From BoingBoing comes this hilarious set of Amazon reviews of $500 audio cables from Denon. Best of all, BoingBoing points to the tags people have associated with the cables.

Oh, market conversations! What claims and brands won’t you take apart?

[Tags: market_conversations denon everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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From Slashdot:

“At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had ‘clearly won.’ The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision.”

Of course, Open Document Format winning isn’t exactly the same as OOXML — the 6,000 page standard Microsoft pushed through ISO — losing. Slashdot commentators are right to be plenty skeptical. Still, this is a good thing since it opens a practical path to document interoperability in a public, open format. [Tags: odf ooxml microsoft standards ]

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Andrew Hinton has posted the annotated slides of his talk at the Information Architecture Summit. While it ultimately is aimed at IA’s who are struggling with their profession’s identity (i.e., all IA’s), Andrew’s talk is quite broad and fundamental, and also engaging and creative. Well worth the read. [Tags: ia iasummit2008 andrew_hinton information ]

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I’ve lived in Boston since 1986, but have never made it into the great Boston Public Library. Until today. My streak was totally broken because the little group digitizing the BPL’s holdings invited me in to see what they’re doing. And, oy, the work they have cut out for them!

But they’re an intrepid band. And they recognize that they’re up to something important. Although some in the BPL may have thought that digitized prints and photos are just lesser-qualities backups, the group knows that they’re not only bringing hidden images into the public sun, they are engaged in a social project that changes how and what we know. (What’s not to love about librarians?)

The Print Stack, where photos, prints and miscellaneous other objects are stored, only seems to be in the basement. The ceiling is low, there are no windows, and the lighting leaches vitamin D out of your body. It’s long and overflowing, reminiscent of the warehouse that ends Citizen Kane, and that is echoed in two Indiana Jones movies.

If you want to find a particular image in the roughly two million prints and images (no one knows for sure), you ask Aaron. Some bits and portions have catalogs of various sorts, but overall, it’s a disarray of metadata. For example, the Herald Traveler collection of photos has about 1.2 million pieces, arranged in 104 cabinets, each with four drawers. The folders and drawers are labeled, which helps a lot, but they’re not indexed, much less cross-indexed.

Herald Traveler collection

At least those photos have captions. Aaron shows me some beautiful 19th century photographs of Indian architecture. Many years ago, the BPL went to enormous trouble to paste the photos into multiple volumes — turning the photos into a book, as Aaron points out — but didn’t bother to record the notes on the back of the photos. Aaron is now going to have to dissolve the pages to expose the notes.

Aaron holds up a degraded negative.
A dirigible is barely visible on it.
Tough reclamation project.

The archive doesn’t just have pictures and prints. It’s got, well, everything, including a couple of old typewriters and a collection of matchbook covers from Boston restaurants.

Boston matchbook cover collection

Of this abundance, the digital group has so far scanned about 24,000 objects. When I point out to Maura Marx, the group’s head, that, given the library’s estimate that it has maybe 23 million objects, she’s looking at a 2,000 year project, she tells me that they’re just getting started. They’re going to bulk up, maybe do some offsite digitizing, and begin to make some serious progress. When I ask Thomas Blake, who does the actual digitizing, how he decides which stuff to do, he laughs a little and says, “What I think is cool.” And, since the public has an appetite for “choochoo trains, maps and postcards,” he’s done a bunch of them. The BPL is, after all, a public institution that both serves the public and relies upon the public’s support.

The Library has been posting digitized works at Flickr. Take a look at the 19th century photos of Egypt, or, yes, the postcards And the book fetishists among you should definitely check out the “Art of the Book” collection. Predictably and hearteningly, the public — you and me, sister — have been commenting and adding to what’s known. Maura hopes to get permission to put the images into the Commons. Digitizing and posting — “scan and release,” in the group’s memorable way of putting its mission — turns patrons into historians.

The scanning is slow because it’s one guy who’s doing a careful job. The camera has a 22 megapixel chip, but they’ve been known to digitize at 88mps, creating files that are half a gig in size. Tom likes saving the RAW files to avoid unnecessary data loss. You never know what’s going to be useful. For example, he had been scanning postcards at 300 dpi, but a curator pointed out that then you couldn’t see the dotscreen pattern, which might be of interest to someone. So now Tom scans them at 600dpi. Overall, they have about 1.5 terabytes of stored images.

