Emily

Add Fresh Spring Touches to Your Home originally appeared on About.com Interior Decorating on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 10:53:05.

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Try Garfield minus Garfield the book.

Library Journal’s 2010 Movers and Shakers list was released today, and I’m happy to be part of it.

Librarian By Day posted a nice linked list of all 50 librarians - thank you Bobbi. Thanks also to the other Movers and Shakers and everyone else out there that I learn from. I enjoy what I do, but generally feel quite stationary compared to many both on and off the list. Thank you.

“In Taiwan, there are more cellphones than people. About 7% of all mobile data goes to movie information. And Google owns nearly 100% of the mobile search market. These, and more fun facts in this handy infographic!”

Will North American cel phone users start to behave like other countries or will bandwidth, pricing, regulation and equipment strangle the mobile economy?

Stephen

It is Friday, and it is spring break, so we really need some fun!

My best friend sent this earlier in the week.  I don’t usually like these endlessly forwarded email lists, but I love this one:

20 Random Thoughts for the Day 

1. I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong. 

3. I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger. 

4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.. 

5. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet? 

6. Was learning cursive really necessary? 

7. MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5.  I’m pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood. 

8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died. 

9. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least KIND OF tired. 

10. Bad decisions make good stories. 

11. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren’t going to do anything productive for the rest of the day. 

12. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don’t want to have to restart my collection….again. 

13. I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to. 

14. “Do not machine wash or tumble dry” means I will never wash this –ever. 

15. I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Darn it!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voice-mail. What did you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone and run away? 

16. I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day.  What a waste. 
     
17. I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call. 

18. My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day “Mom what would happen if you ran over a ninja?” How do I respond to that? 

19. I think the freezer deserves a light as well. 

20. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lights than Kay.

Have a great spring break everyone!

The Inverse Graphing Calculator takes words and converts them into equations that would express them graphically:

The Inverse Graphing Calculator (version beta-1) is like a backwards graphing calculator. Normally, you enter an equation into your calculator and then get a graph of the curve. The way the IGC works is, you type something you’d like as your curve, like ‘Hello World’ or ‘I love you’. The IGC produces an *equation* which has this phrase as its graph!

Link via Geekologie

“The Omeka team is reaching for the clouds. After more than a year of planning and development, we are very pleased to announce the impending arrival of Omeka.net, a hosted web service that will bring standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Be first in line for an invitation to try the free Omeka.net Alpha, including a special bundle of plugins, themes, and storage, when it launches in April.

Omeka.net will expand Omeka’s current offerings with a completely web-based service. No server or programming experience required. Similar to services offered by WordPress, the popular open-source blogging software, with the launch of Omeka.net users will be able to sign up for a free hosted Omeka site. Just create a username and password, and your online collection or exhibition is up and running.

This new hosted web service will further the Omeka project’s mission to make collections-based online publishing more accessible to small cultural heritage institutions, individual scholars, enthusiasts, educators, and students.

With Omeka.net, your online exhibit is one click away.”

Sign up at http://www.omeka.net/invite

From ArtForum.com…

The archives of the architectural firm that designed the World Trade Center have been rescued from shredding at the eleventh hour, reports Dave Iztkoff for the New York Times. The firm, Yamasaki Associates, in Troy, Michigan, was founded in the 1950s by the modernist architect Minoru Yamasaki, who in addition to the Twin Towers designed the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Yamasaki died in 1986, and his office was closed in January. Ted Ayoub, one of the last employees of the firm, contacted the Society of Architectural Historians, which in turn contacted the State Historic Preservation Office in Michigan. Mark Harvey, Michigan’s state archivist, assembled a crew to drive a truck from Lansing to Troy, with one day’s notice, to save the archive from being shredded.

justbesplendid:

A.K. said it well in this post when he said, “Until I began to study metadata, I though “about” and “of” were just two prepositions used frequently in the English language.”

When reading lately about (or of?) “about” and “of” I can’t help but hear former President Bill Clinton’s voice asking what is meant by the definition of the word “is.”

