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April 1, 2008
The Media Re:Public group at Berkmanhas announced a breakthrough technology that promises to take the “conference” out of “un-conference.”
March 17, 2008
Library of Congress Reference Librarian Thomas Mann has a long, detailed and fierce argument against the LC Working Group on the Future of BibliographicControl. He is quite specific about what will be lost to scholars with the Working Group’s more folksonomic approach.
Much of what I’ve read so far points to the huge amount of information contained in the existing LC Subject Headings and their cross references, and how well they can convey to a scholar a lay of the land she is researching. (I don’t know why we’d want to throw out the LCSH instead of supplementing them with yet more metadata.) I haven’t read the entire piece yet, but what I’ve seen is fascinating, learned and will, I hope, occasion a productive debate.
April 2-4, I’m going to TopicMaps, a conference that may be particularly interesting (to people who are particularly interested in it, of course):
The basic idea is simple: the organizing principle of information should not be where it lives or how it was created, but what it is about. Organize information by subject and it will be easier to integrate, reuse and share – and (not least) easier for users to find. The increased awareness of the importance of metadata and ontologies, the popularity of tagging, and a growing interest in semantic interoperability are part and parcel of the new trend towards subject-centric computing.
The organizers have let it be known that there’s still room… [Tags: conferences topicmaps oslo everything_is_miscellaneous]
March 5, 2008
Seb Schmoller has a really interesting post about the taxonomy of a museum of cutting-edge tools.
January 25, 2008
Poking around the photos the Library of Congress has posted at Flickr shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of social tagging.
For example, take this 1940 photo of two kids gathering potatoes in Maine. There are about 80 tags, ranging from potato, maine, and boys to rural, bucolic, plaid, browen, and pommes de terre. The comments include people appreciating the aesthetics of the photo, recollecting their own lives on farms, and nattering on gaily about the cute hats the kids are wearing. For example:
I grew up in southern Minnesota in the 50s. I was probably 5-6 yrs. old. In the fall after the potato fields had been harvested, they allowed people to come in and collect the potatoes that the machines had missed. I can still remember the cold cloudy day, playing with my brothers in the furrows of the field, throwing clods of dirt at each other, instead of picking up potatoes, and getting yelled at by my Mom.
and
this ‘human interest’ is really ‘awesome’ during the world war ll eras, you can survive eating potatoes in the whole year, wthout rice. potato a native of pacific slopes of s. america, in 16th c., with roundish or oval starch containing tubers used for food. batata or sweet potato, is widely known in the philippine island, brought to table and used for food. biggest plantation of potato in the philippines is in northern luzon.
Three people have played with Flickr’s feature that lets you draw a box around a portion of a photo and add an annotation. All three are wastes o’ time (obviously in my opinion): “I love these barrels” is not worth the visual interruption. (You only see the boxes if you move your mouse over the photos.) So maybe Flickr will turn these off for the LC photos. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Nevertheless, this is some very cool stuff. Sure, some of the tags are oddball. So what? In the great wash of tags, they will lose significance. Meanwhile, that photo of two children harvesting potatoes, which had been locked away behind brick and paper walls, now is in the world, gathering meaning, memories, and connections.
[Tags: library_of_congress flickr everything_is_miscellaneous tagging folksonomy taxonomy]
January 16, 2008
Very interesting posting from the venerable Library of Congress on its blog (which by itself is pretty cool). Here’s a snippet:
Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.
The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.
Except for my general nervousness about putting this stuff into a privately held, for-profit organization, I think this is quite cool. It has the advantage of putting the data where the people already are. As a footnote to the posting says, it takes a photo of a grain elevator as an example “because it helps illustrate that there are active Flickr user groups for even such diverse subjects as grain elevators.” As the Commons page says,
The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.
You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.
Gives me little goosebumps.
And, by the way, the photos are fantastic.
January 8, 2008
Vista’s photo manager has a built in tagging facility. Yay!
But I couldn’t figure out how to apply tags to photos until I checked the built-in help. The photo manager shows you your photos on the right and your list of tags on the left. I kept trying to drag tags onto the photos. Nope. You have to drag your photos onto your tags.
This strikes me as weird. It’s less convenient because when you drag a photo, you are dragging a translucent image of the photo, which makes it a little hard to see the list over which you’re dragging it. It’s do-able, but it’s not as easy as dragging a little bit of text onto a great big image.
So, why would Microsoft design it this way? All I can figure is that the designers were thinking that tags are like categories: Bins into which things go. For most of us, however, tags are labels that get attached to things. It works either way, but the “containment” metaphor seems inappropriate for tags… [Tags: tagging vista categories taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
January 6, 2008
Andy Carvin (in a tweet) points to the Wikipedia entry on the phrase “Viewers like you.” All part of the Web’s dismantling (and reassembling) of the traditional notion of topics.
December 8, 2007
Last night before I gave a talk in Woods Hole, I got to chat for a very few minutes with David “Paddy” Patterson who heads up the Encyclopedia of Life project. I’d heard a bit about it, and I\ve been meaning to learn a whole lot more. From my narrow point of view, it’s fascinating as an attempt to make itself useful by saying yes to everything. Each species gets its own unique identifier, and if scientists don’t agree on where the species boundaries are, anything that a scientist might want to point at as a species gets its own ID; that way the argument can continue but at least each disputant can point to exactly what she’s talking about. Likewise, it incorporates multiple taxonomies so even if two people disagree about how to organizes the branches of the bush, they can still each use the EoL, and they can still talk with one another without getting lost in the brambles.
In some ways, it’s trying to do the same thing as the OpenLibrary project: Make it possible to aggregate information about things when we don’t agree about what those things are. And in that regard, both of these projects are embodiments of the ontological insecurity the postmodernists were laughed at for.
November 21, 2007
Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.
“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.
Sounds right to me.
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