Reading Response 3

Svenonius Chapter 3

I enjoyed the breakdown of "entities" in this chapter with a special interest in the idea of "superworks." At first I was a little confused with what Svenonius was saying a superwork was until she provided the Hamlet example. To be honest, I'm such a huge fan of the band Metallica that I think I might have a superwork of their material. My collection consists of not only their music (CD's, records, digital music, and even tapes) to movie posters, band memorabilia, photos of the band, and videos of certain performances. Obviously it is not a complete collection of everything "Metallica" but it's a bunch of different "works" within a superwork. One question I had was, to have a superwork, do you have to have everything? For example, do you have to have every photo, every song, etc. to officially have a "superwork?"

Choose Your Own Adventure Reading -- (The metadata framework)

I think what I liked the most out of this reading was the line that said "People make stuff. People use stuff. People do deals about stuff." I mean you really can't find a better definition for commerce than that right there. I found the most interesting section to be the paragraph is explaining why Metadata is so critical to e-commerce. The importance in the way things are identified and how they are described is crucial to the health of e-commerce. I never thought about this way but I can now tell that when shopping online after reading about this, you start to pick up on the minor details and you begin to see just how important metadata is for online shopping.

Reading Response 2

Svenonius Chapter 1

On page 2, Svenonius discusses access problems and different ways those problems arise. I thought it was particularly interesting how she described that one major problem will always be the users inability to at times create “adequate search requests.” What’s amazing is how I used to consider this to be a problem once search engines like Google and Yahoo came out, but really, these were problems that people over a century and a half ago were dealing with when Libraries were the only bibliographic systems available.
I was fond of the statement that “good systems design begins by postulating visionary goals, if only to make users aware of the extent to which compromises are being made.” I’m not entirely sure if I understood this completely but I think what Svenonius was getting across is that, although those past bibliographic systems and their ideologies were excellent, at some point one had to sit back and wonder how much work was actually done and whether it was necessary, when a simple solution would have worked just as well and would have been less complex.
I think my favorite part of the chapter and the one I connected with the most was when Svenonius discussed the “computer revolution.” How a book is “all of a piece” while digital documents nowadays are unstable, dynamic and without boundaries. Apparently this is a problem because these documents with uncertain boundaries can forever be changing, and altered, therefore changing the way we would categorize it. Basically, although computers do bring some solutions when it comes to organizing information, they have also brought a host of new problems.

Buckland “What is a Document?”

I found it difficult to accept the whole “object as documents” section by Paul Otlet. I totally understand where Otlet is coming from, its just the fact that in my generation documents are .doc’s, digital files, and they can be opened in Microsoft Word! Obviously I know that documents are more than just the digital form that I described but it goes back to faces of users from Svenonius’ Chapter 1 and how different people interpret things. I guess I just didn’t really get into the whole idea of a document being a dinosaur bone or painting. In my mind those are in a totally different category than documents.
Lastly, and continuing on with my thoughts of objects and documents, I found Briet’s examples very interesting when she listed six examples and whether or not they are documents. I feel like I understood her definition a bit better when dealing with what a document actually is. In her opinion, basically when an object becomes an “object of study” that’s when it becomes a document. So a photo of a star is a document, rather than the actual star in the sky, because that photo can be studied, mapped and charted.