When I skimmed the title of the article linked below, many images popped to mind. These included Jerry Seinfeld’s puffy shirt, the formal gown I wore to my junior prom, Lucille’s case (Lucille is the name of my flute), etc. After reading the article, I have a better idea about expert tagging, the pros and cons of tagging at a few different social sites (blogs, Flickr, Google Group, Del.icio.us), and an article from the perspective of the art world.

To read this article, you’ll need to have a picture of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors in front of you.

Also good to know is that a torquetum is a “medieval astronomical instrument designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: Horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic.”

Simply fascinating!

Article: “Of Torquetums, Flute Cases, and Puff Sleeves: A Study in Folksonomic and Expert Image Tagging” by Eileen Fry

The article mentioned below describes Beaudoin’s study of Flickr tags and her search for an underlying pattern for these tags.  Among the selected Flickr users, the most commonly used categories of tags were “geographical locations” and “compound tags.”  The author noted that some categories that scored on the lower side may be in fact still very important. The “event” category is a good example of this.

The author pointed out the additions to Flickr since the study was conducted. This ensured that the article was as current as possible at the time it was published. She concluded the article by discussing the implications for users and for IS professionals.

As a relatively new Flickr user, I would love more guidelines to the descriptions of my photos. “As information professionals,” Beaudoin stated, “we need to develop new methods and techniques to assist people in tagging and retrieving their ever-growing body of visual materials.”

Side note: I find that I am becoming quite a fan of ASIS&T.

Check out this Flickr Cookie Splash Pool!

Referenced Article: “Flickr Image Tagging: Patterns Made Visible” by Joan Beaudoin

I overheard someone the other day say that “The purpose of education is to show you how little you know.” Then, reading this article and listening to the conversation in class last night is proof that I am getting quite an education.

There are questions that I had not considered about digital image collections. There are some interesting points in this article — more suited for a full article summary than a blog post. I liked Matusiak’s take on using both traditional indexing and social classification: “Social classification does not have to be seen as an alternative or replacement of traditional indexing, but rather as an enhancement. These two approaches can supplement each other.”

I think we shouldn’t consider user-tagging a threat to professional indexing but as something that can be used in conjunction with it. We should be keeping our users’ wants and needs in mind. I guess the question would be to what extent and in what capacity.

The author used a graphic displaying Flickr’s most popular tags. You can view Flickr’s most popular current tags by clicking here and the most popular tags on Delicious by clicking here.

Referenced Article: “Towards User-Centered Indexing in Digital Image Collections“

Very brief post at one of my favorite blogs to follow, “Stephen’s Lighthouse” is related to the tags used on Twitter.

After reading Jennifer’s post (and related comments) about Google’s Image Swirl, I decided to give it a try.

I think it has awesome potential. It is “an experimental search tool that organizes image-search results.”

If you search for apple, for example, you see that there are images divided into different clusters. (compared to the results at Jessica’s very cool blog entry here) You have a group of images of actual apples and a group of images of the Apple logo. In other words, you can see the different kinds of “apples” at a glance and choose the group that matches what you are seeking.

When using Google Images, there are times when I have to look through pages of non-related items to find a few quality images related to my desired subject matter. So, I feel this tool could be useful.

Of course, it is still an experiment and is not 100% perfect. Also, you are not able to search for any random string of words. According to its help page, “Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries.”

It’s interesting within the context of our discussions of aboutness/ofness. I would love to see how it works — the metadata behind the data. In answer to the question “How does it work?”, Google says: “Google Image Swirl combines a variety of image similarity features with additional metadata about the images to build a hierarchy of clusters of image search results.”

You can read more about this on the Google Research Blog entry here.

(I don’t remember anyone from our class mentioning this site. If so, I apologize.)

The “Vintage Ad Browser” popped up in my Google Reader feed via Neatorama earlier in the year. It caught my attention because it showed a vintage perfume ad with a picture of a young girl loving on a dog which reminded me of my niece who loves to hug my shih tzu and spent much of Christmas doing just that. (And yes, we have pictures of this.)

So, I decided to check out the vintage tobacco ads. You can look at them here. I searched for metadata with little luck. Actually, it became obvious in a hurry that it is merely a browser and not a collection. Therefore, the metadata varies depending on the site where the image is originally found.

Click on the image below to check out my blog’s “Wordle.”

