from the phone, and many other fancy options (for a demonstration you can contact Congruent). The voice quality seems great, though I haven't tested it in depth. Long distance charges anywhere in Canada and the continental US are 4.5c/minute (CAD) unless you are calling someone on the Congruent network; in that case, there are no long distance charges.

The price of full-featured VOIP is similar to regular phone service, but with many more features and a few disadvantages. The major advantage is the ability to grow and shrink your telecommunications structure quickly as projects come and go, and to enable more flexibility in where you offer services. Agencies may be able to cut down on office costs because staff aren't tied to telephone 'land lines'. Telecommuting becomes much easier, because office extensions can forward transparently to staff wherever they are. (And they can maintain privacy since staff don't need to give out their home phone numbers to anyone.)

VOIP can handle some kinds of business disruptions better than regular phone service. Disaster recovery is simple – if your office is closed down because of fire or flood, you can instantly forward everyone's phone lines to other locations or have people plug into another Internet broadband connection in rented accommodations.

One big disadvantage of VOIP is that your voice services are dependent on your Internet connection, so if that goes down (e.g., because of a power shortage in your building), you've lost your phone system. Poor Internet connections will decrease the voice quality, so you may require a better Internet service than the one you have now. Organizations should have a regular phone line or a mobile phone to call emergency services if the connection goes down. For more technical and historical information about VOIP, see this article.

There are similar phone systems available in the Toronto area that provide some but not all of these features. RealWorld Systems currently uses Unite for our corporate phone system, which we've found reliable and inexpensive, but it only forwards to existing phones rather than replacing them.

Some of the available VOIP features may sound weird or irrelevant at first blush. For instance, with a wireless Internet network, staff can use pocket PCs as wireless telephones, sending and receiving email and text messages or taking notes on their tiny handheld computers while talking on their headsets. It will take creativity and persistence for agencies to figure out how to use the amazing computing power available to them. For instance, I'd like to see more accessible and cheaper phone interpreting services, in which interpreters set up 3-way call conferencing between clients and service providers in remote locations, using encrypted voice communications while at the same time tracking the length and type of calls for billing purposes. Unfortunately, people get freaked out by too much complexity, so for now, VOIP will do better by looking like regular phone services. Still, as Jill Rucci from Congruent says, “This service allows you to control your communications on a whole new level – this is going to change everything”.