Libtools

A priori principle for shareable metadata: there has to be some data in order to share the metadata.  It’s a necessary prerequisite (seems exceedingly odd to have to belabour that).

If material is not classified, you can’t share/extract/expose the classification of that material. The material won’t be included in views that may be developed elsewhere for classed structures for similar types of material.

If no one assigns subjects, subject descriptors or terms, whether controlled or uncontrolled, there is nothing to share/extract/expose there, either. No topic maps or subject browse, for instance.

In turn, your data, or rather users of your data, won’t be able to benefit from the newer models that are emerging for linked data (e.g., SKOS, VIAF, and other web services).

Best practice for shareable metadata?

Practice value-added data in the first place.

I’ve now embarked on implementing the Materials Booking module.  I’ve started to set things up, but the software installation was missing a few key components — like the base file used to set up the Rules for Self-Booking.

I have to say that the fellow at III who installed the software responded to my emails within a very short time and rectified the situation.  Once the rules file was accessible from the menu, I was able to go in and start adding some criteria.

It definitely appears that the documentation in the manual needs updating; several files mentioned there aren’t in the 2006 or 2007 example sets and so it would seem that they are not actually required by the software (i.e. something has changed).  It could also be that some of these are documentation errors that are corrected in the Release 2007 manual.

The human propensity to differentiate and distinguish, as well as to categorize, occurs at the most primitive level: biological survival. One of the first, if not the first thing an infant learns, is distinguishing “mother” from “not mother“.

It is a requirement to learn to distinguish things from one another. It is at the core of how humans learn, develop, and interact with the world around them.

Preliterate, isolated cultures do a great amount of differentiation in order to insure their survival and the continuation of the species. It’s extremely beneficial to the species to have knowledge of the categories ‘poisonous mushrooms’ and ‘building materials with insulating properties’, for instance.

Categorization has its biological origins in saving the species time and expending of fewer calories, helping to insure our ultimate survival.

Nothing miscellaneous about it.

All right!  Just finished up the June load of Serials Solutions bibs (adds, changes, deletes) in short order; followed by the catalog + coverage update this morning — the coverage load took 15 minutes, it was a snap!  Things are settling down now in terms of workflow process — finally.

I’ve learned to not attempt re-sorting any of the columns when ERM displays the processing reports — that part of the software is very glitchy and I’ve gotten hung at that end stage more than once now. That’s what I get for being curious!

I’m cleaning up the documentation for the coverage load wiki pages — that is turning out to be a great help.  The embargo conversion rules are working fine, except that I’d like to reorganize the lot of them so that they file decimally — we will be able to spot gaps better when loading new spreadsheets.

Also made loads of progress today looking more closely at the Serials Solutions “Client Center” side of things when we had a problem with the SpringerLink package.  Turns out someone left a footprint at SerSol — which got carried over to the spreadsheet.  Much easier dealing with human-generated errors than machine-generated!  Plus, now I get to work out a few methods for cleaning this kind of problem up, so all is not lost.

The learning curve is starting to level out.  Hope I didn’t just jinx myself by stating that…!

Getty’s Catalyst image search site is an impressive advance, allowing users to manipulate concepts in the information space by using drag-and-drop.

The Catalyst search demonstrates a very effective use of tag clouds to add/subtract terms as filters. One of its strengths is that it works by recognition, rather than by articulation. There is an offering of terms at the left, some of which you may ‘recognize’ as useful–rather than having to articulate a priori (i.e., by first dreaming up and them typing them into an “advanced boolean search” box) terms which may not be in the dataset anyway.  

I’m especially inclined to think that the insights behind this search functionality were informed by the fact that images are ‘text-free zones’ so the Getty designers/developers are likely much more accustomed to exercising their right-brain functionality. These are the kinds of search models that need to be explored and ported to left-brain dominant activities, like reading text on the screen. Far too many interfaces of our search interfaces can’t find their way off the flat, two-dimensional reading plane — but Getty has.

Only the initial search is needed to hit the ’side of the barn’ (see Bates).