The metadata is a whole ‘nother issue. Chrissy Watkins, who has been there for four days — she had been at the JFK Presidential Library — is working on it. For now, Tom gives every item an arbitrary and unique ID number, the key piece of any metadata scheme. But the BPL is facing the inevitable conundrum: Maximize the metadata but slow the process, or gather less metadata but go at a far faster clip. The group seems to be leaning toward the latter, which makes sense to me. They’ve been using what Tom calls the “Curator Core,” a reference to the Dublin Core metadata standard for books. Trying to capture everything that might be useful is a task beyond daunting. For example, Michael Klein points to “fore-edge paintings,” paintings done on the edges of a book that are revealed when you fan the book slightly. Does the BPL have to come up with a standard that includes whether you fan the book to the left or right? There are so many different types of objects that building a standard or an ontology that captures them all would absorb all of the team’s time. (”The special case is not as special as you’d think,” says Michael.) Instead, they need to scan scan scan, and capture some reasonable set of metadata, to which more metadata can accrete.

One of the ten Open Content Alliance book scanners.

“We’re going from collect and hide to scan and release,” says Tom. And in so doing, the until-now unpublished holdings are going not just from no value to some value. The digital group is in fact radically multiplying the value of the Boston Public Library’s holdings. And as we the recipients of this gift incorporate the images, adding information to them, and contextualizing them, we are further enriching the holdings, far beyond what any small group, no matter how intrepid, could manage.
[Tags: libraries bpl metadata oca archives everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Science Commons, in its relentless drive for product line expansion (I kid because I love), has posted a white paper proposing a Health Commons. In it, the authors, Marty Tenenbaum and John Wilbanks, lay out the problems and suggest a solution.

They write:

We are no longer asking whether a gene or a molecule is critical to a particular biological process; rather, we are discovering whole networks of molecular and cellular interactions that contribute to disease. And soon, we will have such information about individuals, rather than the population as a whole. Biomedical knowledge is exploding, and yet the system to capture that knowledge and translate it into saving human lives still relies on an antiquated and risky strategy of focusing the vast resources of a few pharmaceutical companies on just a handful of disease targets.

After citing more problems with the current system, the authors propose a Health Commons:

Imagine a virtual marketplace or ecosystem where participants share data, knowledge, materials and services to accelerate research. The components might include databases on the results of chemical assays, toxicity screens, and clinical trials; libraries of drugs and chemical compounds; repositories of biological materials (tissue samples, cell lines, molecules), computational models predicting drug efficacies or side effects, and contract services for high- throughput genomics and proteomics, combinatorial drug screening, animal testing, biostatistics, and more. The resources offered through the Commons might not necessarily be free, though many could be. However, all would be available under standard pre-negotiated terms and conditions and with standardized data formats that eliminate the debilitating delays, legal wrangling and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scientific collaboration today.

The paper emphasizes the need for metadata standards: “Providing such standards, Heath Commons improves and extends the public domain by
integrating hundreds of public databases into a single framework…” The Commons also provides the needed “social and legal infrastructure,” and a portal that provides the right set of services.

They hope that by lowering research costs, some of the 5,000 tropical diseases currently “uneconomical to address,” for example, will become the target of pharmaceutical R&D. “Health Commons makes it cost effective for small groups of researchers to conduct industrial scale R&D on rare diseases by exploiting the economies of scale afforded by an ecosystem of shared knowledge…”

The authors see the benefits going beyond the Commons’ value to non-profits. “Every pharmaceutical company sits on a wealth of promising targets and leads that they won’t develop themselves.”

The Health Commons could be a huge step forward. But it will take some work. “To realize the full potential, existing companies need to rethink their business models to leverage the commons.” As an example, the paper points out that “Only six out of the 1800 biotechnology companies funded since 1980 have made more money than was cumulatively invested in them.” Rather than counting striking it rich with proprietary drugs discovered via proprietary R&D platforms, perhaps companies could profit by opening up their platforms and taking a cut of any drugs discovered with them.

Finally, Health Commons will provide a way to continuously publish research, along with comments, to supplement the traditional publishing model.

