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The Library: Building a Resource Collection for the
A few efforts, such as the ACIA's IA Guide and Jesse James Garrett's IA resources, have attempted to collect resources of relevance to IA theory and practice. These efforts are often doomed due to issues of scalability. Could the IA community be enlisted to identify, evaluate, and classify IA resources? The solution might lie in using an active "economic" model, like Slashdot's, or a passive one, similar to Amazon.com's reader-reviewers, to channel volunteer effort into maintaining such an ambitious collection. This might also be an opportunity to create a model content development policy for use by a distributed community. Which would be cool. So, the $64,000 question: is there a scalable model for a distributed library of IA resources? Posted by Louis Rosenfeld at November 03, 2001 04:02 PM
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i've been doing A LOT of thinking about this for the last year or so. in fact, i went so far as to start designing the service a little. to my mind, the right model is neither slashdot or amazon. it's epinions.com. epinions.com's basic model is a combination of the others. it gets the content creation and management of slashdot without all the overwhelming feature creep and the collaborative filtering power of amazon. it's actually more complicated than that but, trust me, it works. especially, if you aren't tied to making a profit. :) actually, the idea i had was a simplified verison of epinions because i think we could remove the $$-earning aspect and a good deal of all the trust stuff. (the ia community is small, active, and trustworthy enough to make them unnecessary.) i've written more about this at MoreSmarter. Posted by tpodd at November 12, 2001 11:39 AMokay, i've been doing some more thinking. this time more tactically. there really seem to be 2 models for the community built/maintained resource repository: 1) IAwiki or 2) epinions. (i know there are probably others but i think these represent the two basic camps pretty well. please offer alternatives, correct me if i'm wrong, etc.) IAwiki: epinions: it seems like what we really want is a mixture of the two or, more likely, a starting point in between the two that will allow us to move toward the epinions model in stages. so, i'll propose some possible stages: 1) build the team (we need to establish responsibility and control to avoid a design-by-committee situation. though, i'm definitely considering this will be a participatory design process.) just some thoughts. i have a bunch of thoughts about specifics of the functionality too but i figure those should wait until we get some bigger picture things figured out. thoughts? Posted by tpodd at November 12, 2001 4:40 PMnot very usable from an info-seeking perspective (yes, there's a search. but i'm talking about some functionality that could really take advantage of the social strength of the IA community) It is true there is usually very little functionality hardwired into wiki sites. No rating, no karma, no meta-tagging... Ironically, wiki's with their collaborative editing base, really does take advantage of the social strength of communities ... as people find a need it gets implemented just by creating pages and writing links. It is through this process than an emergent architecture arises, one which includes such info-seeking usefulness like category pages, roadmaps, intro guides, and reviews. One very useful wiki-tool is the use of two-way-links .. from any page you can pull up a list of all pages that reference that page. This is particularly useful if you start from a category page, for which every relevent page at some time created a link to. On hardwired ratings functionaly you want to be very careful, as these can generate feedback loops that will adversely affect your site. Not to say they aren't useful, just that they are difficult to get right. Posted by Eric Scheid at November 16, 2001 3:26 PMtrue. there are definite advantages to the ultra-flexible nature of a wiki. that flexibility is its strength and weakness. while it can be molded to fit any need the community has, there is very little control or structure to it, and that makes it very difficult to provide tools for navigating, filtering, or searching it. i do like the two-way links, though. that's a powerful idea. also, you're right about rating systems being hard to get right. but a lot of the difficulty comes from having an irresponsible user base. i feel like the users of the IA library might be a little more trustworthy in their behavior. though, i could just be fooling myself. :) Posted by tpodd at November 