Phil Bradley's weblog

Ask Jelly bought by Pinterest, promptly closes

If you haven't taken a look at Ask Jelly yet, you've really missed your chance. I'm betting you probably haven't, which may well be one of the reasons that it's closing. Basically it was a Question and Answer service; people would register, indicate their area of expertise and when people asked questions, they would be pushed through to the appropriate person to answer them - for free. The answer would be posted, people would say thanks, everyone was happy. 

This type of resource,with the obvious exception of Quora simply doesn't work. We've seen it tried and fail with ChaCha and Mahalo. Back in April 2016 I said that it would fail, and it has - less than a year later. I love the phrase that was used in the email telling us that it was closing: "The spirit of Jelly will continue to thrive within the machinery of Pinterest, but Jelly on iOS and askjelly.com themselves will no longer be standalone services." In other words, we've been bought out and have sunk without trace. These services rely on the ability of people to provide useful, timely and authoritative information, but the people who can really do that are, for the most part, busy doing that in their professional lives. It's great if people want to help other people, but the feeling of satisfaction is generally self created. 

It's a shame, but it was obviously going to happen, and if anyone else is foolish enough to try it, their effort will fail as well. Let's move on from this broken model now, shall we?

CILIP the err.. library and information association.

I noticed a tweet today:

Librarian game time: Go onto @cilipinfo site (https://t.co/1kFAdSfTjM) and, without using Search, try and find the acronym "CILIP" defined.

— Phil Gorman (@philbgorman) February 28, 2017

He's quite right. It's very difficult to find, and I was only able to see 'Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' in the title of the site and in some images. In fact, if you look a bit further, it seems to have changed its name. And the logo. And the colour of the logo. And the font...

It appears that the 'Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' no longer exists. No discussion, no voting, no long, angry meetings, nothing. It's an impressively soft launch. And when I say 'soft launch' I mean 'let's not mention it to *anyone*' and see how long it takes them to notice. I am in quiet hysterics here, I really am. All that pain, anguish and quite honestly pure hatred of a few years ago, and for what? I'm sure someone is going to mention the new abbreviation could be LAIA, which is pretty close to La-la, but I'm only doing it because someone is going to, and it may as well be me.

I actually like the strapline - it's got 'library' and 'information' in there, so it's good for those that like to hark back to our roots and look forward. I'm less impressed with the logo, with it's clipped right corner which is not clever branding or artistic; it's just irritatingly sloppy. The blue is best described as 'meh-blue', because it's neither one thing or another, but hey, anything is better than that god awful pink, right? And of course, it IS just a strapline. CILIP remains, but is now a pointless acronym for a phrase that doesn't exist any more. Necessary, because the 'Chartered' bit is very important, and there's only so far that you can go without involving the Privy Council, or consulting members of course. So, if you want, you can still argue that CILIP retains the name CILIP, but as for what that means, well, that's an entirely different story.

I'm already imagining the conversations - 'Yes, I'm from CILIP, the library and information association'. 'Oh right, so what's CILIP then?' 'Well, umm, it's er... well, the library and information association'. 'So what does CILIP stand for?' 'Well, we don't like to talk about it really...' That conversation could run and run.

I'm fully expecting all of the people who took up arms last time around to do so this time. After all, last time, there were consultations galore, this time it's more a case of 'we're doing this and hoping to keep it quiet', so Nick Poole had best be on the look out for flaming brands and pitchforks outside of Ridgmount Street. It's ok - I checked, they haven't moved the offices to Harrogate or the Outer Hebrides, it's still in the same place. And there's still a President, so that's ok. Though, given the way this was done... who knows?

I'm happy with the changes; it certainly works for me. I'm slightly less happy with the fait accompli nature though. Seriously - not a single communication? Not even an update anywhere? Not a news item? Nothing? That does tend to smack of arrogance and a 'f*ck you' attitude and complete disregard for the member vote we had on the name change a few years back. If I'd argued against it, and voted against it, I would be hopping mad right now, and I'm just wondering if CILIP Council is hoping that people are just too damn tired, scared, worried about other things and worn out to do anything - perhaps the most we'll see is a quiet little 'meh, whatevs' response. But in general....

