Author: lara (Page 87 of 96)

If the­saurus con­struc­tion is some­thing that comes up only occa­sion­al­ly in the course of your work you should book­mark this tuto­r­i­al cre­at­ed by Dr. Tim Craven of West­ern Ontario Uni­ver­si­ty for his LIS students.

Eight sec­tions take you quick­ly through the basic con­cepts and con­sid­er­a­tions for build­ing a the­saurus. It’s a handy refresh­er that is soft­ware agnostic.

In fact the sec­tion head­ings would make a good out­line for a set of ques­tions to ask the soft­ware ven­dors if you are con­sid­er­ing pur­chas­ing a the­saurus man­age­ment system.

Speak­ing of the­saurus soft­ware, Dr. Craven also has a hand­ful of free­ware pro­grams to assist in index­ing and the­saurus con­struc­tion. I haven’t checked them out yet and so can’t offer an opinion.

Once in a while it is a good and refresh­ing thing to revis­it some of the clas­sics. In this case a paper that I con­sid­er to be a pri­ma­ry lens for look­ing at infor­ma­tion seek­ing behaviours.

Some­thing struck me as I was reread­ing Mar­cia Bates’ “The Design of Brows­ing and Berryp­ick­ing Tech­niques for the On-Line Search Inter­face” (Pub­lished in 1989, a time when on-line search­ing was awk­ward, expen­sive and the pre­serve of aca­d­e­mics and sci­en­tists. We can argue whether or not the sit­u­a­tion has actu­al­ly improved on anoth­er day.)

The berryp­ick­ing (or evolv­ing search) mod­el that she describes is now a wide­ly used short­hand for a set of user behav­iors. Unfor­tu­nate­ly like many abbre­vi­at­ed terms, we for­get the full com­plex­i­ty of the ideas that the short­hand represents.

Five of the six spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion chas­ing strate­gies that she describes as being used by aca­d­e­m­ic searchers are used every­day by the blog­gers and blog read­ers. Blogs have evolved tools for their own ver­sions of:

• Foot­note Chas­ing: (also known as back­ward chain­ing.) No need to write that cita­tion down and go the library to look up the cit­ed mate­r­i­al, just click on the link in the blog post and get an imme­di­ate look at it.

• Cita­tion Chas­ing: (for­ward chain­ing,) Most non-academics don’t ever learn about using a cita­tion index but it’s one of the best ways to move your search for infor­ma­tion for­ward through time. Now with track­backs every­one can do cita­tion chas­ing with­out even know­ing that they are engag­ing in one of the rit­u­als of grad­u­ate school. Also have look at tech­no­rati’s blog reac­tions for links to blog posts that refer to anoth­er post.

• Jour­nal Run: Instead of sit­ting on the floor of the peri­od­i­cals stacks run­ning your fin­ger down the table of con­tents of each issue of the Jour­nal of Cat-like Things for the last two years just click on the handy archive links in the left (right) hand nav­i­ga­tion pane of the blog.

• Author Search­ing: Most blog writ­ers who pub­lish in more than one place add links to their oth­er blogs or guest writ­ing spots in their “home” blogs.

• Sub­ject Search­es: Search­es lim­it­ed to the world of blogs and blog­ging are avail­able from Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, and a slew of spe­cial­ized blog search engines.

The sixth search tech­nique is a lit­tle hard­er to place in the blog world. At least I thought it was, until I spent some time look­ing at a hand­ful of blogs try­ing to find good exam­ples of the first five techniques.

• Area Scan­ning: the habit of look­ing at the adjoin­ing shelves. Once you have found Audubon’s Birds of North Amer­i­ca (DDC 598AUD) you will find Kale’s Flori­da’s Birds (DDC 598.2975 KAL) as well as Gar­ri­do’s Field Guide to the Birds of Cuba (DDC 598.097291 GAR) on near­by shelves. Handy if you’re look­ing for infor­ma­tion on birds you might see in the Flori­da Keys. The blog equiv­a­lent is look­ing at the blog rolls. Per­haps not as tidy as the library shelf mod­el but none-the-less titles co-located by being placed on the same list are like­ly to have use­ful rela­tion­ships to one anoth­er. (This blog is the sad counter exam­ple; my blog roll is exact­ly a list of things that are not relat­ed to the pri­ma­ry top­ic of my essays.)