Health Commons can and should be a big deal. It requires lots of pieces coming together over time, but its acknowledgment of the role of profit is encouraging, and it is in the hands of serious, committed, and wickedly smart people. [Tags: health science science_commons health_commons pharma everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I’m about to run for an airport (this is probably the single phrase I utter the most in the course of a month, alas), so I only had time to take a quick look at Libguides, but it looks very interesting. It aims to let librarians (and others) share their wisdom and insight, while engaging the community of readers. Interesting! (Thanks to Karen Schneider for the link, via a tweet. And, congratulations to Karen on her new job!)

[Tags: libraries metadata expertise everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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That’s the apt title of a post by ZA3038 that provides an interesting overview of the Open Archives Initiative, about which I know, um, let’s see, carry the one…embarrassingly nothing:

At its core, the OAI promotes interoperability between different systems by supplying a rigorous set of standards that facilitate the sharing of digital information.

The post says “the original and continued focus of the OAI is on…research and journal articles.” Why hasn’t it caught on? ZA3038 suggests a few reasons. It seems like a reasonable consideration of an interesting metadata-based aggregation service.

[Tags: open_archives_initiative oai metadata open_access ]

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ISO’s taking over of Microsoft’s 8,000 page specification of the “open” standard based on Word’s document model has been slashdotted with typical, um, vigor.

[Tags: ooxml standards iso microsoft odf ]

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A librarians’ group is meeting today at the Berkman Center to talk about the future of libraries. Gene Koo, Jake Shapiro, and Melanie
Dulong de Rosnay, all of the Berkman.

I’m supposed to give a discussion-opener later this afternoon. Here are the notes of what I’m thinking of saying:

- Two themes
   - metadata over content
   - socializing of knowledge

- Knowledge as content
   - K was a quality of a belief
   - Became content esp. with books
      - Good fit because K was believed to be universal, single and eternal - permanence of books
         - Christian belief in a single universal truth
   - Books created:
      - topics as self-contained
      - experts as containers

- Web/Net
   - Primary characteristic: Abundance
      - Abundance of good is scarier than abundance of crap
      - Web invented to deal with abundance by giving us links…gives human-mediated shape to the endless sea
   - Links destroy container model
   - Web as social realm leads to socialization of K

- Socialization of K is all about metadata
   - e.g., this is worth reading, this is wrong, this connects to that
   - Paper-based metadata throws out info
      - Digital includes it all
      - Means that in general we get good enough info (but is that good enough?)
   - What does this mean for digital libraries?
      - Library is all metadata
      - distributed content
      - Place for expert and social knowing

Question: Digital libraries have nothing in common with libraries?

(Pardon the compressed form. These are my notes.) [Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Here are photos of an actual IT protest demonstration in Norway. How often do you see that? (Answer: This is the second IT protest demonstration in Norway’s history.)

Steve Pepper, Chairman of the Norwegian ISO committee since 1995, gave a speech that explains why standard document formats are important and why the adoption of Microsoft’s specification — OOXML — as an ISO standard was a bad mistake. There’s also bloggage here, which links to a podcast I have not yet listened to.

Steve has stepped down as chair of the Standard Norway committee in protest of the overall committee’s process. Steve told me about what happened when we had dinner in Oslo last week. It sounds pretty gruesome.

Says Steve, 80% of the committee was apparently against changing Norway’s vote from No to Yes, but that wasn’t close enough to consensus, so everyone had to leave the room except for three administrators and four technical experts, the latter conveniently chosen to get the balance down to 50-50. When there still wasn’t consensus (surprise, surprise), the experts were dismissed and the Vice President of Standard Norway just decided the way he wanted.

Steve believes the 8,000 page spec (!) should not have been “fast-tracked,” and that ISO voted in favor of the Microsoft spec in part because it didn’t want to leave it in the hands of Ecma (a semi-competing standards body). Yet, OOXML is pretty much nothing but Word’s document model with a whole bunch of angle brackets added…overly complex and too tied to Word’s peculiar capabilities. Meanwhile, we have a truly open and well-worked out document standard in ODF. (Get yer copy of Open Office here — it’s free and it works real good.)

This matters a lot, for two basic reasons. First, the world runs on documents so we want to be able to interchange them without even having to think about which application made them. Having two standards vitiates much of the point of having a standard. Second, OOXML is so tied to Word that having it be an official ISO standard gives one vendor (guess which) a market advantage that truly open standards should take away: You should be able to pick the word processor you want based on its features and feel, without having to worry if using it will lock your documents out of the worldwide market of ideas and information.

