Muddiest Point, week 14

I am curious to know more about Decision Support System software. Can it be used for data sets other than business-related data? Also, Dr. He mentioned some people thought DSS might have played a role in the current financial crisis. Is this because the DSS is inaccurate or because its results are hard to interpret? Will this change how businesses utilize DSS in the future?

Comments

Are here and here.

Muddiest Point Week 12

Might social tagging sometimes be less useful that we think? Some blogs -- popular ones, even -- use tagging as a source of humor, by putting in joke tags (the opposite of the actual content, overly specific, sarcastic or whatever). The point is to laugh when you see them, not to actually click on them. I think this is probably a small minority of tags, but I still feel like it's not addressed by all these authors who are so gung-ho about how social tagging is going to make everything super-easy to find forever.

Comments

Are here and here.

Week 12 readings

Reichard & Harder: Weblogs

Blogging applications = social software (bottom-up rather than top-down). Makes sense. Interesting they recommend disabling comments sometime.

Blogs seem to have really taken off in libraries (I say this from the article's examples and my own experience). Do they have potential in archives, too? Posting about the latest collection you've accessioned?

Allan: Wiki

This article makes wikis sound very useful for groups working together as a way to share information. I guess my question is, how is it different from having a blog with multiple contributors who have editing privileges? A wiki would have more formatting options I suppose (Allan talks about handouts which would presumably be printed and given to students).

Arch: Social Tagging

Oh, the word "folksonomy" is so cute.

Social tagging in a library catalog? I can see the uses -- PittCat can be tricky to navigate sometimes, and in closed-stacks libraries like the Frick Fine Arts Library where I work, students can't go wander in the shelves and browse. If they could see what books other had found useful -- grouped by subject rather than call number which can be misleading -- this could make life a lot easier.

Wales: Wikipedia

Wow, I have been reading/writing about wikipedia so much this semester and only now am I actually learning its history. This dude is proud of himself, huh? I mean, with reason. I like that wikipedia is not English-centric.

The Neutrality Policy allows people to express their views as long as couched in language like "some critics say" or something that indicates that Wikipedia itself remains netural.

But if you are "asked to leave the community," is it by contributors or by Jimmy himself? I imagine it must be a vote/dialogue similar to the process of deleting pages.

Muddiest Point Week 11

So are other institutions building their own Dspace-like respositories or just joining Dspace? Could Dspace become too big? I created an account and have been trying to look at presentations & articles but I keep getting the message "Internal System Error"....

Comments!

My comments can be found here and here