Don’t forget about David Weinberger’s book release talk & party Monday
Addendum 4/30: David’s talk is great. He’s very witty. I started reading Everything Is Miscellaneous. You should, too.
He’s recapping the book. I started reading it today while waiting for my number to get called for jury duty. I’m about 80 pages into it. When I started reading it, I quickly realized I was going to have problems because I didn’t have any good way to take notes. I marked pages with business cards and started scrawling partial notes on the back of a flyer for a dance in March. I’m going to blog the book stuff separate from his talk because that’s the organizational scheme that makes sense to me.
He’s making some fabulous parallels between organization and cuts of meat. It’s particularly humorous because he is a kosher vegetarian. It’s easier to cut at a joint than to just take a random slice. Some ways of, well, chunking things up happen naturally.
It’s fun to listen to him talk about Melvil Dui (if you don’t like the spelling, read the book) and the development and limitations of his system. In the book, he mentions how some librarians get a certain look on their faces when someone mentions the Dewey Decimal System. (Was that from talking to me, I wonder …) He has a great slide with a very complex hierarchy on it based on 10 top categories and moving down and splitting off.
One of the biggest problems with classification systems, he explains, is that we don’t agree on how to organize the world and we never will.
Three orders of organization: the physical object itself, a surrogate like a card catalog card, and digitized material.
“Metadata is a lever we use to pry up things,” he suggests while discussing how search works in the digital world as a way to find material.
Tagging as a way of falling in love … through common interests … hypothesizes David. How did he meet his wife? Or you could just end up with noses.
Categorization changes based on people’s needs at a particular moment. Sometimes, it’s better off to wait before categorizing things because we don’t know what’s going to make the most sense at any given time.
Somehow, he managed to tie in plane spotting and how some people will live near flight paths and airports because of the information they want–even if it’s just a hobby. *clears throat*
And, of course, he mentions Wikipedia, its functionality, its basic sections, and the ability to provide space for dialog and edit wars. If the world’s greatest expert refuses to participate in the dialog, the quality of truth diminishes. David believes arguing about knowledge has its value and importance. Publicly negotiating over the truth is vital. People who don’t participate become irrelevant and, unfortunately, can take their very important knowledge with them.
One of the slides that got people laughing is one I’ve seen him use before where he shows the front page of a generic newspaper with Wikipedia-esque statements on each article saying the neutrality of the viewpoint is questionable (NPOV).
May 1st, 2007 at 11:08 pm
[...] One of the questions after David Weinberger’s talk Monday is why library catalogs don’t have more features like some of the Web 2.0 tools and Web sites like Amazon have. What would be so wrong with suggestions like “People who read this book also read …” or informal book reviews and tagging integrated into catalogs? Privacy issues, especially in the post-9/11 world, jumped into my head immediately. Laws and librarians’ professional ethics place great importance on library customer confidentiality. In systems with a very large patron base, it might not be so difficult to trace a list of books and figure out who might have checked them all out. However, in small town libraries, being able to do that might not be so difficult. [...]