I am so delighted to find this cartoon about digital preservation and am looking forward to watching some of the others. These can be found on the DPE’s (Digital Preservation Europe) YouTube channel.

DPE is a “consortium of European academic and cultural institutions dedicated to sharing their collective digital preservation expertise and resources,” and you can read more about DPE here on the digitalpreservation.gov website.

Three Questions from the video:

1. What should be saved?
2. Who’s responsible for saving it?
3. What are the challenges in saving it?

Digital natives are receiving mixed messages about digital preservation. They’re told to be careful what they put on the Web because it can come back to haunt you or be used against you. So true. But they are unaware that what they may want to revisit or may put on the Web that will in the future be useful may actually be lost.

Interesting.

Link: Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation

After reading the blog post referenced below as well as my classmates’ posts here and here, I can’t help but hear that Queen song in my head now (”I Want It All”).

The scary thing is that I don’t know how I feel about all of this. There are days when I wish everything was available to me at anytime. Then there are times that I am concerned about privacy. And accuracy. And who is controlling it all.

I agree that the whole Google-bashing-of-it-all is a little tired.

Someone brought a Kindle into my home and I was offended. Should I be? Probably not.

I want to think that I’m a digital native. But after watching my 17 month old niece move a mouse and watch the computer screen, I realize I’m more digital immigrant than native. Ouch. That hurt a little.

I have subscribed to the hangingtogether.org blog and will continue to develop my opinions. It opened my eyes to some important projects. I also like the play on words in the post’s title.

Below is a picture I took with my phone of my niece watching a Baby Einstein video.

Blog Post Link: “May I Speak Openly About Mass Digitization?“

My thoughts and observations while reading this article:

• It’s a little sad that “the library is too big for serendipty.”
• The idea of computer scientists and social scientists working together fascinates me.
• I love statistics. The author mentions statistical analysis techniques being used to analyze the structure and evolution of the Web.
• I better understand and am grateful that the Wayback Machine respects the robots.txt exclusions. In other words, the fact that my blog from 2005 was not included is actually respecting my privacy.
• Further documentation that the Internet is huge! (approximately 600 terabytes as of 4 years ago)
• The metadata stored about Web pages “includes URLs, IP addresses, data and time of capture, MIME types, and other basic information from the HTTP header” (and every hyperlink from each page).
• Nutch WAX is not similar to Turtle Wax.
• According to the authors, very little usage data is available although it is useful to Web researchers.

If you haven’t seen the graphic about printing the Internet, take a few seconds to do so. It can be found here. Very cool!

Article Link: A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive

If you started singing that song from Back to the Future when you read the title of this post, then you may be able to relate to this post.

I was checking out the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive Website). There were a couple of old blogs I tried that were not accessible. Then I thought about my days in college when I first came across this thing called the Internet and how I used to love Yahoo! So I looked at Yahoo! from a week in October 1996.  Not only did the banner ad make me smile, but it made me think about how I searched for things differently. Back then, it was all about clicking on headings and then subheadings, etc. until you found what you were looking for. Come to think of it, I spent more time just seeing what I could find interesting instead of using the Internet as a tool to search for something specific. More surfing.

By the way, the banner ad was for Internet Magazine -  “For those who can do with a website what MacGyver could with a paperclip.” This was found on the libraries page.

Referenced above: Wayback Machine

I’ve noticed that I am seeing metadata everywhere now!

My hubbie and I are going out shopping for a new washer today. Ours died earlier this week. I decided today that we should be celebrating that we’ve been together long enough to go through the lifespan of a brand new washing machine. It was one of our first (if not the first) major purchases together.

He wants to go to several different stores (Best Buy, H.H. Gregg, Home Depot, K-Mart, and maybe more). I was thinking about how the machines may start running together in my head and wondering how to keep it all organized. I then used an expletive and laughed and said that I would have to develop a schema to deal with this. Let’s see. There are things to consider like size, color, Energy Star rating, brand, price, whether or not it’s on sale, store, warranty, etc.

Then I just thought, maybe I could apply Dublin Core to the washers.

So, wish me luck/ pray for us/ whatever you prefer to do. I have consulted Consumer Reports, shopped a little online, and am ready to get my clipboard and go shopping.

