Libraries and hotels: Different sectors, but value-added information is a hot, proprietary commodity for both

In late 2006 and early 2007, I did some work in Trenton, Ontario for TeleTech Holdings Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based company, as a high-speed Internet specialist offering technical support to their client, St. Louis-based Charter Communications, owned not by Bill Gates, but by Microsoft’s less famous co-founder, Paul Allen. The facility, which had just opened in May 2006 with more than 200 employees, had superb computers and desks and chairs, which ergonomically would put to shame any newsroom I’ve ever worked in.

Sadly, TeleTech closed that Trenton facility on Aug. 31, 2009, little more than two years after I arrived in Thompson, Manitoba. Why? “There is a change in the needs of the client. The work will be moved around to other centres,” TeleTech explained, adding the closure is “not a reflection” of quality of work completed at the Trenton centre. The closure came sandwiched somewhere between Outsourced, the 2006 romantic movie comedy, which won the best film award at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, and the one-season NBC sitcom by the same name that aired in 2010-11, telling the story of a fictional all-American company, Mid America Novelties of Seattle, outsourcing its call centre operation to Gharapuri in India.

Apparently newspapers aren’t the only type of business to go out of business. Or outsource their work to India. Although in the news biz it is more likely to be layout and production work, increasingly editing, and to a limited degree, at least so far, local reporting. The old real estate adage, “location, location, location,” which once seemed to apply to community newspapers, as much as your home, as where both were located was the most important factor in giving them value, in the case of papers for what was thought to be a unique commodity – local news – not so much anymore. Still, call me a Luddite, but it is hard to picture local council and school board meetings being covered remotely from 12 time zones away. Technically possible, yes; But likely on a wide scale? Probably not, although it has been done with some fairly unimpressive results to date.

Not long before I worked for TeleTech, I spent some time in 2005 and 2006 living in Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, both on the saltwater Tantramar marshes, and worked as a financial agent at Moneris Solutions in Sackville. I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us. The other nice thing about both Moneris and TeleTech was they were “inbound” call centres – the client is calling you for help, as apposed to “outbound.” If you want to know the difference, ask a telemarketer.

My Moneris boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering rollout of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank. Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, like the hotel industry where I devote my efforts now (along with the university library), Moneris is very much built on proprietary data – as much or even more so than the hotel business – and you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk.” Documents had to be turned facedown when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift. I remember not so long ago Googling the remodeled Moneris red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street and no images came up for it! Sort of like Area 51 or Groom Lake, Nevada. My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hotdog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly. One of my favourite non-journalism true work stories.

Whether community newspapers can continue to monetize with much success their local information remains something of an open question, but much of the rest of the world is ever increasingly living on proprietary data and value-added information. For hotels, think cloud-based hotel property management systems.

But the phenomenon is, of course, much, much bigger than the for-profit private sector payment processing and hotel industries. Here at the university library, where we’re part of the institutional not-for-profit public sector, we’re also always dealing with proprietary information and data, albeit of a different type sometimes, in terms of copyright and intellectual property issues. Make no mistake; libraries monetize information. Want an inside-the-ballpark library term? Think GOBI3 (Global Online Bibliographic Information).

GOBI3 is an information source and bibliographic database that enables research libraries and consortia to have access to print and electronic titles.

A company called EBSCO, founded in 1944 and headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus e-books, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. Last February, EBSCO bought Yankee Book Peddler, Inc. (YBP Library Services), located in Contoocook, New Hampshire, and founded in 1971 as a bookseller for academic libraries, providing books, collection management, and technical services in print and electronic formats to academic, research, and special libraries in the United States and internationally. There is also Midwest Library Service, out of Bridgeton, Missouri, a book jobber serving libraries since 1959.

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Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

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