Steve tells me that the battle to reverse the Norwegian decision is continuing, and he urges that irregularities in other countries be similarly investigated. [Tags: ooxml steve_pepper norway iso ecma microsoft standards]

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Steve Pepper begins by talking about Vannevar Bush, whose influence on the Web has been profound. Bush was concerned with finding info, says Steve. His aim was to model how we find info on how the human mind works, i.e., by association. But, says Steve, Bush’s memex revolved entirely around documents, which is not how we think. [Caution: Live-blogging!]

Documents are about subjects. Subjects exist as concepts in our brains. They’re connected by a network of associations. Docs are how we happen to capture and communicate ideas. “Hypertext has been barking up the wrong tree” ever since the memex. (Steve then couches this more softly, acknowledging how much he loves the Web, etc.) We should be organizing information around topics/subjects, not around documents.

Why? Because topic maps reflect how we think. That’s why topic maps are ideal fo web sites. They’re subject-based associative. See topicmaps.com.

Steve counters the impression that topic maps are a portal technology. They were invented in 1991, before the Web. They “just turned out to be ideal for the purpose.” Until recently, they were mainly used for portals, but now they’re used increasingly to represent domains of knowledge. TMs are bigger than Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO), for knowledge has a context. The concept of scope enables the rexpression of contextual validity, enabling multiple viewpoints. This makes topic maps more than a simple semantic tech. Semantics are decontextualized meaning, whereas pragmatics is contextuaiized meaning. See www.hoyre.no

Merging “is the single most powerful feature of topic maps.” Merging was the original motivation for topic maps, merging multiple indexes. It enables a “global knowledge federation.” You can arbitrarily merge any two topic maps. That can’t be done with relational databases or XML documents. But how to make it useful? It vcan’t be done by relying on names since every subject has multiple names, says Steve. The only solution for computers is identifiers. A topic in a topic map is a symbol that represents something in the real world, says Steve. He quotes the ISO definition: “A subject is any ‘thing’ whatsoever, whether or not it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means whatsoever.”

Meaning is expressed through the relationship between the representation and that to which it refers. Subject identifiers are central to topic maps. For example, which Steve Pepper wrote the letter of protest to the ISO committee? There’s a Steve Pepper in NJ who has a CD called “The Information Age.” But if you look at the metadata on the PDF of Steve’s letter, there’s a URI that describes Steve. This allows humans to disambiguate. At the moment there’s no good way to register such identities. “PSIs [Published Subject Identifiers] are perhaps not the final answer, but they’re a pretty good stopgap” and can easily be remapped if something else turns out to be the answer.

Steve ends by asking Microsoft to become more subject-centric. Windows is highly document-centric he says. He wants a desktop that shows him the subjects and topics he cares about, rather than folders and apps. Although there are some Semantic Web people working on a semantic desktop, Steve thinks Topic Maps is better for human-facing representations of knowledge. Why not have an entire subject-centric operating system, he asks: NLP for categorizing docukents, p2p, facilities for merges, etc.

Topic maps started out as a way to merge indexes, Steve says. It turned into a knowledge representation formalism. Now it’s the flag-bearer for subject-centric computing. Subject-centric computing is a paradigm shift, Steve says, comparing it to object-oriented programming, and then to the Copernican revolution. [Tags: topic_maps steve_pepper ]

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Birte Fallet, Kjersti Haukaas and Asbjørn Risan present a topic map of Donald Duck’s world. It cameou t of a master course at Oslo University, with Steve Pepper as tutor.

They show the surprisingly full Duck family tree and the topic map of the relationships. Quackmore is the father of Donald and Della. [See? We learn stuff every day! They made special relationships for cousin, uncle, etc. [Why not infer this from the tree? Possibly because they decided to exclude known members who do not participate in stories.] Some relationships are symmetric, and some are asymmetric. They have a special association type for “unrequited love.” And some characters switch occupations. In fact, Donald seems to have a different job in juist about every episode: museum guard, factory worker, dog catcher… They attached the occuptations to the stories. They’ve captured a lot of detail. [But not a taxonomy of Entertainers Without Pants]

They found topic maps to provide “associative richness,” flexible, easy to learn and “Quite fun actually.” The map is here

[Tags: topic_maps donald_duck ]

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Three musicians from the Royal Academcy of Music — Antony Pitts, Hannah Riddell, and John Drinkwater — talk about using topic maps to organize music. They begin with a snippet of Bach’s “A Musical Offering,” which always strikes me as extraordinarily modern, as well as of course exquisitely beautiful. [Caution: I'm live-blogging and thus only capturing a little of what's being said, plus making mistakes, writing poorly, etc.]

