Category Archives: information management

information management

Essential Classification

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Here’s a review of Essential Classification by Vanda Broughton, a core Library Studies textbook and very easy read. It’s a sound introduction to classification – very practical and really aimed at trainee librarians, but included enough background and theory to keep me interested, including some pointers to the biases in the big classification systems. I was also intrigued by the assertion that people find it easier to remember numbers, so numerical shelfmarks are generally more popular than those based on letters. I always thought it was easier to remember letters, because you can make them into little phrases, but perhaps that’s just me!

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information management

Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool

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Estimated reading time 2–3 minutes

Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool is a fabulous plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. It is a bibliography creator/reference manager. It doesn’t take long to download, and gives you a little icon on each page you visit. If you click on the icon, it stores a citation in Zotero. You can collect your links and add notes, and if you use sites with bibliographic information, like Amazon or library sites, it creates a bibliographic record for you. You can then export these in various formats.

I was able to install it, go through the tour and demo, and put together this list of things I have read in the last few months plus create a substantial reading list in a couple of hours with very little typing!

Bowker, G. C., Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. New Ed edn (MIT Press, 2000).

Coulmas, Florian, Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices. (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Ferraro, Gary P., Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective. International Ed edn (Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc, 2007).

Field, Andy, and Graham J Hole, How to Design and Report Experiments. (Sage Publications Ltd, 2003).

Fox, Christopher John, Information and Misinformation: An Investigation of the Notions of Information, Misinformation, Informing and Misinforming. (Greenwood Press, 1983).

Gilchrist, Alan (ed) Taxonomies for Business: Access and Connectivity in a Wired World. (TFPL Publishing, 2000).

Gilchrist, Alan, and Barry Mahon, Information Architecture: Designing Information Environments for Purpose. (Facet Publishing, 2003).

Goddard, Cliff, Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context. (Walter de Gruyter & Co, 2006).

Haynes, David, Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval. (Facet Publishing, 2004).

Haywood, Trevor, Only Connect: Shaping Networks and Knowledge for the New Millennium. (K G Saur Verlag, 1999).

Holmes, Janet, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. 2 edn (Longman, 2001).

Jones, K.Sparck, and Martin Kay, Linguistics and Information Science. (Academic Press Inc.,U.S., 1974).

Keen, Andrew, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007).

Lambe, Patrick, Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness. (Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Ltd, 2007).

Lincoln, Yvonna S., and Egon G. Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry. (Sage Publications, Inc, 1985).

Nielsen, Jakob, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. (Peachpit Press, 2000).

Pickard, Alison Jane, Research Methods in Information. (Facet Publishing, 2007).

Reiss, Eric L., Information Architecture Handbook: A Hands-on Approach to Structuring Successful Websites. (Addison Wesley, 2000).

Yin, Robert, Case Study Research: Design and Methods: 005. Third Edition edn (Sage Publications, Inc, 2003).

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information management

ISKO conference

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

I am very much looking forward to the Tenth International ISKO Conference, which will be held in Montréal, Canada, on August 5-8, 2008. The theme of the conference is Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organisation and the keynote address will be delivered by Jonathan Furner, Associate Professor at UCLA: “Interrogating ‘identity’: A Philosophical Approach to an Enduring Issue in Knowledge Organization”. There is also a workshop session and the famous banquet (I’m glad I’m not doing the seating plan – how do you please everyone when you have to organise experts in organisation?)

I’ve already highlighted The Role of Causality and Conceptual Coherence in Assessments of Similarity by Louise Spiteri; Knowledge Organization in the Cross-cultural and Multicultural Society by Ágnes Hajdu Barát; and Deliberate Bias in Knowledge Organization? by Birger Hjørland, but there are about 60 papers being presented in all.

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information management

Folksonomic tags

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A tag counting experiment – one to add to the growing collection of investigations of folksonomies. The authors claim that over 60% of folksonomic tags are “factual” and therefore ripe for harvesting as metadata. They make no claims as to the accuracy of the tags, although they refer to a previous study that showed that folksonomic tags were more accurate than auto-tagging software. They chose a very specific field – CSS style sheets – but the number crunching is an impressive effort – they claim to have have checked them all! Some typos though.


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information management

Reuters Wants the World To Be Tagged

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged. This article on the ReadWrite Web blog is about the new API (does anyone else pronounce this “appy”?) sent out into the world by Reuters. They are hoping it will encourage tagging of articles in a way they can then harvest. It sounds like it is fairly basic at the moment – it is only recognising a few bits and pieces like people and places. It would be interesting to see how well it does with people like Jack London and places like Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa). When I worked on a similar project we had lots of problems disambiguating the Guineas (Papua New, Equatorial, etc) and Salvadors (El or San) in particular. I assume they have lots of authority files backed up by rules that will sort all those out. It would be nice to see “under the bonnet” as it were!

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