Well played, Library and Information Association. Well played. I shall now get myself a bucket of popcorn, sit back and crank Twitter up to 11. 

Icerocket social media search engine closing its doors

Sad to report that Icerocket, which has been around for years, is finally closing its doors. There's a note on the home page which says "Icerocket.com will be shutdown permanently on March 8th, 2017. Please switch over to other search engines. Thank you for all the years together!" No reason has been given for the closure.

On the other hand, Socialmention* has reappeared. I feared that it had died, but it's suddenly come back online, though what the story behind its comings and goings is I don't know!

Polyfetch search engine dead

Just a brief entry to mark the closure of Polyfetch. The URL just redirects to Google now. It was a nice little search engine which allowed you to open several panes at once to compare different websites. Shame that it's disappeared. 

TFPL slams the door on public training

In common with several others I got an email last Friday morning telling me that TFPL will no longer be offering public scheduled courses from today (Friday, February 11th) onwards, and all currently scheduled courses will be cancelled. Apparently an earlier email had gone out from Chris Jones the Managing Director which said "Following a strategic business review, it has been decided that TFPL will no longer offer publicly scheduled training courses and will transfer our suite of Business Skills courses to ILX Group, another training business within Progility PLC." However, this didn't come to me, or to a lot of other people. 

This is very sad news indeed - I'd been a trainer with TFPL since 1990, and they were an excellent company to work with. They had their own training suite at Farringdon which was run by various different people, including my great friend Val Skelton. TFPL did move around quite a lot, and with each move their interest and enthusiasm for training waned. In the last couple of years they would hire external venues to run courses - when they did actually run, since a lot of them were cancelled. I'm really sorry for the two people who ran the service, and who are going to made redundant on Thursday of this week. They did their best working in an organisation that really didn't seem to care about the product they were employed to market.

As well as sadness, there's anger as well. What professional organisation just snaps its fingers and cancels everything immediately? What about the people who were booked on courses, who may already have purchased rail tickets and booked accommodation? Apparently nothing. What about trainers who may have been updating and working on course presentations that they were due to provide in the near future? (Hint, I was one of them!) It's one of the most unbelievably unprofessional things that I've ever witnessed, and that's saying something. Now, I'm not going to go all sob stories and violins at this point, but several of TFPL's current trainers, such as myself and Karen Blakeman have worked with them for 25+ years. To learn about the closure of the service second hand as it were is astonishing. If they can do that to trainers and delegates alike, what chances do consultancy and recruitment clients have? I'm not sure that I'd want to put any kind of trust in an organisation that clearly doesn't care and acts in such an off-hand a rude manner. It's really disgraceful.

What it does indicate, at least to me, is that the one day training course, where people pay a large sum, travel to London, often staying overnight and then travelling home at the end of the day, is all but dead. Organisations just don't have the money available for training, and even if they do, they're not going to have much of a travel budget any longer. Some companies can of course run their own internal courses, just for their own staff, and can employ a trainer to come in from outside to run the course tailored to their needs, but that's only a small number. What about the 'average' librarian, who may be part of a very small team, or a one person band, who doesn't have that option available to them? CILIP groups run courses of course, and there are one or two other suppliers, but in general, there isn't really very much available. I'd predicted this in July of last year with my blog post that said 'Training as we know it is broken' and it doesn't give me much pleasure that I've been provide right. 

I want to do something different, as I explained in my post of last July. Short face to face training, local to delegates, backed up by videos and access to wikis, with online chats into the future does, at least to me, appear to be the best way to go. I ran several courses like that last year, and I'll be running more this year (if you're interested in hosting a course, do let me know!). People can learn when they need to, at their own speed, in the comfort of their own homes or at their desks at work. People still need to be trained, we just have to be inventive about how we do it in the future. 