This article has expanded my thinking in a few ways — considering the differences in types of images (artistic, documentary, and ordinary), considering the advantages and disadvantages of the controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies (and how a combination of the two can be helpful), and a reminder that not everyone in the world speaks the same language.

We tend to get self-absorbed in the U.S. and forget that fact, I think.

Enter the cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) mechanism.

I thought I’d do a little experiment with my beloved Google Image search. I searched for “Kenya photos” and then, in French, “photos du Kenya.” I found fewer pictures with the second search but different images.

It is easy to quickly see evidence of the “great linguistic diversity existing on the web” mentioned in Ms. Menard’s article.

Reference: Image Indexing: How Can I Find a Nice Pair of Italian Shoes? by Elaine Menard

I began reading “Developing a Metadata Strategy.” It mentioned two of my favorite subjects — mathematics and music — on the second page. So it quickly grabbed my attention and interest.

Within Illustration A, there is a phrase that trips me up - “gray lit.” Should I know what this is already? I did a quick Google search (dangerous, I know) and of course found a Wikipedia article on Gray Literature. Is this article pretty much correct? Any other comments on this? Sounds vaguely familiar.

Moving on to continue reading about how to build a metadata repository.

Reference: Developing a Metadata Strategy by Grace Agnew

Thank you, Dr. MacCall, for including this in our readings.

I’ve skimmed it, bookmarked it, and will be using it in the days ahead. It’s been several months since I had LS500 and as the saying goes, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” I don’t use Dublin Core on a daily basis and did not remember much about it. This along with this past Tuesday’s class is helping to dust off some of the cobwebs in my brain.

Reference: Using Dublin Core

Side note: I first heard the phrase “If you don’t use it, you lose it” from an 89 year old lady named Margaret in a water aerobics class as she passed me water-walking at the YMCA. This was several years ago. I just did a quick Google search to see the source of that quote and found some very naughty usages of this quote.

Highlights from the article:

• Billions and billions of images and videos on the web — only a fraction are indexed!
• These numbers are exponentially growing.
• “Efforts to automate the process”; “human ability to create images is exploding”; “unique challenges of analysis in various domains.”
• The two approaches to image indexing and retrieval are concept-based and content-based; the author seems to support utilizing a combination of the two.

If you didn’t read this one, I recommend it. It is well-written, in my opinion, and leaves you with a feeling of excitement and being overwhelmed by the possibilities.

I can’t argue with his points about sending photos via mobile phones. In fact, I was turning on lights at the library this morning and took this photo of the snow outside the window and sent it to my Flickr account in the blink of an eye.

This article made me think about something I had not considered previously. Medical images are not just like any other snapshot taken by your camera or phone. It has its own issues in indexing. For example, the author points out the “modality” (MRI, CT scan, X-Ray, etc.) of the images. Fascinating!

Reference: Image Retrieval: Benchmarking Visual Information Indexing and Retrieval Systems by Abebe Rorissa

I came across an interesting site the other day - Flavors.me. If you are looking for a place to list all your social networks for whatever reason, you might give it a try. Here’s mine.

I am quite behind on my blog entries and hope to catch up soon. Between the weekend class in Gadsden last week, sick mid-week, letting the beautiful snow distract me, and my brain experiencing what is described in this 23 second video, it’s not been pretty.

“They don’t do things that way anymore. This is the Age of Science Know-How, electronal marvels.” - Barney Fife

Regarding my post in response to Dr. MacCall’s post about weekly browsing add-ons:

I added My Weekly Browsing Schedule on my work computer and my personal laptop. I added Page Scheduler on my personal laptop. I couldn’t get My Weekly Browsing Schedule to work on either computer. I had entered my friend’s blog on both. With Page Scheduler, you still have to click on the icon to pull up all the sites you’ve entered. This seems no better than a bookmark, in my opinion.

I gave up on both and removed them from my laptop.

Last night, I had stepped away from my computer at work. When I came back to my desk, I noticed that the log-in for my friend’s blog was open in one of my Firefox tabs. At first, I thought that I had completely lost my mind. Then I realized that the My Weekly Browsing Schedule tool had opened it for me at its regularly scheduled time.

Conclusion: I’m not going to bother with Page Scheduler but will continue to play around with My Weekly Browsing Schedule.

