Personal Information Management

The Lerner Vinyl Collection

Currently, my husband and I have close to 600 album sets, many with multiple discs, in three formats: 45rpm, 33⅓rpm, and 78rpm. The collection is spread across two pieces of furniture that have two rows of four cubbyholes each. There are three main genres: classical, world music, and everything else. “Everything else” is spread across the top cubbyholes, only includes 33⅓rpm records, and is alphabetized first by artist last name or band, and then by album name. World music begins the bottom row, and also only includes 33⅓rpm records. Again, they are first alphabetized by artist and then album. Next are the classical records, which are arranged alphabetically by composer. Those records with more than one composer (many classical records are compilations, or have two related pieces by different composers) are taken on a case-by-case basis and put under the composer whose piece on the record we listen to more. 78rpm records (all classical) followed by 45rpm records are the final components; they are arranged in the same alphabetical sequence as the other records.

Why is the Collection Organized This Way?

While I appreciate personal organization, when categorizing music one can get caught in minutia and soon the system can only be interpreted by the creator. Because vinyl is a physical manifestation of music in that the actual vinyl cannot be searched electronically, the system needed to be simple enough for friends to use, but detailed enough so that we didn’t need to hunt every time we wanted to listen to something new. Part of the joy of the collection is watching other people pick what to listen to, and serendipitous discovery is an important aspect of that process. Due to this, I made the organization specific enough to guide whoever is looking to the general area, but broad enough to allow the searcher to discover other items of interest. Simple genre categories allow the searcher to eliminate certain types of music, while separation of format allows one to immediately discount certain records. Beyond these broad separations, alphabetical ordering seemed most logical for our needs. As I know my own collection fairly well, this system allows me to pinpoint a record’s location surprisingly quickly. Upon reflection, I realize that I created this system more for our friends’ benefit than for my own – in this instance of my personal information management, I was far more concerned with how other people would access the materials than I was with my own access needs. Perhaps this speaks to the social nature of the materials in question. Either way, my audience and their discovery is by far the most significant reason my collection is organized in this fashion.

Are There Certain Aspects that are Successful for the Material?

In particular, I think that subdividing the collection into three loose genres is extremely useful for the materials. As I stated earlier, I did not want to micro-divide the collection, but I think that the three genres really lend themselves to three different listening experiences. No one, in my experience, has had difficulty choosing between those three options at any one particular moment. If a goal for my organization scheme was to be able to roughly find records, but also allow people to discover things they might not have found otherwise, this subdivision points them in the right direction without leading them straight to one record. The divisions also reflect the three main areas that we collect: classical, world music, and a little bit of everything else.

Improvements?

Thinking back to the Weinberger piece, “The New Order of Order,” the collection is rooted in the first order of order, the physical location of actual objects. While this works quite well for most of the collection, it is the cause of much consternation in the classical sections because classical records often have more than one composer, artist, or piece on a recording. There is more than one logical place for many of the items. Finding particular pieces of music is more difficult here than in other sections of the collection because not only does one need to remember the name of the piece, but one also needs to remember the composer and whether or not it was on a record with another piece by a different composer, which composer it was filed under, and who is performing the piece. There are so many variables in each aspect that finding any common thread by which to organize has been unsuccessful to date. Perhaps I need to enact Weinberger’s second order of order, and create cross references so that all pieces and composers are fairly represented and accessible.

One Final Observation:

I find it interesting that this scheme incorporates almost all of the PIM behaviors discussed by Barreau in “The Persistence of Behavior and Form in the Organization of Personal Information”: filing, piling, and spring cleaning. Obviously, the records are all filed in particular locations; however, I am often lackadaisical about actually filing records where they belong immediately after listening. As a result, there are piles of records all over the living room, each one the evidence of a particular listening session. Finally, about twice a year, we spring clean, re-ordering everything, weeding, and marking items for sale as we go. Though I think that Barreau described these behaviors as being more intentional than described here (besides the spring cleaning), I would guess that most people employ all three behaviors in different areas of their personal information management.

Works Referenced:

Barreau, D. (2008) The Persistence of Behavior in the Organization of Personal Information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 59(2) p 307-317.

Weinberger. (2007). Everything is Miscellaneous. New York: Times Books. Chapter 1: The New Order of Order.

Electronic Resources

Blog post #4
Please note that I was sick when this was due, and a new due date for me was set at Sunday, 7 March 2010.

1. LISA

2. I used the topic “controlled vocabulary.” Doing a search using this complete term yielded 464 published works. The results seemed to cover the scope of the topic (including social tagging, metadata, and terminology mapping) as well as lexicographical variations such as “controlled vocabularies.”