Creative Commons debuts appalling search engine

I was really quite excited to see that a new resource has been made available for us to search for CC licensed images.  CC Search was launched a couple of days ago. The engine that they've created is a meta search engine, pulling results from the databases found at Flickr, 500px, Rijksmuseum, the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That's a total of about 9.5 million images that we can use. Filters allow searchers to limit results to images that can be used commercially, Modify, adapt, or build upon or both. You can limit your search to title, creator or tags, and you can also limit to specific collections as previously listed. If I create an account and sign into it I can save to a list or favourite it. I can also create my own tags and add those to existing images. All sounds wonderful so far, so what's with the 'appalling' reference?

Quite simply - and I know it's only in beta - it's a laughable search engine. A search for fox red labradors gives me lots of images of foxes, and little else, unless I start to scroll through. So the engine defaults to an OR search, and it's taking that quite literally. I can't run a phrase search, so "fox red labradors" gives me the same results. All I can do is search on single words to have any chance to get even vaguely what I'm after. This is no search engine at all! I would expect that even if something IS in beta, that the basics would have been taken care of, but obviously not. Now, yes, I expect issues and problems and things not quite being sorted out, but this is fundamental to searching! In its current form it's almost completely unusable. I can't even search for images that I've given CC licensing on because even though I limit my search to creator, it's looking for phil OR bradley, not both. 

Quite extraordinary. All that I can say is that I hope they'll release a rather more effective version in the near future, and if they do, I'll be sure to let you know. I really hope that they do, since it's going to be fantastic to use when it works. But it's currently a case of 'when' rather than 'works'. 

Facebook introduces 'recommendations'

This was first announced back in autumn 2016, but I've only just seen it starting to happen in the UK on the desktop version of the site. Basically if you want thoughts, ideas, opinions and recommendations, Facebook can create a status update for you which does exactly that. 

As you can see Facebook is offering to turn recommendations on for this post. 

Clicking on that gives me the screen you can see above, and when I click to turn on recommendations, I get the following screen:

Once I confirm the location the status appears like this:

I can then click on my recommendation, and Facebook will attempt to find the location for the recommendation and put it into the status update as well:

I think it's a good idea - it's what we've always done in the past of course, but this is just a nice piece of functionality that allows us to make real use of it. At last! A Facebook update that improves the experience. 

When a library organisation doesn't pay its bill

To the Chair of a professional library interest group,

I’m angry, depressed, sad and disappointed that I need to write this open letter to you. You sent a member of your group onto two courses that I ran, and the total cost was £198. I try and keep my costs as cheap as I can because I think making sure we have well trained and informed professionals is important. My fee has been tightly worked out, and as an independent trainer it’s important that I get it right. I have to pay for my own National Insurance, I get no holiday pay, no sick pay and I have to pay for my own pension. That’s not a sob story, it’s just a fact, and I’m happy to pay that in order to live the life that I want. However, it does mean that I have to get paid promptly – particularly because I have to pay out for things in advance of a course – the cost of a venue, travel, administration costs and so on.

My invoices state that I wish to be paid within 30 days, and this is something that almost all of my clients are able to do without issue – sometimes within hours of receiving their invoice I’m paid. However, I also make it clear that if I’m not paid on time I’ll have to charge a late payment fee; not because I want to make more money out of a client, but because very occasionally one is slow in paying.

If I don’t get paid inside my 30 days I’ve then got to decide what to do next. Usually I let things slide for a while; I know what red tape is like, so a few days here and there is to be expected. However, when several months passes and there’s still no payment it’s time to do something about it. I already spent time checking my bank account, working out who had and had not paid, so that takes time, and takes me away from my real job of earning money. I get told that ‘it’s being looked into’. However, when an invoice is sent on September 30^th and it still hasn’t been paid by the middle of January, almost FIVE MONTHS late, it’s time to get a bit more involved. The addition of a late payment charge as per my original invoice, and the threat of taking your organisation to the Small Claims Court does the trick inside two days. Except it’s for the original amount.

