Professional Documents
March 31, 2009
Before beginning my studies at the iSchool, most of the professional documents I had created were articles for newspapers. Newspaper writing requires careful research, succinct writing and massive editing, but the end product is relatively ephemeral. The professional documents I’ve had a part in at the iSchool took longer to create, required the parsing and culling of intellectual arguments and hopefully have more staying power than the average newspaper article. Below, I have included two documents of which I am particularly proud, documents that I think meet a professional standard.
Collaboration is necessary in creating a large-scale professional thesaurus, since there is so much work to be done. In the class Construction of Indexing Languages (LIS 537), I worked with three other students to create a subject thesaurus on bartending, which contained 100 preferred terms and over 800 lead-in terms. In order to complete this project, we had to harvest terms from a variety of sources, including expert blogs, recipe books and websites. Although it seemed strange to be reading mixology books for class, our fun topic helped keep us motivated. And it was an arduous task! We had to control for homonymy and synonymy, establish term relationships, as well as establish conceptual hierarchies and a notation schema. After that, we needed to write jargon-free instructions for our non-expert users. I ended up being very pleased with our resulting thesaurus.
(Because our thesaurus project was over 100 pages long, I have included only an excerpt here.)
The culminating project in LIS 522, Collection Development, was also a group project. We were to create a complete and usable collection development policy for a library of our choosing. This policy was to cover the entire cycle of collection development and focus on a very specific library or collection. Because I hope to be a cataloger in an academic library one day, I worked on a policy for a Spanish language collection in an academic library setting. First, we had to familiarize ourselves with our hypothetical audience, consult the collection development policies of similar libraries, learn the essential components of effective CD policies and decide which elements to include in our policy. The resulting document is designed to be used by collection development librarians, as well as patrons of the collection.
Urban Exploration Metadata Schema
When I started LIS 538, I knew a bit about XML and about how metadata could be used to increase the findability of information in databases and on the web. But I had no idea that creating a workable metadata schema from scratch was such an involved process. Working with my partner, Eloise Marszalek, we created a schema that urban explorers could use to discover useful web resources. (Urban explorers, also called urban spelunkers or infiltrators, visit parts of city infrastructure that are normally unseen or off-limits.) We began by conducting a domain analysis to solidify the purpose and scope of our project. Then, we drafted a set of functional requirements, a domain model, term declarations, a description set profile and syntax/usage guidelines. We created XML elements of our own, as well as borrowing from tried and true schemas, such as Dublin Core.
Over many iterations and reworkings, our schema became a work that we really became proud of. Besides leaving the class with a professional level product that we were both proud of, we both felt that our collaboration was incredibly successful. We communicated effectively, worked well ahead of our deadlines and, in the end, our efforts paid off. I would love to have the opportunity to actually implement this schema.