Anthony talks about one day in the life of the Academy. He zooms in on more and more detail, eventually showing a messy sketch of a small stretch of time, including the works and musicians being discussed and performed, with “A Musical Offering” at the center. It’s a mess. Now he shows a cleaner version that sorts by scores, sounds, ideas and opinions. But the musical work doesn’t exist in any one of those boxes, he says. The music moves from inspiration to notation to interpretation to reception. There are distinct boundaries between them. Anthony treats those as rows and adds columns for creating, capturing, connecting and communicating.

Ultimately, they show a timeline — RAMline — divided into seven rows: idea, composer, score, performer, sound, audience and history. It is fed from a topic map, allowing multiple visualizations.

Anthony shows the ontology. [Pardon me if I don't try to capture it :)]

Hannah teaches a course on assessing the way music is documented. Students create their own RAMlines, like a CV. “The logic of the topic map has transcended language barriers,” and led them to unexpected conclusions. One student (Laurie) did a map of Bach’s cello suites, tracking versions, arrangements, and publications. Another student has a RAMline of Chopin Scherzo #4, tracking the recordings, etc.

The project is at the end of Phs 1: an internal working model. In phase 3, it goes open access. [Yay!] They hope it will be largest online music knowledge base.

Steve Pepper adds that topic maps started out as a way to capture musical information

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Sam Oh teaches at Sungkyunkwan U in Korea and heads the ISO committee responsible for Topic Maps (among other things). (I had the pleasure and honor of having dinner with him last night.) [Caution: Live-Blogging]

FRBR tries to capture the various levels of abstraction of our works. Group 1 consists of: work, expression, manifestation, and item. “A work is realized through an expression” that is “embodied in” a manifestation and “is exemplified by an item.” E.g., Othello is a work which may be expressed in English or in Korean. A particular edition of a book is a manifestation, while a particular copy is an item.

Group 2 consists of people and corporate bodies responsible for creating Group 1.

Group 3 are the subject entities that “serve as the subjects of intellectual or artistic endeavor” Concept (topical subject heading), object (name for an object), even (name for an event), place (name for a place). Sam says that FRBR adopted these from topic maps.

There are some defined relationships among these three grups: A work is by a person, a manifestation may be produced by a corporate bdy, etc. Ad there are work to work relationships such as successor, supplement, complement, translation, etc.

Currently, everything is focused on the manifestation level. That’s at the center of the map, so to speak. A future direction for library systems: Applying FRBR in services to present search results, to streamline cataloging, and to express new insights into works. FRBR can “naturally” be rendered in topic maps, he says.

Sam talks about mapping MARC (standard bibliographic records) to FRBR. The OCLC has an algorithm for converting these.

He shows some examples of pages and maps. He also notes that FRBR’s terms for talking about these levels of expression aren’t clear to a general public. E.g., most people don’t talk about “manifestations.” He’d like to see better terms, especially as FRBR gets exposed more widely. He also thinks the library community should come to know topic maps better.

[Tags: sam_oh frbr libraries topicmaps topic_maps oclc everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Google Maps now (well, I just noticed) lets anyone add a place marker that is visible to all other users. Their example is a spot in a SF park where there’s open air dancing.

I’ll be interested in following two questions: 1. How will policy evolve to handle abuse and edge cases? 2. How will the system be hacked?

1. What controls is Google going to have to introduce to keep maps from being polluted with markers such as “Best pizza in town,” “Marcie the Slut lives here” and “[enter your choice of slur]town”?

As of now, Google lists two types of controls. First, some listings are protected, either because they’re hospitals or government buildings, or because the owners of a business have “claimed” the listing; Google does some form of verification before awarding ownership. Second, there’s a “report abuse” button which sends the listing to a moderation process.

I hope that that’s sufficient. But what about edge cases? If grieving parents mark the spot on the road where their child was killed, will Google count that as abuse and remove it? Historical markers? Celebrity homes? Notices of where events will be held? Treasure hunt clues?

2. Related to the first: How will people creatively hack the system, not to bring it down (the bad hacking) but to use it in ways Google didn’t anticipate (the good hacking)? For example, maybe citizens will mark potholes, possibly giving the text a distinctive, findable tag. Or educational walks. Or the rankings of public schools. Or all the places there was a death by gun. Or a link to a Flickr query that aggregates photos from that spot. Or the ten million better ideas that everyone else will have.

