theorywatch

Oh, no— here we go again!

Got an excellent response and some very useful comments from the reviewers for this one: go, me! Who knew that I’d become a collection theorist myself?

Had some interesting final projects in “Digital Collections” this semester, ranging from a Community Overdrive audio collection of Aesop’s fables, to a fantasy collection of celebrity memorabilia, to a historical account by a child patient at the Eastern Oklahoma Tuberculosis Sanitarium, to pilot projects for ongoing collection activities at the University of Oklahoma School of Dance, the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the American Choral Directors Association. Two people were working on a digital repository project, which was new for this class, which tends to be rather image-driven! One really nice project focused on developing metadata for spoken language recordings in the Caddo language. An excellent paper also, on the difficulties faced by designers trying to make a collection user-friendly for people at various points along the autism spectrum (this one was obviously too difficult to do as an actual project during a one-semester class!)

This was also the first time I offered people the chance to choose between putting their collections on OMEKA or on CONTENTdm, and there were some interesting challenges on both platforms, which I hope people realized was a valuable learning experience (even if there were some panic-stricken project moments along the way, such as “where did my collection go!”

Of course, the readings as always were fascinating (at least to me, though I suspect that some people wished I wouldn’t have assigned the entire NISO Framework for Building Good Digital Collections.)

And the final exam involved explaining what made the Galaxy Zoo a collection… or not. (No, that’s a joke— there was no final exam, as this class was mostly a survey/studio class for collection design.) Unfortunately, I don’t know when I’ll be teaching this one again… but I do know that some excellent digital collection builders emerged from this class, hopefully with their inspiration intact (and possibly even enhanced)!

Some of the collection proposals in this semester’s class have given rise to this idea: is there value to thinking of collections that can’t or won’t be built, and examining the reasons why? Is there value to thinking of sub-collections that can be formed out of existing collections to supplement (or to subvert) the focus of those collections? Is there value to thinking of collections that have two sides (a “public” face for outsiders and a “private” face for insiders)?

Clearly, yes.

Probably a paper in that somewhere too…..

Another thing I love about the Digital Collections class (now officially approved for inclusion in the curriculum as LIS/KM 5453, go me for proposing it!) is that it gives me the perfect excuse to find things like Judy Malloy’s “Concerto for Narrative Data”.

Since I’m working with some of the late Ross Atkinson’s concepts right now (particularly his idea of the “anti-collection”), I’m more alert than usual to other good uses of his ideas. Over on Collections 2.0, Steven Harris has a wonderful post on “the gravity of libraries” that I think Atkinson might have loved (especially the equation.) It’s serious, easy to read, and brings together a lot of interesting things: librarian gravitas, in other words. Go read it!

Haven’t mentioned the Digital Collections class lately, primarily because it’s pretty much running itself. (A number of people in it are actually involved in digital collections already, so there’s a different level of discourse going on than would otherwise be the case, I think.) Looking forward to seeing those collection proposals soon, as they are likely to be very good, given the level of talent I’ve seen in the class. The varieties of “professional gaze” in the class, due to those different backgrounds, are particularly interesting: how I can structure the class in future to take fuller advantage of what that adds to our overall perspective?

Anyway, the concept of “empty space” came up in someone’s critique of a particular collection’s design in terms of visual focus and appeal, which was a point very well taken. But you can apply it to a lot more: you could also consider the cognitive implications of a particular collection’s “empty spaces.”

So I’ll think I’ll go do a little of that now.

I can’t believe that I said this tonight in class, referring to the “Visual Human” collection at the National Library of Medicine.

I must be spending way too much time with PhD Comics.

Well, Digital Collections has started this semester. Since the first discussion posts have already brought up Derrida and DeviantART (and not by me, lol), we can tell that it may be a very long semester for some….

Barbed wire!

I had no idea that this can be found in a wide variety of patented patterns, and that it is actually classified and collected. Talk about your ultimate “boundary object”!