Let me explain something at this point. Having to ask for money is not nice; I hate it and I don’t know of anyone who does. It puts you in the position of being a supplicant, and it’s also a direct attack (for want of a better word) on your feeling of self worth – if someone can’t be bothered to pay you, what does that say about their attitude towards you? Clearly, since the money is paid very quickly on the threat of legal action it could quite easily have been paid when it was first due. I’m not a large organisation (although that shouldn’t make a difference), and even small sums of money add up and are important. But it seems that you don’t care. That’s pretty disgraceful, and it’s not good morally or ethically. Added to that is the fact that you haven’t even got the good grace to say that you’re sorry. An apology does more than say ‘sorry’ it helps to re-establish self worth, and also – very importantly – return a level of trust. Without it, and by showing a complete disregard to the person your group owes money to, it lessens you, me and the profession as a whole. It means that I have to consider the way in which I work, the price that I charge, and the extent to which I can trust other professionals. That’s a horrible situation to be in, yet it seems that you either don’t care, or even worse, don’t even think about it.

So, what should I do now? Still continue to try and request payment for the outstanding overdue fee? The money itself doesn’t really matter (I’d be quite happy to donate it to charity), if it was 5p, £5 or £500, it’s the principle that matters. The principle that says you recognise the value of the work done by the person who did it, that you owe a debt that needs to be paid, and that you have a level of respect for the person asking. Or do I simply walk away, feeling a little more bitter, a bit more upset and angry and a lot more depressed?  You tell me, because I really don’t know.

Of course, there’s also the question of ‘do I tell anyone’? I could quite easily name you, your treasurer and your organisation/group in a public forum like my blog. However, I have my own professional respect and ethics which means that I won’t do this, but it also annoys me that my principles mean that you won’t be called out for the lack of yours, but that’s the way it goes.

Very sadly and disappointedly yours…

Google kills link function

Google has killed off yet another search function, this time the link: option. What this was supposed to do (and I'm never sure that it worked very well anyway) was to tell you which sites linked to the site in question. It was quite useful because it gave you an indication as to what type of page you might be looking at. For example, if you checked to see who linked to my site you'd have seen that it was mainly universities and search engine optimisation sites. Links to a racist Martin Luther King site told you that it was linked to by libraries and academic institutions which were taking the line of 'don't trust this site' and by racist white power sites. 

What happens if you try link: and an address is that Google just does a straightforward search and is looking for the word 'link' and derivatives of it. It was a useful little function and one that people on my courses always liked. However, value and usefulness doesn't matter much as far as Google is concerned. 

12 Royalty free image search engines

This is something that comes up quite a lot, as people are always looking for images that they can use without fear of payment or copyright restrictions. There's a nice new collection of such engines over at the Hootsuite blog, and I've picked a few of my favourites. 

Picjumbo It's a nice resource but only has a small number of images (600 or so), but they are of excellent quality. 

Unsplash is excellent - my search for 'books' returned a lot of results (277) and they were really interesting pictures.

Stockvault was another good site, and again I got a fair number of results for books, but the images were rather more boring to be honest. 

Negative space gave me a few book images, but I hadn't seen them anywhere else, so was happy with that. 

Kaboompics has a great name and some superb photographs.

Stocksnap has some really excellent images, and my books search gave me 145 really good quality and interesting images.

Splitshire had no books pictures :( but it did have some really fantastic images, so it's worth a look.

Life of pix has some really good very high quality and good resolution images. Only a couple of books pictures, but certainly worth exploring the database. 

Pexels is a multisearch engine with access to almost 4,000 images with more added every week. 

Jay Mantri is a photographer who has made many of his images freely available for people to do anything they want with them. No search option that I could see, but excellent landscapes and abstracts.

ISORepublic has free stock photos for creatives. Lots of excellent images. 

Free Refe is a good collection of high quality images.