EDUCAUSE | Folksonomies

More on classification

StuartYeates — Tue, 30 May 2006 04:08:46 -0500

When I asked Where's the fight-back from formal classificationists?, Matt pointed me to some very interesting websites, including two at LibraryThing. These projects are great, but they're about bridging the gap between formal classification and folksonomies, rather than shoring up the somewhat dilapidated current state of formal classification.

What I had in mind was a program such as this:

Imagine a theoretical classification scheme, which is still widely used in libraries and would like to be widely used on the Internet. The guiding hands decide that if they are to survive on the Internet they must adapt, to this end they:

Publish a series of elearning modules, to enable a wide variety of users to upgrade their skills with respect to the scheme.
1. first-year students needing to find the recommended reading material for their courses
2. research students looking for peer-review papers
3. librarians looking for professional development
4. software developers looking to use the scheme in their application (more on the later)
5. content creators looking to classify content
6. content consumers looking to classify content
Only the last two classes of user are genuinely new, of course, so much existing content could be migrated initially from the current systems.
Publish the results of these courses in machine readable formats, so users could link back to them.
Change the copyright licence on the text of the scheme to enable third parties to use the materials in information systems.
Work with content creation, storage and distribution systems du jour, to enable them to use the scheme correctly. This is most likely include:
1. encouraging users to learning how to use the scheme correctly (via the courses outlined above)
2. encouraging systems to link to course results, so the automatic systems can check that classifiers have been sufficiently trained.
3. encouraging communities to develop traditions of quality classification. One could imagine a scheme such as slashdot's meta-moderation working very well.
4. linking between systems in meaningful ways.
Technically these could be achieved in a number of ways, including direct participation in the development of the software (particularly easy in the case of open source software), development of libraries to do these things in the languages used by such systems (currently mainly Java, Ruby and PHP).
Focus staff development resources (including elearning modules discussed above) to enable librarians in bricks-and-mortar libraries to meaningfully and usefully answer user questions about finding materials on the Internet by leveraging the fact that the classification scheme which they already have person-years of training with now covers a much larger field.

There are a number of people and groups who see themselves as generating content for the ages (think Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia and some of the better photographers on flickr) and I believe many of these would more than welcome systematic classification scheme. The existence of should a scheme would also solve problems such as representation of foaf:interest in a global context and other interoperability issues which arise in the web 2.0 world when trying to describe real-world concepts without dependence on a particular system.

If such a system did take root successfully, it would be very hard to supplant it, because just as a second classification scheme is of very limited use in a library, a second classification scheme would be of very limited use on the Internet.

An interview with RLG's Merrilee Proffitt

mpasiewicz — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 11:15:00 -0500

In this 20 minute recording, I sit down with Merrilee Proffitt, a program officer in RLG’s Member Programs division. We'll talk about digital preservation and web archival in particular. Among other things, we'll also talk about the ArchiveGrid and potential uses of social software.

Merrilee and a number of others maintain a blog over at hangingtogether.org

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with NYU's Howard Besser

mpasiewicz — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:56:00 -0500

In this 33 minute recording, I sit down with NYU's Howard Besser. Howard is a Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of New York University's Moving Image Archiving & Preservation Program, as well as Senior Scientist for Digital Library Initiatives for NYU's Library.

Among other things, he'll share some thoughts on issues facing distance learning, the importance of archiving the raw materials of research, and issues affecting the development and availability of image databases.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Taggers Take Heart

joeclark — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:49:26 -0600

These days articles about tagging often repeat an image of Monk-like librarians freaking out about the rise of folksonomic classification. One imagines uniformed order-obsessed Gruppen-Kataloguers peering out of a fortress window and muttering about the rabble in the courtyard below. "Zey need our help," one chuckles, leeringly, fondling a weapon.

As satisfyingly as that may reinforce the stereotypes of some commentators, I'm not sure how accurate it is.

Witness a couple of recent blog entries that take an analytical look the tagging phenom and come up with good news:

Academic Commons cites a D-Lib report suggesting folksonomies are more valuable and stable than many believe, and
Blogger Clay Shirky writes a persuasive argument on the failure of ontology in a web-connected world, and why folksonomies might be a better solution to organizing information off the bookshelf.

Both worth a close look.

Make site current without overloading the webmaster

joeclark — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:40:37 -0600

I've recently encountered a couple of cool tools that can help make your site more interactive and current, on a budget, without driving your webmaster insane.

Want to share a reading list with your audience, such as guides for classroom instruction, podcasting, etc.? LibraryThing is yet another social computing tool that lets you catalog books (ones you own or ones you want) online, organize them with tags, and share your reactions with others. It's incredibly easy to add books -- I had been using Amazon's wish list function to keep track of books on my wish list, and LibraryThing imports these! They also have a "bookmarklet" that lets you add any book you find on Amazon to your library list with one click.

Even cooler, they have a "widget" that you can put on any web site featuring random or selected books -- see an example on my RTFM! blog (scroll down, on the right). You could create an organizational account and include "highlighted" among the tags, and then feature that list somewhere on your website. As staff add useful books to the LibraryThing account, you can easily tweak the tags to rotate them into and out of the display.

Relatedly, I found a freeware service -- the RSS Box Viewer -- that lets you easily put an RSS feed on any page. I'm using it on my work homepage to display recent entries in my Educause blog (is this getting recursive enough yet?).

Both of these nicely complement the del.icio.us tagroll -- a great way to share discoveries in online spaces, e.g. journal articles on instructional tech -- as well as tag clouds, which provide an alternative cognitive map of information or interests for site visitors (see examples of both at jsclark.net).

One of the best things about all of these things is that once you set the feeds up, they update automatically. Call 'em textcasts. :-)

eSchool News article on educational applications of Tagging

joeclark — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 08:55:05 -0600

Though I don't think it uses the word "folksonomy" anywhere, this article in eSchool News contains -- if you can wade through the gee-whiz style -- a couple of neat ideas for application of tagging tools in the classroom. The examples are provided by K-12 educators but could easily be adapted to any instructional context.

University of Michigan President comments on Google ...

mpasiewicz — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:54:00 -0600

C|NET has a nine and a half minute video of Mary Sue Coleman speaking about their library digitization project.
http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6036176.html

The transcript of her speech is available her:
http://www.umich.edu/pres/speeches/060206google.html

An Interview with the Internet Scout Project's Rachael Bower

mpasiewicz — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 15:19:00 -0600

In this 19 minute recording, we'll hear from Rachael Bower, Co-Director of the Internet Scout Project. Join us as she share some thoughts on the project, their CWIS offering, their work with the Applied Math and Science Education Repository, and more!

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with ALA's Rick Weingarten

mpasiewicz — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 16:44:00 -0600

In this 32 minute recording, I join Rick Weingarten, Director of the ALA's Office of IT Policy, for a look inside the beltway. Join us as he shares a brief bit of background about the American Library Association and a fairly interesting discussion about privacy, the google print litigation, and internet governance.

Also of interest could be ACRL's blog entry noting a number of higher ed associations have released a guide to copyright. Oh, and don't forget resources from our own policy office ;)

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with NYPL's Barbara Taranto

mpasiewicz — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 11:53:00 -0600

In this 28 minute recording, I sit down with New York Public Library's Digital Library Program Director, Barbara Taranto. Listen in as she compares the work of academic and public libraries, shares her views on social software and the incorporation of technology in the academic enterprise, discusses public and academic library partnerships, disaster recovery/business continuity, google print, and much more.

Those interested in this podcast might also find interest in Lorcan Dempsey's recent blog entry entitled Circulating intentional data.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org