19, 2001 2:08 PMtrue. there are definite advantages to the ultra-flexible nature of a wiki. that flexibility is its strength and weakness. while it can be molded to fit any need the community has, there is very little control or structure to it, and that makes it very difficult to provide tools for navigating, filtering, or searching it. i do like the two-way links, though. that's a powerful idea. also, you're right about rating systems being hard to get right. but a lot of the difficulty comes from having an irresponsible user base. i feel like the users of the IA library might be a little more trustworthy in their behavior. though, i could just be fooling myself. :) Posted by tpodd at November 19, 2001 2:10 PMOther people who might be good to bring into this conversation include Kat Hagedorn, Vivian Bliss and Chiara Fox; I'll email them and point them to this conversation. sb Posted by Samantha Bailey at November 19, 2001 3:59 PMI've been looking into Hebbian learning just lately and that has sparked some ideas. Posted by Eric Scheid at November 19, 2001 4:22 PMI would love to help out with this! Thanks for the heads-up Samantha. :) My time is a bit limited at the moment, but it should get better come the first of the year. Let me know when we are going to get a meeting together to discuss things. I'll go back through our brainstorms for the ACIA IA Guide - might get some ideas there. Posted by Chiara Fox at November 28, 2001 7:55 PMSamantha did indeed drop an email my way. And darn it - this looks too interesting to not be involved. At the risk of sounding obtuse, let me ask a few questions to make sure I understand the idea of the IA Library. How serious is everyone? And keep in mind that 'resources' could be many, many things. Ahh, once again we are back at the idea of collection development policy. :-) VB Posted by Vivian Bliss at November 28, 2001 8:11 PMThe IA Library group is posting its thoughts and ideas here. Posted by tpodd at November 28, 2001 10:42 PMsorry, the IA Library group is posting SOME of its INITIAL ideas there. We'll be posting progress reports here. Posted by tpodd at December 2, 2001 1:41 PMHi all. Apologies for the late response. I'm still unpacking my life... Chiara's right. There are many lessons that we could take from the ACIA IA Guide re-design. I also am limited in my time until the beginning of next year, but would be more than amenable to starting a discussion then. Posted by Kat Hagedorn at December 6, 2001 9:41 PMHi folks; I'm (re)posting Todd Wilkens' 12/2 project plan here for reactions: -------------------------------------------- 2) Research 3) Iterate the goals/requirements list 4) Brainstorming/Innovation/Etc. (This is where we create, synthesize, and brainstorm about how the system could/should work based on the goals/requirements and research.) 5) Decisions, decisions, decisions... 6) Specification and Detailed project plan 7) Build it (this will be fleshed out in more detail as we complete steps 1-6) Please, comment, suggest, critique or praise as you see fit. -tpodd Posted by Lou Rosenfeld at December 11, 2001 11:43 AM...and here are some goals that Todd Wilkens posted for comments: -------------------------------------- The IA Library should... ***Secondary*** ***Misc*** The way I see it, the first 4 are primary/immediate needs. You could argue that Discovery might not be an immediate need, but I'm sure it's a primary requirement for the Library. There's a huge soup of IA resources out there. It's a big problem to find what you're looking for. It's an even bigger problem to find what you don't even know you should be looking for. Also, I'm not tied to any of the "Misc." items. I listed them because they've been discussed on the list. Comments, comments, comments, please. -tpodd This tool (the first and second priorities) sounds very close to something I built for the IRS in 1997/98. The tool was built in ASP, but I do not have a platform to resurect the tool in that format. I am beginning to rebuild the tool for my own site in the next few weeks. I can easily hand off the tool for use elsewhere after that. Posted by vanderwal at March 18, 2002 4:18 AMbuy viagra online_ CaptainStabbin InTheVip BoysFirstTime 8thStreetLatinas TrannySurprise Cumfiesta MILFHunter BigNaturals MikesApartament TopShelfPussy StreetBlowjobs WeLiveTogether Posted by as at December 26, 2003 4:53 AMTest Posted by levitra at December 27, 2003 8:31 PMHi Posted by phentermine at December 27, 2003 11:55 PMComments closed This site exists for archive purposes only. Please check Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture for the latest on the community effort.
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