1. Considering the question "How do you organize your closet?" (113) made me realize that most of the organization I do is entirely for myself. I am the sort of person who has a lot of clutter but knows roughly where everything is, but when I have to explain to someone else how I organize something--say, when I am trying to help my husband navigate the kitchen--I realize that my organizational strengths, if they exist, do not lie in creating a system so transparent that after five years of marriage my husband can figure out where I put the colander. So if it began with closets (again, loosely but for my purposes functionally organized), I would be fine, but creating information retrieval systems for other people is going to be more of a challenge.
2. "In design, there is rarely one perfect solution...design requires multiple decisions and compromises, and you can never be sure that you couldn't have designed the system better if you had worked on it longer." (114) So here I am planted squarely in the realm of the humanities: There Are No Right Answers! You Can Never Be Wrong! But Also, You Can't Know If You're Right! I love this sort of uncertainty, and yet it drives me batty. There is some comfort, though, in the problem-solving aspect: information retrieval begins with problem definition. This is how I think about more abstract philosophical thought processes: when I was teaching introductory religion, I pointed out to my students that each major religion poses one great human problem that needs to be solved, and then provides a solution. So much of life--information retrieval, philosophical meditation, plumbing--lies in figuring out what the problem is.
3. Metadata. I am intrigued by cloud tags, which I use on SmugMug, my photo hosting site. If you want to see what my tag cloud looks like, you can go here. If you want to see about 800 pictures of my daughter, you can click on "auletta." This is not only a shameless plug for my cute kid (it's that too), but also a good example of tagging on SmugMug in general. I use tags mainly for my own reference and for my family's, so any relative can click on his or her name and find any pictures he's in, or so I can click on "maine" and find all the pictures I've taken in Maine. If you search all of SmugMug for photos tagged Auletta, the overwhelming majority of results are pictures of my daughter, who has a conveniently (in this case) unusual name. Three of the other four are pictures of Ken Auletta. But if you search "tupelo," which is both a kind of tree (and what's tagged in my photos) and the name of a town in Mississippi, you will get pictures of water tupelos as well as pictures of Tupelo, Mississippi, and other pictures tagged or captioned with the word "tupelo" for whatever reason. If you search "tupelo mississippi," my tupelo tree pictures come up because they were taken in Mississippi (but not in Tupelo), so I have them tagged with "mississippi" too. There I go, throwing off your search. There is probably some inevitability in spurious results, even if "all and only the relevant information" is the ideal.
Tupelos in Mississippi, but not Tupelo, Mississippi.
The other thing I think is cool yet troubling about metadata is the idea that "the way that we group things affects what we know and think about them" (116). The first thing that popped into my mind was the classification of ancient Christian beliefs into "orthodox" and "heretical." We treat heretical Christian sects differently than what eventually became orthodox Christianity, even though who the winners-who-write-history would be was not clear when the heretics and proto-orthodox Christians were tussling it out. So we assign the descriptor "heretical," which is a pejorative, to sects that competed on equal ground with proto-orthodox Christianity at the time they flourished. Thus the person who designs information retrieval systems, and especially the person who assigns tags/descriptors/subjects/etc., must be conscious of the way that simply grouping things can reflect the designer's inherent biases.
Weedman, Judith. "Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying, and Evaluating Information Systems." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 112-126.
Updated July 9, 2009.
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