Introduction 9/6

So, I have debated about how best to manage the 'scrapbook' for this course. I considered social software solutions (wikis, blogs, whatever), considred MSWord (given its robust document organzation and Endnote integration), open source info organization software (but felt unsure about dropping hours of implementation time into a new project just to get the first assignments of the semester off the ground). I decided that the debate for me centered on deciding the relationship between this creation of the document (the scrapbook) and the continuing value of it (the research process). Creating it in Word seemed ultimatley pointless since it would lock me into formatting decisions now that (in the html world) are best left separate from content. Going open source / xml seemed to be too much overhead and lacked the level of application integration that I was interested in. Social software seemed like a promising solution but there again, the Wiki is focused on easy user participation not on data management. So, I decided to try a modified use of bibliographic management software, in this case EndNote. I have become almost entirely dependent on EndNote to manage my course readings and research and thought that I should try to apply that organization type to the scrapbook as well. Using Endnote, I lose some document formatting abilities, but gain the ability to specifically control data contents and format, integrate observations with my readings & research, and leave the question of the producible format for later. There are disadvantages however, Endnote is windows based, meaning that in order to have ubiquitous access to this library I have to carry the data with me. Endnote only has limited support for simple markup of document text. Hence, my paragraphs might lack the style afforded by other applications. I have used Endnote in this fashion for several semesters in my Information Literacy course and have seen it used (poorly) in a previous instance as an archival information database.

My goal for the scrapbook then is to include both an ongoing commentary and an annotated bibliography integrated into a single document / application. Having written bulk export/import functions for other data, my hope is to decide on the format later in the semester. In order to help this work I am going to decide on some basic organizational tennants now. My comments will always go into Research Notes. The date of entry, formatted as yyyy-mm-dd will always go in a custom field: diaryEntryDate as it seems that chronological order is important. Title will be populated with an open text general description. At the moment I will use the keywords for any subject tagging that I want to do. This falls well short of my goal to integrate proper citation links within my comments to interesting articles but at the moment I will have to accept that. My goal with this project is to begin managing more of the research process here. At the moment, I do a good job tracking citations, but do a poor job tracking ideas, observations, potential areas of interest. I am looking forward to seeing how that progresses throughout the semester. One potential impact of this is that I would like to produce this scrapbook as an integrated project between 881 and 715. While ultimately I should be able to separate the observations, it would seem to be an artificial distinction.

In this spirit, I will leave with an observation by Marcia Bates in her article 'The Invisible Substrate of Information Science.' She argues that Information science professionals think more about 'a resource in terms of the features that matter to the organization and retrieval of it, rather than in terms of mastering the content" (Bates, 1046). She continues by arguing that subject specialists lack this trait and as a result are less qualified that IS professionals in this regard. I have to admit that while I see value here, this concept flies the face of folksonomy based organization, semantic web, and in many respects 'user' centered design. In fact, it seems to be a somehwat condescending approach towards non IS people to assert that these skills are more valuable than content knowledge/subject understanding. On the other hand, I have seen first-hand the truth in this assertion. Just recently on two faculty cooperative projects, the failure of the faculty member to entirely grasp the importance of relating their description of a thing with the file name of the digital object they were describing resulted in hours of cleanup work. But while their efforts needed some information organization guidance, the intellectual componenet that they brought to these projects (one an effort to more accurately catalog and represent electronic reserves and the second an effort to get history students describing (not organizing) primary source material) was invaluable (more so than organization?). In fact, I had one professor refer to me as a 'technician' and while the assignment of that tag was in some ways offensive I have to also recognize that I was the one applying the organizational system to her intellectual output so in many ways it was an accurate description.