George Peckham-Rooney

I have posted information on upcoming events at the SLA conference hosted by the division in an earlier post and I would highly recommend anyone who is at the conference to check them out. There are some great offering this year on taxonomy development, ontologies etc.

I will probably be posting more about the division events in the upcoming weeks as my tenure moves forward. I also want to note that the division has also recently launched a new website at taxonomy.sla.org that will have information on the division and our upcoming events.

I am happy to take questions on my blog or via twitter (@georgedpr) should anyone have any questions about the division.

Building a digital life is much like sending an astronaut to the moon; there is always some left over debris that is hanging around in orbit. As societal interaction shifts further online there is constant digital debris from old social networking profiles, never used email addresses, and accounts on that not-so-great Web 2.0 service that clutter the experience. There are several steps you can take to help manage your digital life and keep the debris to a minimum. The digital landscape is complicated enough without falling into information overload.

1) Name Control: The first is to own your domain name (e.g. johnsmith.com). This allows you to own your own email address and also maintain your own brand online. As you change blogging services, social networks, book cataloging sites, and other such services you domain name will remain the same. There a myriad amount of domain name registration services available. (I like Hover as they provide domain privacy in their basic registration package.)

2) Email:  Nowadays most people have more than one email address; a personal address and one provided by their workplace at the very minimum. However, there are also old addresses that have since been abandoned or addresses you're only have access to for a limited time (i.e. school address). In either case I would recommend forwarding the email to an active account. ( In relation to the first point several major email providers like Yahoo and Google allow users to set-up your domain name with their service.)

3) Be Selective: Web companies are always developing new services, updating old services, or pivoting old products to target a new market. Maintaining a presence or account on everything can be tiring and can create an information overload. It is best to use services that give you the most return on your investment of time (remember time is not an infinite resource). There are services (like Posterous) which aggregate content across several different services making it easier to post content.

4)Delete: Once a service has become unusable or no longer worth the effort delete your account. 

Lastly, there is always the scorched earth policy, which is to disengage with the digital world entirely: delete all your profiles, log-off email forever, and give up your digital habit. However, while you no longer have to deal with the online world it also removes you entirely from the conversation. It is better to engage on your own limited terms than not at all. The world is only becoming more interconnected.

Working in a large organization brings an information professional larger support and also its own set of problems. Large organizations often employ a centralized document management system (DMS) to manage documents created/used throughout the organization. The goal behind these systems is to help users across the organization share, compare, and documents. However, could these systems actually be make the system worse rather than better? Documents uploaded to the system often use different naming conventions, different administrative metadata, and different versioning conventions. Essentially, even the best DMS system can be a disaster without any care and monitoring.

Large document management systems alone are not a solution. Instead, the organization has to build a culture that weaves together knowledge sharing and collaboration principals alongside deploying the document management system. Users have to be made aware of the larger picture concerning document management and how their work can help others and vice versa. Furthermore, it is important that users enter the metadata for each document correctly or documents run the risk of being lost in the electronic slush pile. While the investment in a “DMS Librarian” could seem daunting having someone whose role it is to tend to fix metadata, help users upload documents correctly, and audit document libraries can pay dividends in the long run. 

It has been my opinion that one of the biggest challenges facing librarianship is a branding issue. (I am hardly the first nor will I be the last the bring-up this topic.) Beyond the portrayals in the media or the impression with the general public librarians often struggle with positioning their role as key to an organization's success. Information is the foundation for any modern endeavor inside and outside the business world. A recent study in First Monday (http://www.firstmonday.org/) by Alison J. Head, Ph.D. and Michael B. Eisenberg, Ph.D (http://bit.ly/qR6zcq) showed that college students searched for information regularly for both school and personal reasons and they spent days often trying to find information to help with major (or not so major life decisions). For the millennial generation and those currently coming of age the search for information is a lifelong pursuit. As average person is faced with an array of information corresponding to any decision they may face. We've progressed beyond information overload to information fatigue. Yet still there seems to be a culture of search amongst many information users and purveyors. However, there may be a time when search fails due to too much information.

A fairly recent article in the Wall Street Journal (http://on.wsj.com/eXgu9A) on change the in YouTube's content strategy shows the importance in curated content alongside search. Don't get me wrong I enjoy search to no-end; being able to place a word/phrase in a text box and have computers in a data center crawl the web for a corresponding match is brilliant. However, it has always struck me that more is not always better than less. There is no variable in a search result to match how much a particular result set meets the user's intention. It can match word for word, but there is no way to match the intention. I would argue for a hybrid approach collect content within a single vertical or gather together particular important/authoritative content. Aid searchers in determining the authority of content and thus help them make their decisions easier.

The title of this post may be idealistic, and sugary, but that’s how I feel about information. That’s the reason that I went to library school; connecting people to information. There is nothing that makes me happier than knowing someone found a book, quote, or online article via a taxonomy I designed or reference help. The nature of the content is irrelevant. Whether the person is looking for War and Peace or the latest Harlequin novel or trying to find a map of the Galapagos Islands the search is the important factor. I believe the search for understanding is a key factor in the human condition. Many actions that seem grounded in the mundane have roots in the search for understanding. Attending school, travel or having a conversation with the stranger all come from a search for understanding. Some could argue how does the latest romance novel help people understand the world? I would respond that the enjoyment of novels might lead to better understanding of oneself or simply give someone an evenings escape so they can better face the next day. Either way the person gains insight into the world.

I ran across a great article recently called the Death of Taxonomies by Theresa Regli over at CMSwatch. I would recommend the article to anyone working/interested in the taxonomy/ontology space. While the title may read like a 1930s headline the article is rather upbeat about the future of taxonomies (and by extension taxonomists).

The automation trend in the information management industry has been building momentum for many years. Data scrappers/manipulators pull data from different sites to aggregate results for several services like Kayak (for travels plans) and Indeed (for jobs). The question continually arises about whether human intervention is actually required for data management or should we simply submit to the machines. I think that neither having a solely human or machine driven system is preferable to a hybrid version. Given certain parameters certain computer programs can successfully maneuver through a site to gather information with better consistency and speed than a single human operator. Though those same rules that allow the program to scrap the data can also mean that it pulls in too much information, too little or simply the wrong data entirely.

For instance, recently I had been tagging photos from a trip to an aquarium. During the process my photo organizing software (iPhoto) runs a facial matching software program to find faces in my pictures and then asks me "Is this Bob?" etc. If the photo is of the person in question then I click "yes" and the software tags the photo with that persons name. This feature is supposed to save me time and let me search through my photos more quickly. Though many times the software is correct there are sometimes when it makes an error by matching the wrong name to face or goes off the deep end completely. While cataloging the photos from the aquarium it pulls up a picture of a seahorse amidst an entire field of corral. Amidst the corral the software has sketched a box and indicates that it believes a face is hidden amongst the corral. The parameters behind the software read the information about the photo as including a face, but in reality it just happened to be a bit of corral that fit the profile. Humans may be less precise and more variable than an auto-tagging program, but they are capable of thinking outside the given parameters. A human being is not bound by those same rules that make the software think a human face is hiding in the corral. That's why a hybrid model works best.