3. Thesaurus

a. The thesaurus for LISA was extremely easy to find and use. There was a link at thebottom of the search page that took me straight to a page that allowed me to search the thesaurus. Results could be viewed in their place alphabetically in the thesaurus, or else as a hierarchy or rotated index. One can check boxes next to the terms and use those to either narrow or broaden their search. Additionally, terms can be exploded to include all narrower terms within an entry. Finally, related terms are included in each entry. The only real drawback I could find to the interface was that the thesaurus couldn’t be browsed, if, for example, a user didn’t have a specific search term in mind. There was also no help feature for using the thesaurus that I could find, but this was not a real drawback for me, as the interface was so intuitive.

b. Controlled Vocabulary was in the thesaurus when I searched for the term. It had an alternate term (UF), vocabulary control, as well as three related terms. There were no narrower or broader terms; however, after digging in the thesaurus for a bit, I did find terms that used those signifiers, so the thesaurus does employ them.

c. The thesaurus is extremely easy to use. All one need do is navigate through the thesaurus, marking terms that should be included in the new search. Additionally, how the terms should be used in this new search needs to be chosen (either an AND, OR, or EXPLODE command). A fairly large downside to this method is that each new term cannot be given its own command. Therefore, I cannot search for [[controlled vocabulary AND taxonomies] OR thesauri] directly from the thesaurus. However, searches like this can be done through the advanced search pane, though it seems somewhat of an annoyance to the user to have to first search for the preferred terms and then have to navigate to another pane to do the actual search.

d. Other functionalies offered through the thesaurus search pane include selecting a thesaurus for a different database in the bundle, and links to the previous and next terms in the list. As stated earlier, a nice function to add would be delimiting search commands for individual terms rather than for the marked terms as a whole.

e. For the most part, the LISA thesaurus abides by the recommendations set forth by the Craven guide. In particular, the LISA thesaurus standardizes the forms of the entries (pluralizing when appropriate), following the rules for making multi-word terms the preferred terms, indicating syndetic relationships in a consistent manner, and though I did not encounter any homographs in the terms that I looked through, the adherence to other standards would lead me to believe that they appropriately label homographs. The only real deviation from Craven’s guidelines that I could find was the lack of thesaurus guide. There was no introduction, no scope statement, and no real indication of what the thesaurus was about or how it was structured. Though scope notes were included where appropriate for terms, they did not aid in determining scope, structure, or intent. There are of course, assumptions that can be made – it is a thesaurus for library materials, so the scope should be the library and information science discipline; however, I think that Crane’s guide makes clear that it is important for this type of information to be stated explicitly: for the LISA thesaurus, it is not.

f. LISA’s thesaurus is an extremely helpful tool for database users at all levels of expertise. I think it more effective for those users at the novice or intermediate level, due to the fact that searching directly from the thesaurus is limited to one search command (AND, OR, or EXPLODE). Due to this, compound searches are more complicated to execute, and seem to demand more familiarity with the system. The thesaurus is intuitive enough for a novice user to gain some value, and more importantly, the thesaurus term search feature allows a user who is unfamiliar with the thesaurus vocabulary to search (without having to browse through hundreds of terms) for terms until they hit on one that can serve as a starting point. For intermediate users, features such as the explode command allow search ranges to be expanded. In total, the LISA thesaurus is an effective, if incomplete tool that allows basic and intermediate users access to a resource that adds value to their search. Expert users may have a harder time due to the limitations of the “search directly from the thesaurus” features, but nonetheless, they can still use it for its intended function: to provide a controlled vocabulary with which to search the database more effectively.

4. After my explorations, I would certainly modify my search; use the thesaurus in the future; and tell both friends and patrons to use the thesaurus in their searches.

5. The new search results, after having used the thesaurus to broaden my search, brought back 1366 hits, on subjects relating to controlled vocabularies. Topics included ontologies, thesauri, social tagging, taxonomies, and terminology mapping. Overall, the hits were related to what I wanted to retrieve, so the new search was a success.

6. Craven states in “Thesaurus Construction,” that “a thesaurus is a tool for vocabulary control. By guiding indexers and searchers about which terms to use, it can help to improve the quality of retrieval.” I think that this assignment effectively taught me that databases that I use weekly can be aided by controlled vocabulary, which is an odd realization because I use MeSH constantly at my position at the Health Sciences Library. There seems to be a divide when it comes to the scientific community and the rest of the academic community in terms of how databases are used. I have taught people all about MeSH, but I have never explored thesauri in other databases. That trend seems to be reflected in the academic community’s electronic resources – MeSH is more commonly known and accepted across the medical discipline, but to my knowledge there is no unified or commonly known vocabulary for other fields. Of course, they do exist, but I could not name any besides those in scientific fields, and therein lies the disparity. Perhaps this is because hard science and medical fields are grounded in facts and figures (rather than interpretive disciplines) that can be pinned down with great accuracy by language, and thusly are the easiest to quantify in a controlled vocabulary. Maybe as electronic resources become even more integrated into all academic communities, other controlled vocabularies will rise to the surface and become fully integrated into their respective communities.