It’ll be fun to watch. [Tags: google google_maps everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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April 2-4, I’m going to TopicMaps, a conference that may be particularly interesting (to people who are particularly interested in it, of course):

The basic idea is simple: the organizing principle of information should not be where it lives or how it was created, but what it is about. Organize information by subject and it will be easier to integrate, reuse and share – and (not least) easier for users to find. The increased awareness of the importance of metadata and ontologies, the popularity of tagging, and a growing interest in semantic interoperability are part and parcel of the new trend towards subject-centric computing.

The organizers have let it be known that there’s still room… [Tags: conferences topicmaps oslo everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Eric Lease Morgan has a good post (from a couple of weeks ago) about the Open Library project’s developers meeting. Such interesting questions… (Open Library wants to give every book its own home page to accrete metadata, and, of course, make all that info open, public and standard.

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Seb Schmoller has a really interesting post about the taxonomy of a museum of cutting-edge tools.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy museums seb_schmoller ]

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I spent yesterday at the NFAIS conference. After I spoke, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet group gave an interesting, informative and funny talk, and then there was a kick-ass panel on Web 2.0 in the edusphere. Steve Sieck has done an excellent and pithy job blogging both Lee and the panel (Chris Willis of Footnote.com and Bryan Alexander

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Bestiario is a Spanish group that does some insanely watchable visualizations of networks of information. For example, poke around at their way of mapping del.icio.us links.

I’m not very good at interpreting visual data so I can’t tell if it’s helpful, but it sure is cool.

[Tags: visualization social_networks ]

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Poking around the photos the Library of Congress has posted at Flickr shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of social tagging.

For example, take this 1940 photo of two kids gathering potatoes in Maine. There are about 80 tags, ranging from potato, maine, and boys to rural, bucolic, plaid, browen, and pommes de terre. The comments include people appreciating the aesthetics of the photo, recollecting their own lives on farms, and nattering on gaily about the cute hats the kids are wearing. For example:

I grew up in southern Minnesota in the 50s. I was probably 5-6 yrs. old. In the fall after the potato fields had been harvested, they allowed people to come in and collect the potatoes that the machines had missed. I can still remember the cold cloudy day, playing with my brothers in the furrows of the field, throwing clods of dirt at each other, instead of picking up potatoes, and getting yelled at by my Mom.

and

this ‘human interest’ is really ‘awesome’ during the world war ll eras, you can survive eating potatoes in the whole year, wthout rice. potato a native of pacific slopes of s. america, in 16th c., with roundish or oval starch containing tubers used for food. batata or sweet potato, is widely known in the philippine island, brought to table and used for food. biggest plantation of potato in the philippines is in northern luzon.

Three people have played with Flickr’s feature that lets you draw a box around a portion of a photo and add an annotation. All three are wastes o’ time (obviously in my opinion): “I love these barrels” is not worth the visual interruption. (You only see the boxes if you move your mouse over the photos.) So maybe Flickr will turn these off for the LC photos. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Nevertheless, this is some very cool stuff. Sure, some of the tags are oddball. So what? In the great wash of tags, they will lose significance. Meanwhile, that photo of two children harvesting potatoes, which had been locked away behind brick and paper walls, now is in the world, gathering meaning, memories, and connections.

[Tags: library_of_congress flickr everything_is_miscellaneous tagging folksonomy taxonomy]

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Doris Obermair interviewed me at the Picnic conference in spring 2007, and now has posted an edited version in which I talk about the effect of the miscellaneous on business. (With Spanish subtitles.) (By the way, I list videos here.) [Tags: doris_obermair everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Very interesting posting from the venerable Library of Congress on its blog (which by itself is pretty cool). Here’s a snippet:

Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.

Except for my general nervousness about putting this stuff into a privately held, for-profit organization, I think this is quite cool. It has the advantage of putting the data where the people already are. As a footnote to the posting says, it takes a photo of a grain elevator as an example “because it helps illustrate that there are active Flickr user groups for even such diverse subjects as grain elevators.” As the Commons page says,

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.

Gives me little goosebumps.

And, by the way, the photos are fantastic. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous library_of_congress tags flickr folksonomy taxonomy photographs metadata ]