Messiness as a virtue

1. What are some of the messes in your life and how do you try to organize them?

Don’t even get me started!

My biggest overall mess is digital files on my computer. All of them. Every kind of everything.

The most important of those files that need organizing is my family’s digital photos and videos. I *do* have backups (offsite – in the cloud via Carbonite) but our local files are a wonderland of Alice proportions. Thanks to being a somewhat early adopter and to always having plenty of hard drive space, we have zillions of pictures and videos. I would put the over/under on the number of videos on our computer that are less than 1 second long due to the photographer wanting to take a picture but the camera was on video at 200. Yes, I probably have over 200 videos of someone standing awkwardly and someone (usually my wife) saying some variation of “oops, its set for video”.

I understand completely that it is not technically difficult to get our digital images organized but it is going to be painfully time consuming and I can’t foresee a time when I’ll be able to get to it. I really think that our best option may be to make a family project out of this and set up a few computers with access to these files and work on them while sitting around the dinner table for a few days over the next year or so. I will probably pay my children to do this with me.

Here’s what I know. What Gmail is to email, Picasa is to digital photos. But ONLY IF those photos contain something for Picasa to find. Right now, the only metadata included in my photos is facial recognition and I’ve only done that because it was so cool when it came out in Picasa 3.5. I used to have a fairly good folder system for digital images but the volume just got to be too much to keep up with. Furthermore, when I was the only person in my family who could operate both the camera AND the computer, I could import pictures how I wanted and when I wanted and I could add tags as I saw fit. As time passed, other family members started using the camera and downloading pictures to folders all over the computer. This is where things got out of hand.

I do not sort my email at all. I do have some filters set up to flag some different emails so I can be sure and notice them, but I don’t label very many and I never sort them into folders like I used to back in the day. I just search for them within Gmail. I’ve found that learning just a few search operators will put any email I desire on my screen in seconds. Picasa is waiting to do something similar for me but I *must* give my photos some metadata in order to be able to find photos. Picasa is so powerful that even though I don’t have much metadata, I can still find most pictures I want… often just using dates and people in the photos, but I definitely want more metadata.

2. What are your thoughts on the work of Valdis Krebs as presented beginning on page 180? Is this something that would interest you as an information scientist?

I’m extremely interested in this kind of work. My first exposure to how an organizational chart does not tell the entire story of an organization’s workflow was when I was about junior high school age (7th to 9th grade). My mother worked as the secretary (would be called an office manager today) at our church and the church was experiencing some growth. Besides the normal church activities, e.g., scheduling events, there were also some issues that arose from the numerical growth. At this age, I began to realize that people were not kidding when they would say “your mom keeps this place running.” She did! I don’t know exactly what the organizational chart for our church would have looked like, but I’m sure that Krebs would have found that all the traffic passed through my mom’s office and/or her phone line. Later I became aware of what sociologists call “gatekeepers”, which are those people who control access to those who have the power to make big decisions.

On page 173 of my ebook (I think it is probably about p 182 in the print version) Krebs talks about people who are “properly positioned”. I’ve always tried to position myself at the busy intersections of the organizations I’ve been involved with for a couple reasons: I like to know what is going on and I’ve found that I’m good at managing information and solving problems. I have found that a good place to be on the organizational chart is somewhere that gives you access to those at the top levels of your organizational chart but where you aren’t necessarily one of the masses down at the bottom of the chart. In one organization, I was involved with the network administration and other technology issues. I had regular access to the president of the organization but did not have other people above or below me on the organization chart, my job was like a strange growth out of the side of the chart (see below).

Positions like that tend to give a broad degree of freedom with exceptional access to those throughout the organization.

Our school library is somewhat like this although my specific position is not. Just being in the library seems to work well for my skill set and I’m able to serve everyone in the school so it is a good fit.

3. Relate what Weinberger is saying about the definitional view and the prototype view to the information behavior models presented in this course.

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4. What are the library prototypes? Experiment with identifying three levels of abstraction for libraries. Be sure to think about how different cultures may think about/abstract libraries.

Library prototypes would include a building, printed books, a circulation desk, and reference materials. Sadly, the “shushing librarian” also remains a prototype.

Libraries exist in different ways, such as openlibrary.org that we heard about in the Brewster Kahle TEDTalk, but I don’t think that a paradigm shift has occurred in the general population so as to see a digital only library as a prototype of libraries.

As for levels of abstraction… what about:

1st level	civic building	library	local education
2nd level	libraries	children’s section	school
3rd level	public library	story room	school library

It is also worth noting that computer programmers use libraries of code snippets and other tools.