Interesting readings from around the web:
“Because wide-spread full text indexing abounds, the problem of find is not as acute as it used to be. In my opinion, it is time to move away from the problem of find and towards the problem of use. What does a person do with the information once they find and acquire it? Does it make sense? Is it valid? Does it have a relationship other things, and if so, then what is that relationship and how does it compare? If these relationships are explored, then what new knowledge might one uncover, or what existing problem might be solved? These are the questions of use. Find is a means to an end, not the end itself. Find is a library problem. Use the problem everybody else wants to solve.”
–Eric Lease Morgan, “Next-generation library catalogs, or ‘Are we there yet?’”
“My favorite worlds have always been natively game-like. In their basic world rules you immediately want to interact with them. When you know that Anne McCaffrey’s Pern has five types of colored dragons, you immediately want to match yourself to one. When you know that in Piers Anthony’s Xanth every person has a unique magical talent, you want to pick out a talent for yourself. These rule structures are very game-like and enhance the poetry of a world. In addition to making it accessible, they give you a framework that exposes the theme and meaning in a world much more clearly than worlds that do not have these structures. Character classes are extremely powerful things.”
–author and game designer Erin Hoffman in an interview with Clarkesworld Magazine
“It’s strange, but start talking to hard-bitten, seasoned executives about information in the enterprise and they automatically switch off their critical faculties. They’ll believe anything. Really. Like, information and how it is used in your organisation can be understood by a piece of software, out of the box. Like, you don’t need to actually understand your information environment in order to manage it. Like, the best people to ask about making your information generally accessible, are narrow subject matter specialists. Like, you can fix your information environment once, and it’ll stay fixed forever without paying any more attention to it. In this article we explore three fairy tales about taxonomies that executives seem particularly prone to believing:
1. That you don’t need taxonomies if you get a good search engine;
2. That taxonomies can look after themselves or can be delegated piecemeal to non-taxonomists;
3. That the best people to advise on taxonomy development are subject matter experts.”