Segue Into Spelling

By Melody Smith | October 6, 2014

Segue is an odd word. It’s conjugated versions defy normal grammar and spelling rules, i.e. segueing, segued, etc. Pronunciation is a whole new challenge as many understand the meaning and use it in day to day conversation, but when it comes time to spell it — that is a whole different story.

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Classifying History

By Melody Smith | October 3, 2014

The American Historical Association (AHA) recently put together a draft revision of its taxonomy of the discipline and is inviting comment from members as it moves toward a final form of the document. The deadline for comment is September 30.

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Publishing and Libraries – The Relationship Evolves

By Melody Smith | October 2, 2014

If you aren’t attending the Taxonomy Boot Camp, maybe you will find this conference a little closer to your interests. “The Library as Publisher: Details, Practice, and Potential Outcomes” addresses the creation of new content sets by virtue of a university open access repository, or putting together custom courseware and how this practice is turning many libraries into de facto publishers. This is actually a pre-conference to the Charleston Conference in…you guessed it, Charleston, South Carolina.

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Ordinal Oddities

By Melody Smith | October 2, 2014

Many linguist believe that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn and not because of the pronunciation challenges, but for the exceptions to every rule. For us word geeks, this is more than just humorous, it is educational (and a bit frustrating). This was found in the blog post, “Why is today the first, not the oneth?” in the blog, Wordlady.

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Terminology of Days Gone By

By Melody Smith | October 1, 2014

A peek into the past is what Words in Time and Place provides its readers. Exploring the language and terminology of days gone by and using the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary as the source.

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The Ins and Outs of Researcher and Contributor Data

By Melody Smith | October 1, 2014

Making content findable to users, researchers, professionals, academics, etc., is a common goal. The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) launched its registry in October 2012 for this exact reason. Now they are on track to reach 1 million registrations at their 2-year anniversary this month. With over 150 members, almost half from academic or government research institutes, and one-quarter from the publishing sector, they are enabling research data exchange interoperability through integration of identifiers into research data systems and workflows.

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Taxonomists and Social Media

By Melody Smith | September 30, 2014

The increase in social media content offers everyone new challenges and opportunities. That is no different for taxonomists. Now they can define our own terms and hashtags as a basis for findability. This is the epitome of content tagging.

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