Organization Monkey

“incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result” -Merriam-Webster online

practical example: the OPEN Government Act of 2007 cannot be scheduled for a vote due to a secret hold.

i’m working on an article about assigning metadata and happened upon the old corey doctorow comment, “metacrap.” i bump into this work every once in a while when googling something metadata-ish. it’s a humorous piece in which doctorow points out some obvious flaws in assigning metadata, such as “people are lazy,” and don’t provide quality metadata, and “people are stupid,” noting that even when people have good reasons to assign accurate terminology, they don’t. i’ve chuckled over this and moved on, but today something about it stuck out to me:

Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas.

And that’s just not right.

i agree with his argument that people may disagree on how to describe something, but we’ve got schemas now that accommodate varying opinions (hello, repeatable fields!). i think metadata creators are making great strides in promoting heterogeneity. there are some very flexible schemas out there (dublin core, i’m looking at you) that provide a simple backbone to which a variety of elements and vocabularies may be attached.

jeff pomerantz’s blog pointed me to a site called tagcrowd. i pasted in the text of my forthcoming chapter, The impact of locally developed electronic resource management systems (in the book Electronic Resource Management in Libraries: Research and Practice). Here is the resulting cloud, which identifies the big concepts by their frequency of use:

academic (8) access (21) acquisitions (30) addition (7) administrative (14) agreements (15) angeles (6) assistance (6) available (14) began (9) catalog (10) cd (8) collection (8) communication (11) computer (6) consortium (8) constructed (14) core (7) created (12) data (24) database (7) defined (8) department (18) designed (17) developed (40) different (6) digital (19) discussed (6) discussion (6) display (6) dublin (7) electronic (96) elements (14) erdb (8) erlic (10) feature (6) federation (12) focus (7) format (6) functions (7) gold (8) group (13) hermes (8) identifies (6) information (34) initiative (15) institutions (14) jewell (15) language (11) librarians (15) library (78) license (36) lists (7) locally (15) management (67) materials (10) member (10) metadata (14) modules (8) needs (12) open (6) order (10) outside (12) particular (7) patrons (7) process (11) program (13) psu (7) public (15) publisher (7) purchase (15) record (6) related (6) report (12) required (8) resource (135) result (7) rights (11) rush (8) search (10) services (7) shared (8) software (10) staff (30) stakeholders (6) standardized (9) successful (10) systems (46) title (6) tools (17) track (7) university (29) used (8) users (9) vendors (20) vera (11) view (13) web (9) workflow (9) working (9)

created at TagCrowd.com

i came across an inventive website a while ago called “colourlovers”. it’s an interactive space where people that work with or enjoy thinking about color can write about it. it’s creative as well, and allows registered users (lovers?) to create their own color palettes, which users can then name. i grabbed an rss feed from them and find that i keep saving the postings in my bloglines account so that i can think about them over time.

here’s a link to their site, to someone’s thoughts on color in philadelphia, appropriate for us medical librarians that are just back from that city for the annual conference.

i presented some research results during a poster session at the recent medical library association conference in philadelphia. mla has linked to a pdf of the poster: http://www.mlanet.org/am/am2007/e-present/20070520_03_kennedy.pdf

poster title: is our cd/dvd collection worth all this? a cost-per-use analysis of accompanying materials.

those viewing the poster seemed very interested in the decision tree we developed to help us determine if we could keep the cd/dvd in the text, based on the language of the license agreement. you can see a tiny version of the decision tree on the pdf, but may be interested in viewing it in the context of the research design and results in an upcoming publication in the journal of academic librarianship, september 2007.

1. review cdwa-lite
2. take survey on said schema to offer feedback and suggestions
3. grill a hotdog
4. drink a beer

it is a long weekend due to the memorial day holiday, after all.