June 27, 2011 11:57 am
Published by Fran
I enjoyed DAM EU – a Henry Stewart Event – last Friday and was particularly struck by the range of projects, the variety of approaches, and the diversity of industries represented. Sponsors included Capture, Kit Digital, and iBrams. I will publish a series of posts over the next few days to cover the event, session by session. It has also been written up by Michael Wells. The Art and Practice of Managing Digital Media The conference was chaired and opened by David Lipsey, who has a distinguished career in Digital Asset Management (DAM). He introduced the day by talking about... Read more »
June 25, 2011 7:51 am
Published by Fran
Catching up on my reading, I found this post by Jonah Bossewitch: Pick a Corpus, Any Corpus and was particularly struck by his clear articulation of the growing information gulf between organizations and individuals. I have since been thinking about the contrast between our localised knowledge organization systems and the semantic super-trawlers of the information oceans that are only affordable – let alone accessible – to the megawealthy. It is hard not to see this as a huge disempowerment of ordinary people, swamping the democratizing promise of the web as a connector of individuals. The theme has also cropped up... Read more »
June 8, 2011 10:19 am
Published by Fran
Back in 1995 my brother wrote his MA dissertation on copyright: Of Cows and Calves: An Analysis of Copyright and Authorship (with Implications for Future Developments in Communications Media) or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Home-Taping. It is interesting how relevant it remains today, especially in the light of the Hargreaves Report delivered to the government in May. Essentially, nothing much has changed in the intervening 16 years. My brother reflected the predictions of the profound changes that digital technologies would make – and were already making – to the creative industries. Although details such as the... Read more »
May 25, 2011 1:28 pm
Published by Fran
Rather late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to reading The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden. I have to confess to bias as I was very pleased to see that my FUMSI article on folksonomies was mentioned in the recommended reading section. Written in a clear, sensible and readable tone, Hedden gives a very thorough overview of practical taxonomy work. The book works as a textbook, but reads pleasantly and although I anticipate referring to it as a reference resource, I enjoyed reading it chapter by chapter. I am very pleased to have so much... Read more »
April 14, 2011 4:39 pm
Published by Fran
Public Access to Information? Challenges for Information Gatekeepers was a joint event between ISKO UK and Taxonomies in the Public Sector (TiPS). I have written a review of it for the ISKO UK blog.
March 6, 2011 8:14 am
Published by Fran
I very much enjoyed the UKAD UK Archives Discovery Forum event at the National Archives. There were three tracks as well as plenary sessions, so I couldn’t attend everything. Linked Data and archives After an introduction from Oliver Morley, John Sheridan opened by talking about the National Archives and Linked Data. Although not as detailed as the talk he gave at the Online Information Conference last December, he still gave the rallying call for opening up data and spoke of a “new breed” of IT professionals who put the emphasis on the I rather than the T. He spoke about... Read more »
February 7, 2011 6:49 am
Published by Fran
I enjoyed this blog post: On Serendipity. Ironically, it was recommended to me, and I am now recommending it! Serendipity is rarely of use to the asset manager, who wants to find exactly what they expect to find, but is a delight for the consumer or leisure searcher. People sometimes cite serendipity as a being a reason to abandon classification, but in my experience classification often enhances serendipity and can be lost in simple online search systems. For example, when browsing an alphabetically ordered collection in print, such as an encyclopedia or dictionary, you just can’t help noticing the entries... Read more »
January 27, 2011 2:31 pm
Published by Fran
I met Rob Wilson of RCWS consulting at the DAM London conference last summer, where he talked about digital identifiers. He has long career working on information architecture for range of organisations and industry standards bodies, including the ultimately doomed e-GMS project, which was an attempt to unify government metadata standards for sharing and interoperability. Identifiers are a hot topic at the moment, and so I was pleased Rob was willing to talk to me and some of my colleagues about some of the problems and attempts at solving them in the wider industry. Rob described the need for stable... Read more »
January 21, 2011 6:26 am
Published by Fran
Managing content in a mobile world On Day 3, I decided to try the “Mobile content” track. The speakers were Alan Pelz Sharpe from The Real Story Group, Russell Reeder from Libre Digital and Dave Kellogg from MarkLogic. Augmented reality is one of my pet topics, so I was pleased to hear the speakers confirm it is all about data and meaning. It is just one aspect of how consumers want more and more data and information presented to them without delay on smaller and simpler devices. However, this means a greater need for metadata and more work for usability... Read more »
January 14, 2011 1:18 pm
Published by Fran
I was very flattered to be asked by FUMSI to provide a summary of my review of the latest ISKO UK event – Legal Know-How Event: Organization & Semantic Analysis.