Did my first volunteer session with SPL. Loved it! I didn’t change the world, but it still makes me really happy when I can show someone something, and I see the gears click together. I showed a gentleman how to find a link on a page, and how he could click on it with the mouse and it would take him to another web page, and how he could keep doing that, clicking on more and more links and it could take him to lots of new places on the web. His eyes lit up a bit as he started to see that bigger picture, and he said, “Well, I’ll be darned!”
How awesome is this!?! Could this ever get old? I doubt it.
However, I need to continue to slog through Metadata reading. The class isn’t quite what I was expecting, but still stuff I’m interested in. Right now it’s hard; this is probably the hardest class I’ve taken so far (but that’s probably because of its structure), but I suspect I like it. :) I think we’re working on the details of larger web efforts that I would like to see realized, even though I’m not totally confident that the semantic web is a realizable goal. In one of my earlier courses, the final class actually, we as a class had a discussion about information on the web. We talked about the potential for tagging and attempted to address the big heaping issue that for some people free is a good price for cataloging work despite the quality, as well as other organizing principles and OPACs and, and, and…. It was all very free form. Anyway, someone talked about how maybe books could be hyperlinked to each other in a catalog to show that they were related, and I said something to the effect of “right now, links are only on or off; either they connect one object to another or they don’t. I would like to know a little more about the nature of those links, why they’re linked, why someone thought they should be linked, and I want to know without having to spend time interpreting the two things to figure it out.” Something like that. In any case, that idea still follows me around (just like my other idea for investigating the rhetoric around resources that are professionally cataloged and resources that are collaboratively cataloged), and I see opportunities for it coming into reality through metadata on the www.
Somewhat related to the subject of rhetoric around organizing information, I saw what might become the library blog video meme du jour. Good stuff! I passed it along to my partner (as it’s so hard to find neat things within our culture and practice that I can take home) and he likes the Digital Ethnography group. He pointed me to Information R/evolution, which I hadn’t seen. I wonder when I can carve out time to look into the rhetoric stuff….
My new, most recent project: origami. Discrete tasks with (relatively) clear directions and a finished product within 20 minutes, as opposed to 10 weeks. And the coolest web resource I’ve found is Origami Club. I’ve been making pumpkins!
