Posts by Melody Smith
The Driving Factor
It should be no surprise that costs directly drive decisions in the world of business. Many SharePoint users underestimate the long-term management costs of deployments and then ignore sound design practices to reduce SharePoint maintenance costs. In the rush to rapid deployment, this can be costly in the end. SearchWinIT brought this problem to our attention in their article, “Five ways to cut SharePoint maintenance costs and refine management.”
Read MoreTaxonomy is Gray
From the time of Plato, philosophers have been outlining the world as they saw it and they truly built an outline; they truly built a taxonomy of the world as they saw it. The way we perceive some field, or reality in general, is our own philosophy. If we look at the world through these lenses we see it one way; we look at the world through a different set of lenses, we see it absolutely differently. That is important to realize when building a thesaurus, because people are thinking of a field in one specific way or another.
Read MoreDocument Management with Solid Support
BMI Imaging Systems will be demonstrating a variety of document and records management solutions that increase the efficiency of government and corporate record keeping processes at the Las Vegas, Nevada Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) 2013 conference.
Read MoreGroups Urge Reforms Regarding Metadata Collection
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined 59 other privacy and civil liberties groups in a letter sent to the US Senate Judiciary Committee, calling on Congress to evaluate the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs and risks to civil liberties. The coalition sent the letter in advance of the Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the NSA surveillance programs, and urged Congress to enact critical reforms to ensure that government surveillance programs include robust safeguards for constitutional rights. These reforms would include tightening the standards for collection and use of information, including communications metadata.
Read MoreSeeking Consistency and Standards
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) voting members recently approved a new project to develop recommended practices for Packaging and Exchanging Serial Content. Many different organizations, including libraries, archives, indexing services, etc., work better and more efficiently when they exchange and work with digital files that make up serial content. However, these files are in some type of package that isn’t always the same or compatible.
Read MoreNew Data and More Access
EBSCO Information Services and NetAdvance have joined forces allowing metadata from NetAdvance’s JapanKnowledge collection to be added to EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS).
Read MoreWebinar Addresses Data Migration
Concept Searching is hosting a webinar along with Portal Solutions entitled, “84% of Migration Projects Fail – Getting it Right in SharePoint,” on August 22, 2013. The webinar will address SharePoint migration issues, information architecture and best practices to ensure migration does not result in the typical project over-runs, post-upgrade production issues and unanticipated down time.
Read MoreOutlining Slices of Knowledge
As most readers of this blog know, a thesaurus is a way to categorize the knowledge of certain fields or specified combinations thereof. All thesauri are built for specific fields or topical areas. This does not prevent a thesaurus from being able to cover a wide range of knowledge, especially if it’s multidisciplinary within, for instance, the area of academic subjects as a whole. (If the latter is the case, we might well have much more trouble with disambiguation than we would have in more specialized thesauri.)
Read MoreExpanding the Search
Alexander Street Press has updated its search interface with semantic facet browsing or more commonly known as an algorithm to identify categories of interest from a single keyword. With this new feature, results are returned pertaining to the keyword even if the keyword is not in the title of the resource.
Read MoreMy Other Life
I have another life outside the taxonomy world; one that often reminds me how connected we all really are in this world. I am attending a conference on faith-based communications. See, I told you it was a different life. While doing the “meet and greet” with fellow attendees, one mentioned she used to teach library and information sciences before feeling a call to write and even start her own small publishing company. The others around us queried her about the books, etc. and I waited patiently to ask her about her previous life. You see, when I tell people I write about taxonomy the response is almost always, “Is that about dead animals?”
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