Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College.

NELINET Annual Bibliographic - 16 November 2007

Jane Ouderkirk, Managing Director of Knowledge & Information Assets

In other words… : Using multiple taxonomies

Contexts and Perspectives

Contexts and perspectives in which information objects are:

§ Created

§ Collected/ deposited

§ Described § by creators § by collectors§ by potential users§ over time§ across cultures/languages§ across professions§ relative to the volume of similar objects in a collection

Discovered/used

Harvard Business School

1. 1,800 MBA Students

2. 98 Doctoral Students

3. 201 Faculty FTE

4. 1,044 Staff

5. 33 Buildings

What’s in a name?

Knowledge & Library Services (KLS @ HBS)

§ Baker Library Services§ Contemporary collections research, reference, access

§ Historical Collections§ Reference and access services to the world’s largest business history collection

§ Web & Intranet Services§ Web service management for HBS

§ Knowledge & Information Assets Management§ >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Knowledge & Information Assets Management KIA was Collections Management was Library Technical Services

Three Units-

§ Taxonomy & Metadata Management§ grew from Cataloging§ provides metadata and taxonomy management and consulting services to HBS

§ Content Management § grew from Acquisitions & Serials Management§ responsible for acquisition and management of purchased or licensed content

§ Information Lifecycle Management§ grew from Records Management§ responsible for management of internally created content from its creation to

destruction or transfer to permanent archival storage

Shift in core products and services

§ More information to manage, but less of it in physical formats

§ More competition from vendors for cataloging, processing, access…

§ Increased demand for metadata and taxonomy management to meet

business needs specific to HBS

§ Voluminous increase in internally created digital information§ Faculty publications and administrative records, documents, and documentation§ Databases, wikis, i-sites, spreadsheets, websites, photographs, videos, podcasts,

weblogs, Second Life sessions, Facebook groups…

Changed customer service models

Just in case - Libraries attempt to anticipate information needs buy

acquiring what customers might need

Just in time – Libraries get the information when it is needed (resource

sharing)

Just for you – “I want the information that I need delivered to my desktop

when I need it!” (RSS feeds, purchase on demand, improved discovery

tools)

Definitions

§ Controlled vocabulary = list of terms explicitly enumerated, controlled

and published by a registration authority

§ Taxonomy = controlled vocabulary terms hierarchically structured with at

least one parent-child relationship to other terms in the structure

§ Thesaurus = networked collection of controlled vocabulary terms with

related or equivalent terms.

Perspective -

Perspective

§ the appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their

distance from the viewer wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

§ the interrelation in which a subject or its parts are mentally viewed ; point

of view cte.jhu.edu/techacademy/fellows/Hemmingson/webquest/slsdictionary_htlm.htm

§ the process of viewing something from a distinct vantage point; or, the

impression one has of an object or landscape from particular vantage

point www3.newberry.org/k12maps/glossary/index.html

Perspective (time)

X >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Y >>>>>>>

30 years of observation reveal a greater degree of change than 5 years

1967: AACR first published; OCLC founded

1968: First MARC publication issued

Perspective (Access)

1975 - Periodicals Rooms with hundreds of volumes of print

index/abstract/citation services – each with its own taxonomy

1985 - DIALOG – sequential searches of online serials information using

terms from dozens of paper thesauri with distinct vocabularies

Today – free-range, full-text searching across platforms, BUT!

An example-

1. In the West, ALL Swans were white

until 1697.

2. highly improbable and unpredictable

events can have massive impact

3. Humans attempt to create order

where there is chaos or to impose

order where there is none

4. Predicting the future is more complex

than analyzing what we know of the

past.

Perspective: What is The Black Swan about?

OCLC Subject : Uncertainty (Information theory) -- Social aspects. Forecasting.

Amazon Customer tags: decision making (46) risk (39)

intellectual meditations (32) complexity (24) history of science

(21) historical dimensions and perspectives (20) knowledge

(19) random (16) investing (15) chaos (12) philosophy (7)

LibraryThing: probability(33) economics(23) finance(20)

philosophy(19) mathematics(16) statistics(16) Business(13)

science(12) randomness(11) Psychology(10) risk(10) investing

(7)

Who’s managing what with which tools?

§ Multiple repositories for Content and Metadata

§ ILS/OPAC

§ Visuals Images

§ Archival Finding Aids

§ CMS Content Management Systems

§ Institutional Repositories

§ DAMS Digital Asset Management Systems

§ ECMS Enterprise Content Management Systems

Where do I find the words?

www.taxonomywarehouse.com

1. Over 660 Taxonomies

2. Classified by 73 subject domains

3. Produced by 261 publishers

4. In 39 languages

5. 65% produced in digital media

6. 100 directly licensable

Customized sets

Say what? Say how? Says who?

§ User terms (web analytics)

§ Cross-mapped thesauri – shared input§ Bombay = Mumbai=map coordinates=mail code=phone code§ Tradenames = generic§ English=French=Chinese=…

§ Corporate & Personal Name registries

§ Tag clouds and topic maps as finding aids

§ Cooperative tag binding

Stovepipes or silos vs. bridges and maps

§ KW search reveals only that which is explicitly stated within an object

§ Faceted searches against a single taxonomy can help or hinder

§ Metadata facilitates or protects/prevents/limits discovery§ Metadata embedded in objects§ Metadata stored in repositories with pointers to objects§ Digital Rights Management

§ Taxonomy helps narrow or broaden search within a structured hierarchy

§ Thesaurus widens search with inclusion of related/equivalent terms

§ Data Registries improve consistency

What next?

§ Smarter data-mining software§ Computational linguistics§ Entity extraction software

§ Cross-application tag aggregation§ Cooperative tag binding across platforms, professions…

§ Cooperative relationship and concept mapping§ For audience subsets§ By audience subsets

§ Attention metadata – ALL about individual user behavior

§ Perspective analysis and customized context = advanced personalization

Thank you!