After reading Jessica’s post, I feel a bit guilty again about my past tagging habits. The post makes sense to me. Especially the statement, “The concept behind this revolves around users choosing words or phrases that they think will be the easiest for others to use to retrieve the document or image.”

My issue is that I have been using Delicious, Library Thing, Vodpod, and more, and recently even Flickr. When I first started blogging and adding images, etc., I didn’t know what the purpose of tagging was. Oops.

My dear husband is one to always read the directions. I tend to want to try something out and skip the directions. I learn better by doing. If I had read directions, would I have known what tags were for? Would I have been a more responsible tagger? I guess that is the flaw with the uncontrolled vocabulary. Hmm. Things to ponder. Thanks, Jessica. And I like the pink flower.

Reference: “Tagging” by Jessica

Last night, I could not sleep. Why?

I had been playing around with some web design stuff at ShowItFast.com earlier. At around 2 a.m. when I thought I was asleep, I thought of the perfect picture I needed to complete the site I was working on. Then it occurred to me that I had no idea where to find that specific picture of the pink rose. When did I take that picture? That’s the only way I could try to find it.

Why didn’t I enter any metadata? When am I going to have the time to tag all my photos? I take a bunch. Just my trip to Disney World alone last fall…. Wow.

I had no idea that this class would make me feel so guilty and lose sleep.

In all seriousness, I have seen the importance of tagging my photos next time. And can do the rest a little bit at a time.

Do you know the seven wonders of the world? That could be debatable. It depends on whether or not you’re referring to medieval, modern, ancient, etc. But according to Juha Hakala, the seven levels of identification are:

• organisations
• people
• collections and services
• works and expressions
• manifestations
• component parts and
• search attributes.

What I got from this article is more evidence that there is a challenge before us in the area of identification of digital objects. The organizational methods of the 1980’s were fine for the 1980’s (ah, such simpler times). But there is much need to fix those methods or systems and to create new ones.

I also really liked the picture he painted of the “deep web.” According to Hakala, your typical Google-type application searches documents, whereas libraries should assist “users to find relevant databases, collections embedded in them and other sources that are hidden from document-driven applications.”

Reference: The Seven Levels of Identification

This is in response to Dr. MacCall’s post, “Hmmm, Scheduled Browsing.”

At first, I thought the two add-ons mentioned in the referenced article would be one of those things that sounded nice but eventually would prove annoying and useless.

I tried to think of a possible use for them but kept coming up short. Then it occurred to me that they could solve the problem I mentioned in this post about my friend’s blog. I love to follow her entries. Her blog is password protected and doesn’t show up in my RSS aggregator. She doesn’t post everyday and I tend to forget to regularly visit.

I have added “My Weekly Browsing Schedule” to Firefox and will see how this goes. I currently have it scheduled to go to A.E.’s blog weekly so that I’ll remember to log on to it and see what’s new in her world.

What are some of your favorite Firefox add-ons? One of my favorites is Shareaholic.

Quote from the Metadata Switch website:

“The Metadata Switch is an umbrella activity for a set of projects which are constructing experimental modular services that add value to metadata.”

Things I appreciated about reading through these pages:

• The way it is laid out makes it easy to read and understand
• The list of sub-projects breaks down the overall concept into more digestible parts
• The goal of making different schema work together makes sense to me (There is so much information with so many ways to access it. This becomes so overwhelming. We need all these different silos to connect somehow.)
• The fact that this is describing project management/ systems analysis puts these ideas into language that is more familiar to me
• The examples provided keeps it from being completely theoretical

I hope to read more about this project since it was to be completed several years ago.

Reference: Metadata Switch

Feeling a bit overwhelmed and a bit spacey after painting all day yesterday, I decided I would look for a “Metadata for Dummies” book. No such luck! (not that I can find anyway) Dibs on writing that, guys! Of course, this means I will have to find another way to get a grasp on all this stuff before I can write the book.

In my search, I found a PowerPoint in the form of a pdf file called “Metadata for Dummies“. I skimmed through it, and it seems to be about the importance of metadata related to photos.

I also came across a list of tags from the “Dummies Books”.

By the way, I remember someone from class posting about the use of tags in Wordpress. But has anyone discussed the differences between tags and categories in Wordpress?

