September 26, 2011 4:46 am
Published by Fran
I thoroughly enjoyed the third biennial International UDC Consortium seminar at the National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, last Monday and Tuesday. The UDC conference website includes the full programme and slides and the proceedings have been published by Ergon Verlag. This is a first of a series of posts covering the conference. Aida Slavic, UDC editor-in-chief, opened the conference by pointing out that classification is supposed to be an ordered place, but systems and study of it are difficult and complex. We still lack terminology to express and discuss our work clearly. There is now an obvious need... Read more »
September 12, 2011 5:12 am
Published by Fran
Semantic enrichment Guy Maréchal continued the Linked Data theme by talking in more detail about how flat data models can be semantically enriched. He pointed out that if you have good structured catalogue records, it takes very little effort to give concepts URIs and to export this data as sets of relationships. This turns your database into a graph, ready for semantic search and querying. He argued that “going to semantics cannot be avoided” and that “born digital” works will increasingly be created with semantically modelled metadata. From Mass Digitisation to Mass Content Enrichment The next talk was a description... Read more »
September 9, 2011 6:01 am
Published by Fran
Kevin Bradley, IASA president, gave the welcome address to the 42nd IASA annual conference. He characterised the digital revolution as one that will continue reverberating for years. He reminded us that it is not always easy to sort the sense from the nonsense and that we are often surprised by what turns out to be valid and how easy it is not to see the wood for the trees – or perhaps to “lose the word to the bits”, or the “picture to the pixels”. Keynote address – on Linked Open Data The keynote speech was given by Ute Schwens,... Read more »
September 4, 2011 2:48 pm
Published by Fran
I was delighted to be invited by Simon Rooks, Multimedia Archivist at the BBC, to talk to the Organizing Knowledge Taskforce of IASA (International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives) about Linked Data and the Semantic Web. As someone from the content rather than the technical side, I focussed on introducing the basic concepts and trying to encourage people to think creatively about their data. I go to a lot of talks described as introductions to Linked and Open Data that are actually rather technical and even if they focus on projects, they tend to assume there are a lot... Read more »
August 29, 2011 11:41 am
Published by Fran
There aren’t many books on taxonomies, so it is good to have another on the shelf. Darin L Stewart‘s book is based on a series of lectures and provides a good introduction to key topics. As a format, that means you can pick the sections that are relevant to you. It has a very American student textbook tone, with pop quotes and definitions of key concepts in information science (e.g. precision and recall), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful refresher for professionals. I particularly enjoyed the sections on XML, RDF, and ontologies as most of the coverage of... Read more »
August 21, 2011 7:37 am
Published by Fran
Last Wednesday evening I attend my first “Knowledge Café” hosted by David Gurteen. I have heard a lot about these cafés at various information events and so was pleased to finally be able to attend one in person. The idea appears to be twofold – firstly that knowledge and information professionals can find out what such cafés are for and how to run them and secondly simply to participate in them for their own sake.The “meta-ness” of the theme – conversations about conversation – appealed to me. (I’ve always like metacognition – essentially thinking about thinking, too). We had plenty... Read more »
July 11, 2011 2:49 pm
Published by Fran
I very much enjoyed attending and speaking at the second biennial ISKO UK conference – Facets of Knowledge Organization – A tribute to Professor Brian C. Vickery (1918-2009) – last week. I have written a review of the conference for the ISKO UK blog.
July 3, 2011 1:07 pm
Published by Fran
I was asked to write about privacy for Information Today Europe. In under 1,000 words it is not easy to cover such a huge topic, so I tried to take a bird’s eye view and put just a few of the issues into a broad context. Most people focus on quite a narrow angle – for example information security, or libel cases – but the topic covers far wider socio-cultural issues. From hacking, to government surveillance, to Facebook as a marketing tool, to family logins for online services, to personalisation, and even neuroscience, what is known about us and who... Read more »
June 29, 2011 7:51 am
Published by Fran
Sustaining your DAM Sara Winmill from the V&A talked about the huge shifts in mindset that were needed to accompany their DAM work. They needed to stop thinking about storing pictures of things and start thinking about managing those digital images as the things. Their needs for storage were vastly underestimated at first. Unlike the myth, storage is not so cheap – the V&A need some £330K for storage annually. They have been investigating innovative approaches to “backup bartering” – finding a similar organisation and storing a copy of each other’s data, so that the backups exist offsite but without... Read more »
June 28, 2011 8:27 am
Published by Fran
Serco Artemis Digital – Realising the Value of Archives and Rehabilitating Prisoners Bruce Hellman from Serco described the work they have been doing to employ prisoners as cataloguers and transcribers. The work, which varied from project to project, but which included typing up handwritten archival documents that were not suitable for OCR capture techniques and adding metadata, was very popular with prisoners. Bruce argued that it gave them a chance to develop skills that would be useful in the workplace on their release, and allowed organisations to get work done more cheaply than by paying standard market rates. How Metadata... Read more »