http://www.thetyee.ca/MediaCheck/current/
UBCBookBotKillJoy.htm
The University of British Columbia’s main library is implementing a system in which books are shelved in stacks accessible only to computer controlled robotic cranes. Users will call up books from computer terminals and they will be fetched for them.
Makes a lot of sense, especially as the volume of works explodes and the physical space can’t expand to keep up. This article, though, in part laments this innovation, noting it will likely cause the “lost pleasure of [the] ‘unexpectedÂ’,” that title beside the one you were searching for that actually ends up being the treasure you needed but hadn’t sought. (read more…)
So what does this have to do with educational technology. Maybe not a lot, but for some time I have wanted to respond to the seemingly unmitigated glee of some of my fellow ed tech bloggers over the death knell being sounded for metadata, in particular human generated multi-level taxonomies (see this, this, this, and many others to boot).
To be fair, many of them are not taking on taxonomies per se, just the onerous means that many systems (especially learning object repositories) have placed on users to create metadata. Really, I have no argument with this.
But I do have an issue with the effects that so-called ‘flattened keyword browsing’ will have on the above noted serendipitous ‘pleasure of the unexpected.’ When we throw out multi-level taxonomies, we also through out the side-effect of teaching people about the shape of the collection (and thus the shape of the discipline) as they look for things.
To take an example from Brian’s post on flickr, it’s one thing to click on the keyword ‘Vancouver’ and see all photos that used that keyword. One might even notice the keyword ‘Gastown’ amongst those same pictures, and by clicking on it get another collection of images grouped around this term. One could make an educated guess that ‘Gastown’ was a part of ‘Vancouver,’ and one would be right, but there’s nothing strong about this connection, and there’s definitely nothing telling a user that – “hey, if you are interested in neighborhoods of Vancouver like Gastwon, there’s another one called ‘Yaletown’ that you may also be interested in.”
It’s not clear to me that you couldn’t improve flickr to show end users some of these other connections in keywords; I think you probably could, but I’m no flickr expert. But it’s the very nature of hierarchical taxonomies to exhibit these parent-child relationships, and in so doing teach people more about the structure of the domain. I would suggest this is an invaluable aid to learning that should not be lost, especially in the lower grade levels. I just can’t help but feel that the flattening of taxonomies associated with ‘easy’ systems like flickr seems like so much baby-with-the-bathwater; sure you get rid of some workload, but at what expense? – SWL
Unfortunately, serendipity is, to a large extent, a casualty of the move from a primarily analog world to a digital one. Somehow this strikes me as being analagous to what’s happened in music – in the old days you used to get marvelously different sounds on synthesizers by weird, random, tweaking of the controls – but now we just have to be content with digital recreations of those same “vintage” sounds. But we gain a ton in reliability and predictability.
Of course, in librarianship, the argument over closed vs. open stacks is probably at least a hundred years old. Access vs. preservation is usually how it’s couched. And the right answer depends on where you sit (or stand).
Cheers – Oren