“He called me an oldster! I called him a pig. We’re going out Saturday night.” - paraphrase from some episode of The Golden Girls

If only I could grasp new terminology the way television sitcom dialog sticks in my head.

I read the blog post, “OAIster Reaches 10 Million Records” by Heather Morrison.

Side note: Acronyms annoy me. They are intended to speed up your communication, I suppose. But until you internalize the meaning of the acronym, it just causes you to have to slow down and think about what the acronym stands for. In other words someone says something using acronyms and I have missed part of what they’ve said because they were still talking while I was trying to figure out what the acronym stood for.

So, I was trying to figure out what OAIster stands for (looks like it would sound like oldster, I don’t know). I followed one of the links from the blog post (about OAIster) and learned that:

“OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open archive resources that was built by harvesting from open archive collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster boasts more than 23 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors.”

23 million! That’s 13 million more than 3 years ago at the time of the blog entry. I also learned that these digital resources include:

• Digitized (scanned) books and journal articles
• Digital text
• Audio files (wav, mp3)
• Video files (mp4, QuickTime)
• Photographic images (jpeg, tiff, gif)
• Data sets (downloadable statistical information)
• Theses and research papers

Now. Actually learning what this truly should mean to me and how to use it is another question.

Reference: OAIster Reaches 10 Million Records

What I have learned this week:

1. My RSS aggregator does not always update as quickly as I think it should.
2. The similarities of the phrases organization of information, metadata, and cataloging.
3. The concept of the “audience level” tool
4. Some of the pros and cons of “metasearch”
5. My classmates and/or professor have a fascination with daschunds. (I love my Shih Tzu, Xochitl, thank you very much.)

When I don’t know what to say or am tired or frustrated, I often exclaim “Oy with the poodles already.” You may want to say “Oy with the daschunds already.” Tonight is the beginning of the spring semester at the university where I work; therefore, I am trying to stay awake during this first late night shift since early December. This explains why this post is a bit nonsensical.

Thank you Gilmore Girls for the catchphrase.

“Metasearch offers the most promise, of any existing technology, to make academic libraries relevant to patrons in the Web context.” - David Lindahl

While reading David Lindahl’s article, “Metasearch in the Users’ Context,”I felt excited and justified.

The first part of this article accurately depicts the frustrations of many users. Why can’t searching our libraries’ databases be as simple as searching Google? We’ve been told that libraries were among the first to utilize technology. So why aren’t we continuing to blaze the trail? Why do we just arrogantly say that our users should get more training? This points not only to all the obstacles discussed in this article but to a problem with customer patron service in libraries. Unfortunately, librarians are often considered unapproachable. This, however, is another topic for another day.

We should be providing quality information in a simple manner. Do we continue to type DOS commands every time we use a computer? No. That part of our daily technology is typically hidden. We are not expected to receive better training. The interface has become more user-friendly as the technology has improved. We’re not considered lazy because we’re using a mouse, are we?

Lindahl states that “Technologies must be hidden under a user interface that responds to what patrons want, not what the technology has to accomplish.” This reminds me of the “transparent infrastructure” Dr. MacCall discussed in our last class meeting.

The idea of different pathways for novice and expert users, I feel, is an excellent solution to many of the issues with metasearch and in a sense provides the best of both worlds.

The second part of the article discusses some of the obstacles metasearch must overcome. I liked reading about stakeholders and their interests. It reminded me of the Systems Analysis course I had with Dr. Aversa. It’s always fun when your courses come together like that.

Good, bad, or ugly — it will be interesting to read more articles on this topic.

Reference: Metasearch in the Users’ Context

In the post by Lorcan Dempsey, “Know Your Audience,” I was at first left wondering if I was the wrong audience for this post.

I noticed that one of the links no longer works (it is almost 4 years since the post, after all). Seeing Amazon.com used as an example, I thought I’d try out this “Audience Level” function. Apparently Amazon no longer lists it — at least not on the two books I tried: Twilight and Metadata. The OCLC’s audience level tool referenced in Dempsey’s post yielded better results. Using Twilight as an example again, you find that it has an audience level of 0.09 with 2,658 Worldcat holdings and 16 manifestations. The audience level scale appears to be between 0 and 1 with 0 on the juvenile side and 1 on the research side.

