magpie's shiny things

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.