Organization Monkey

i’ve been working on an article that is meant to guide digital collection developers to consider particular aspects of how he/she intends the collection to be used, in order to choose an appropriate metadata schema.  i’ve seen in real life, and heard stories about, how a collection gets rolling, gets digitized, and then gets to the metadata stage without a real plan of which elements are important.  the guide is a series of nine questions to help the developer consider practical things, like, “who is your user?”  clarifying potential users (and uses) of a digital collection will guide a developer to identify key elements that the user will employ in a search of the collection, and those elements can play a dominant role in the schema that is ultimately chosen.  an example: if the collection is designed for history majors, who are very concerned about when things happened, it would be appropriate to include at least one date element in the schema, with a standardized way of entering the date information.

so, all you metadata experts out there, is there any one aspect of schema creation that you think a collection developer has to identify before choosing a schema?  leave a comment.

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i think it’s creepy that the cadaver calculator is hosted on a singles dating website, but i suppose it can be an ice breaker! find out how much your body is worth when you’re dead: http://mingle2.com/cadaver-calculator

thanks for pointing me to this, scienceblogs: medicine!

my boss has been away from the office for a few weeks and has amassed a pile of mail.  i thought it would be nice for her if she returned and found it organized, making it quicker for her to sort through.  so i made three piles: a pile of adverts; a pile of routed journals; and a pile of must-see-first items, like invoices and personal notes.  i was so pleased with myself as i finished the job, and then it dawned on me that i had JUST ORGANIZED THE MAIL.

simpsonize me

as i mentioned yesterday, the task force on social networking software i’m on is posting its first survey. if you’re a member of the medical library association, please consider participating. the online survey may be found at http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB226QBA8H8DF .

the phrase “web 2.0″ is still mysterious to some, but i like to think of it as “taking back the web.” since the dot.com bust, the internet has been being rebuilt as a friendlier place, a social place, where the exchange of ideas and innovations aren’t necessarily tied to money-making ventures. all kinds of tools to assist communication via the web are being constructed. indeed, it is a very exciting time to be involved in the business of information exchange. i am pleased to be a member of a new task force for the medical library association, the “task force on social networking software,” created by the incoming president, mark funk. i’ll be posting here along the way, while the task force (the sntf, if you’re part of the in-crowd {p.s. if you’re reading this post, you’re officially part of the in-crowd}) determines how best to harness these social tools for use by the medical library community. we’ll be posting surveys and generally taking the pulse of how our community is using existing social tools. stay tuned, and feel free to leave comments.