Speaks for Itself

Although I set up this blog primarily to track the progress of my MLIS portfolio, I usually don’t post about the ins and outs of its creation.   That wouldn’t make for exciting reading or writing. Now that I’m within a whisker of being finished, though, I feel like alerting the world. I just loaded images to my pages, changed them from private to public and the only thing I have left to do is upload two of my projects to the student server and link them.  Yippee!  Although this MLIS experience is nearly over, I plan on keeping up with this blog.  Maybe I’ll write about my new career.

Just for fun…here’s a picture from a homemade book I cataloged recently on traditional Central American clothing:

Costumely

I would really love to hear any feedback about my slides or any suggestions people may have for preparing. Wish me luck!

Besides the portfolio, I’ve been reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, which has been on my reading list forever.  As someone who’s interested in the details of search, classification and usability, the book has been a nice step back, a big picture kind of read.   I do take issue with Weinberger’s polarized view of folksonomy v. taxonomy and his opinion is the former is inherently better in a digitized world.   I will have to revisit this issue, though, because I’m only half way through the book.

infocamp2008 banner

My summer is about to end.  The evenings of unchecked sloth will be replaced by paper writing and lecture watching, even as the weather continues to tell me otherwise.  *Sigh*  I suppose it’s time.  But, I do have one last hurrah planned before the great hunkering down.  On Sept. 27 and 28, I’m going to InfoCamp in West Seattle.  InfoCamp bills itself as an “interdisciplinary un-conference” where students and informational professionals get together to share ideas and find out about each other.  Its organizers do not pick the presenters.  Instead, participants sign up to speak about whatever topics interest them.   Through a wiki, participants can list topics they are interested in hearing about, as well as sign up to give a presentation.  It looks like there will be quite a bit about information architecture and the semantic web.  This event sounds like a lot of fun; I can’t wait!

Also, I finally got Peter Morville’s book, Ambient Findability, from the library last week.  Ever since I discovered his blog called Findability.org, I’ve been meaning to see what he has to say about web navigation in the world of information overload.  Morville’s ideas are bounded by Moore’s Law, which acurately predicted an exponential explosion in electronic processing power, as well as Mooer’s law, which states that “an information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.”  Given the reality of both laws, Morville describes the various ways that we navigate the online world (which he also explains is becoming increasingly intermingled–or, as he says “intertwingled”–with the physical world) and find the information that we need.  So far, I haven’t encountered much in the way of concrete design or navigation solutions, but then again, I have a couple chapters left to go.

I also decided to check out the lastest developments in the Library of Congress’ upcoming adoption of RDA (stands for Resource Description and Access, the new cataloging rules that are slated to replace AACR2).  Apparently, LOC, the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library are recommending that RDA be more extensively reviewed and studied before it is adopted.  Hmmm.  I must admit that I haven’t had a chance to look over the proposed RDA rules yet.  Another something, something to add to my list.

Shoe, heel, snake, eve, ahh! Photo by maintenancepic. Obtained via Flickr Creative Commons on 8/20/08

My friend Naomi just showed me a research project that Google is conducting, and it comes in the form of a simple, yet addictive little game. They’re calling it Google Image Labeler, and here’s how it works: You are paired with someone else in Googleland. You are both shown a series of images. You and your partner tag the images with whatever words come to mind. When you both assign the same word to an image, you move onto the next image and get points. You do this over and over (or in my case over and over and over and over) and the peeps with the most cumulative points are listed on the screen like top scorers in a video game. The images are often of poor quality and cover everything from portraiture to ads to nudie shots, so your brain’s got to be nimble.

Google states that the purpose of the labeler is to help “improve the relevance of image search for users.” Of course, this leaves me to wonder how the company plans on using the user generated tags to improve relevance. Research on query mapping, perhaps?  Or folksonomy?  Maybe Google is having its users generate metadata for them.  Maybe a matched set of tags later becomes descriptor for the image.  If so, this is genius.  Why hire temps to do something that people will do for free? *sigh* I wish I was privy to Google’s search secrets. For now, I’ll just be content to tag their images.

Fast forward to today.  I’m at the copier, snatching somebody else’s copies by mistake, when I notice that I am holding a comprehensive bibliography of web design resources.  Turns out, two of the librarians at work are planning a redesign of our portal page and found this great resource from the University of Minnesota Duluth.  Why could I not have stumbled across it six weeks ago?  Because (1) knowing little about IA, my initial search strategy was flawed; and (2) the serendipity gods smiled on me six weeks too late.

One of the items on the bibliography is Peter Morville’s blog called findability.org.  For anyone interested in taxonomy, controlled vobabularies, folksonomies or IA, I would highly recommend checking it out.  In fact, I’m off to read one of Morville’s posts about folksonomy innovations at Buzzillions right now. I’ll let you know what I think.

Nevertheless, the taking has been weighing on my conscience, and rightfully so, especially when there are places like Flickr’s Creative Commons that serve most of my purposes. People like me–who aren’t trying to turn a dollar off other people’s pictures or alter them in any way–have access to hundreds of thousands of free images. I had heard about Creative Commons a couple years ago, but only recently found out just how much is available.  In fact, there’s so much available that I can no longer justify my pirate methods. On this blog, from here on out, everything will be fairly obtained and attributed to the right peeps.  I’m playing by the rules now.  

PS: I would be interested to know about other people’s favorite places to find alternative copyright materials.  Send a comment my way if you would.