libraria miscellanea

Metadata is commonly defined as "data about data." This seemed like an esoteric term to me until I read two articles that helped clear things up a bit. Metadata is used in library settings as surrogate records, of sorts, so people can pull up the item in the catalog and view information about it without looking at the actual item. Very helpful! Electronic articles have metadata created for them so they can be searched for and downloaded using Ebsco or a similar database. Also very helpful! Internet information has Google to rank the information for us, using algorithms , not metadata. The algorithms search the entire piece of information, not just metadata tags, according to Dawson and Hamilton. They remind the reader that Lynch (2001) states that it is really easy to "manipulate the behavior of retrieval systems that use it, rather than simply describing the documents or other digital objects it may be associated with." Trolls are everywhere! I always wond...

Guinea pigs and digital libraries I love being a guinea pig for other people’s experiments. Especially the helpful ones. I have an on-again-off-again fascination with doing personality assessments, such as the Briggs-Meyers or the Kiersey temperament sorter (by the way, I’m an ENFJ and Counselor Idealist, respectively). (about five minutes later, I am back to writing and have just re-taken the Kiersey Temperament Sorter…) I just finished reading two articles about studying users in the digital library by Judy Jeng, and Ferreria and Pithan. Both state that user satisfaction is key to success in searching for information, ala Carol Kuhlthau , who was innovative in her research on this topic. Satisfaction in anything a person does plays a huge role in whether or not said tasks are accomplished, with what level of success, and what toll it takes on said person. But heck, this principle should be applied to all areas of life! I shall take this research to my boss...

I like Wikipedia ; "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," claims as listed on the homepage. If I have no idea what someone is talking about, such as a new "buzzword," I go immediately to wikipedia.org. Why? If it is happening now, especially if it's popular, there will be a wikipedia entry. Do I view it as the absolute source for information? Of course not. My seven-year-old neighbor could have written the entry. Or a tenured professor from Rutgers or Yale. I have no idea, but I do know that many people have checked it out, edited it, re-edited it, etc. and I will get a rough idea about what I need to know. According to Jaron Lanier, Edge writer and "digital visionary," this web entity is dangerous, just like Facism or "Maoism" (as the article title suggests, "Digital Maosim") because of the concept of what he calls the "hive mind." Think of bees, right? All these people out there in digital land are anony...

When I first tried to read the selections for the subject of this blog, I got weighted by all the research jargon. So I switched the order of the readings, and presto, I actually understood something. First impressions are important, no doubt about that. I hate to think that I'm going to meet someone for the first time on those days when I roll out of bed on those mornings which follow a night of over-indulgence: too bad. Sometimes a first impression is all you get. So, for a library to make a good one, especially to the online world, seems paramount to its' existence and flourishment. Lingaard, et al write that 50 milliseconds is all it takes for a web user to evalute the appeal of a web page in Attention Web Designers, (Lingaard 2006, 115). Apparently we are hard wired to respond emotionally much quicker than our ration works. I'm thinking of Ralph Kramden shouting, "One of these days!" or George Costanza yelling, "George is gettin' angry!"...