For the next cou­ple of days I’ll be more aware of which search habits I might be drag­ging from the paper based past into the dig­i­tal present present and think­ing about whether or not they are still use­ful and if use­ful are they well pro­vid­ed for?

Just the usu­al read­ing too quick­ly this a.m. and I got seman­tic zon­ing instead of seman­tic zooming.

On reflec­tion seman­tic zon­ing may be more use­ful con­cept. Think of semat­ic zon­ing like coun­ty zon­ing. You know, urban plan­ning. Per­haps (?) our clas­si­fi­ca­tion schemes need to be a bit more like a city. Some bits of a city we zone and design for easy, cer­tain, and sure access, like a cen­tral core. Some we let ram­ble a bit like the res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hoods. Some areas we inten­tion­al­ly push toward chaos and sur­prise like parks and gar­dens. How we zone and how rigid­ly we grid an area depends on what peo­ple are like­ly to be doing or seek­ing in each area. The court house and hos­pi­tal, should be imme­di­ate­ly and dis­tinct­ly find­able. The bench under the wil­low in the arbore­tum, not so much.

URL removed to pro­tect my chances of get­ting work…

Tag­ging had got­ten every­where. It’s the lat­est “got­ta have” for your web­site. Got­ta have tag­ging and one of those cool cloud things in the right hand col­umn. But tag clouds are often just so much noise. Can’t tag­ging be put to bet­ter use?Did you know that there is tag­ging in Ama­zon? Six months ago it did­n’t seem to be used much. Now it seems to be gain­ing enough mass to be useful.

A cou­ple of examples.

The Lit­tle Green Book of Get­ting Your Way (a business/negotiation book).

It ranks #366 on Ama­zon’s sales list and has 47 reviews. It has twen­ty tags. The top tag is per­sua­sion.

Click­ing through on per­sua­sion gets you a pret­ty use­ful list­ing of books.

Eight of the first ten books tagged per­sua­sion are busi­ness titles. Most like­ly what you’d be look­ing for if you start­ed with the Lit­tle Green Book. (The top book is of course some guy tar­get­ed dat­ing book and there’s the odd­i­ty in place ninth place: “None but You” based on Jane Austen’s Persuasion.)

Now let’s try some­thing a lit­tle less common.

Set­ting UP LAMP (just because it’s on my desk at the moment)

Ranks #67,422 and has 19 reviews. There are 9 tags, three peo­ple tagged it lamp and there are 8 oth­er sin­gle­ton tags. All the tags make sense.

Click­ing on the lamp tag gets you… well books on LAMP yes but also a lot of light­ing fix­tures. Two light­ing fix­tures in the top ten and then it lights all the way down to the 27th item. The lists and guides aren’t use­ful. (You can get some help from the tag cloud at the bot­tom of the page though.) The sec­ond tag on the prod­uct page. books-computer-tools leads to a use­ful, though obvi­ous­ly pri­vate­ly mean­ing­ful, list­ing of books that you might want on your desk if you were work­ing with LAMP.

Note that the tag pages have a link to the lists (List­Ma­nia and So You’d Like To…) that have been tagged with your cho­sen term. Though in the first exam­ple (per­sua­sion) four of the five are blunt­ly aimed at becom­ing a bet­ter pick up artist. The two for lamp are a col­lec­tion of Smooth Jazz music and a list of home decor books. Not ready for prime time? Or maybe just bad exam­ple choic­es on my part.

As an aside, I like the new rollovers for the prod­uct pictures

When you’re look­ing at a prod­uct pic­ture on one of the lists — like the tagged items list — you roll over the pic­ture and get a brief descrip­tion of the item includ­ing price and rating.