Author Archives: lara

Steven Hannah’s Sorting Out Card Sorting isn’t real­ly about card sort­ing. It’s an exam­ple of using a par­tic­u­lar method­oloy to do aca­d­e­m­ic lit­er­a­ture review and then a pro­pos­al for cre­at­ing a tool that can be used to aug­ment and extend the knowl­edge dis­cov­ered dur­ing the review. But even if the phras­es ground­ed the­o­ry and constant … 

Continue read­ing “TQR — Sorting Out Card Sorting”

During a recent slog up tread­mill hill I read through Wm. Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It on the Web. I feel bet­ter now. After my grad school deja vu expe­ri­ence with Simplified Facet Classification I was despair­ing of ever being able to bring facets to the mass­es. Or in my … 

Continue read­ing “More on Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web”

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 … 

Continue read­ing “TQR — Introductory Tutorial on Thesaurus Construction”

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 … 

Continue read­ing “TQR- Berry Picking Time (with apolo­gies to both Ms. Bates and Great Big Sea)”

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 … 

Continue read­ing “Semantic Zooming, Oh, I Thought You Said Semantic Zoning.”