Dempsey explained that “This service is based on the insight that we can say something about the likely audience for an item based on its pattern of distribution across libraries (WorldCat knows about over a billion items available from thousands of libraries).”

The way I’m thinking about this is to consider the small juvenile collection at the academic library where I work. One may fear that these books would be rated incorrectly because they are at an academic library. However, across large data sets, we get a better picture of the “likely audience for an item.”

Reference: Know Your Audience

I related to Kathie’s post, “Foundations & Definitions” in trying to find a good, solid definition of metadata. And I absolutely love lists. They make me feel better.

Some of the definitions made me look up other words, though. I can now relate to the teenagers in our Sunday School class. My husband, their teacher, is a walking dictionary. He’ll use a “ten cent” word. Their eyes will glaze over. They’ll grab one or both of the dictionaries we keep in the room (one geared for college students, one geared for 5th graders). When they find the definition, they’ll have to look up some of the words in the definition usually as well. It can be a painful process but it is good for them and will be good for me.

Dr. MacCall’s response to the post included a definition for metadata that is ““A cloud of collateral information around a data object.”  I think I know what most of those words mean. Wait. Collateral is “property that you pledge as security for a loan that is given up if you default on the loan.” Right? Hey, give me a break; I worked in banking for almost 10 years.  If you follow the link Dr. M provided, there are 27 definitions!

I will now continue to catch up on my Google Reader items; there are 438 (115 of which are from this class)!

Kathie’s Post: Foundations & Definitions

I just read the post by Karen Calhoun (link below).  I’m still hoping for some major “conceptual breakthrough” as Dr. MacCall has said.  It’s almost as if I’m learning a new, difficult language and have no idea where to begin.

What I realized from this article is that traditional cataloging is different from metadata. This, I’m sure, is obvious for my classmates who actually do cataloging work everyday.

I will count this as a small conceptual breakthrough. My questions at this moment are what are the differences between the two and is cataloging a subset of metadata?

Referenced Blog Post: From Cataloguing to Metadata: An Invitation

I’m wondering if the reading materials listed under Week 2 are to be read before or after tonight’s class meeting. In other words, is each week’s “assignment” to be completed after that week’s class meeting or prior to that week’s class meeting?

I am quite fond of the short, simple tutorial videos that you can find about various technology topics. The article we read for Week 1, “Google Reader for Beginners”, included an example of this. I found it to be a little blurry and made me a little carsick, but it was a suitable introduction to Google Reader.  I try not to gush, but Google Reader changed my life.  I was beginning to follow too many blogs.  Instead of spending time to visit each blog, now I let them come to me in my iGoogle widget on my homepage.

I had to narrow down the number of subscriptions a couple of months ago. Now, I’ve added how many more? That’s okay. I have all of the metadata blogs in a separate folder. That doesn’t keep them from popping up in my iGoogle widget, however, along with the home decor photos, Garfield Minus Garfield, coupons, Fox News, James Spann, and the like.

The drawback to this, I’ve found, is that on password-protected blogs it does not work.  In other words, my friend, A.E., has a blog that is private. She has established a few of us to have access, and I have to go directly to her blog and enter a password each time.  Does anyone know of an RSS aggregator that will allow me to only log-in once and continue to pull entries?

Reference: “Google Reader for Beginners” article

Welcome to the “Tag - You’re It” blog. I first heard the term “metadata” in my LS500 class in the Fall 2008 semester.  It intrigued me then but also intimidates. Of course that was my first semester in graduate school and the first semester in my first library job. In fact, it took me several hours (weekend class) to realize that the professor (S. Yates) was saying “Dublin Core” and not “double encore!”

I have been blogging for a few years now — as a means to keep up with and plan events with my friends from high school, as a means to vent during difficult times, as a means to talk about random events in my life, as a means to share photography, etc., etc., etc. I’ve recently been pondering taking a break from the personal blog and focus on more professional endeavors in blogging. I find it’s one of those things that will be an excellent tool in my toolbox when interviewing for library science jobs but at the same time won’t be loved by all. In other words, I am excited to have this opportunity to have a focused blog for a class.