IR self-submission and metadata quality

Thinking of self-submission of one’s own work into a repository and the quality of the resulting metadata, particularly subject metadata …

Any cataloguer who has ever tried to catalogue a technical report which helpfully includes user-submitted keywords will be conversant with the potential inadequacies of such keywords. It is not unusual, in my experience, for reports on highly complex subjects to include only vague keywords, such as “aspects”, “experiments” and “research”.

It is possible to build up highly complex controlled vocabulary infrastructures into repository software, so different user groups can access their own specialised vocabularies; which is great as far as that goes. But sometimes freeform keywords are the best option in a particular case. So how best to encourage users to choose high-quality, relevant keywords, without having to provide them with pages-long advice?

 

Where to from here?

Now that the 23 Things project is finished, the Techapillan mind has been busy pondering the direction of this blog. To keep or not to keep? If to keep, to change or not to change?

After some deep Techapillan thought, the many fans of this blog will be delighted to know that they’ll still be able to get their occasional fix of Techapillan wisdom, albeit with a rather more focused approach.

As Techapilla’s work focus currently revolves around institutional repositories, open access and electronic resources, those are the areas most likely to be the subject of Techapilla’s much sought-after wisdom.

Welcome to the journey. May it be a productive one!

 

Forgotten blog posts

Since we were supposed to write a blog post about each of the 23 Things, I’ve gone back just to check I’ve written something about each thing. So this is a catchall post for all those Things I missed posting about. Since I’ve made 20 posts and there were 23 Things, I’ve obviously missed posting about at least 3 Things. Hmmm …

Back in Week 10, we were supposed to try out wikis and add a pic of our pet. Guess which one is Techapilla’s?

Back in Week 4, we were supposed to comment on other people’s blogs. Yep, done that. Even commented on my own.

Back in Week 11 … Week 11? Where’s Week 11? What was Week 11? Now Techapilla is curious. Was Week 11 inadvertently dropped? Advertently dropped? Deemed unsuitable for a scholarly academic library? Or was Week 11 more prosaically combined with another Week? (Techapilla may just have encountered one of the disadvantages of blogs – they provide a platform to ramble on about the most banal topics!)

OK, all done. Time to put 23 Things to bed. Not so sure about this blog. Time will tell.

 

End of 23 Things

Well, Techapilla has done it. All of those 23 Things now completed.

It was fun while it lasted, and I did learn a lot. Most of the Things I was already aware of, but hadn’t necessarily tried them out. So this was a great opportunity to do that.

So what sticks in the mind?

Firstly, I had a great discussion with Jenny Levine of The Shifted Librarian about gaming in libraries, and the role of libraries in the community in general.

Next, Second Life has proven to me that my current life is rich and fulfilling and I have absolutely no need of a fake life. OK, bit of a cheap shot there. But if you’re thinking I’m not too impressed with Second Life, you’d be spot on.

I’ve been a fan of Library Thing right from the start, and still am. Lots of potential there to incorporate it into the Library’s web pages or webpac.

Of most practical use? Blogs and wikis. Lots of potential there too, to improve our internal and external communications.

Vodcasting was interesting but irrelevant to me – ask me to take another look in a couple of years, and I might have a different impression.

And the most fun? Without a doubt, the image generator task!

 

Get a life!

Well, Techapilla did it! He signed up and downloaded Second Life and got himself an avatar. OK, it didn’t last long. Ten minutes max. Took 10 times as long to download the thing and install and then download an update and install that.

And no, Techapilla didn’t like Second Life at all. Especially when he found himself out there in the Second Life public with no clothes on! Luckily, clothes suddenly appeared on the toned Techapilla bod after 5 minutes or so, just when he was about to run for his life out of shameful modesty.

Hmmmm. Don’t really have much to say about Second Life beyond that, and that it was clunky to play on my home computer. Images took ages to appear, and movement was jerky. So that’s a problem with my computer, not with Second Life itself. But I don’t think Techapilla will be back anytime soon. I admit Techapilla has a bit of a mental block about Second Life and just can’t understand what the attraction is.

Techapilla can’t help thinking that Second Life is a novelty that’ll wear off sometime in the not too distant future.

We will see. We will see …

UPDATE: Techapilla cancelled his Second Life membership in a hurry! Despite having a “free” account, Techapilla received a “billing failure” email. While there wasn’t any risk of Techapilla being cheated, as he hadn’t provided his credit details; and Techapilla is savvy enough anyway to detect phishing scams – and this wasn’t one of them – it is definitely unsettling to receive bills for something you think is free.

 

Vodcasts

Nearing the end of 23 Things – up to the 21st thing already. And this one was quite an interesting one, although not in the way my treasured fans (yes, that’s you, dear reader) may expect.

Despite the title of this post, the 21st thing is principally about podcasting. But since podcasting is meaningless to someone with my particular suite of talents and traits – think about it! – I chose to concentrate on vodcasting instead.

Now, because of these special talents and traits of mine, I have a very specific requirement of any vodcasts. They must either be subtitled or have closed captions (drat, surely that doesn’t mean that Techapilla’s cover has been blown?).

Despite searching high and low for vodcasts which fit one of these requirements, the results were very sparse. None of the dedicated vodcast websites searched included any vodcasts meeting these requirements. There were a couple of mentions in Google of closed captioned vodcasts for academic purposes, and pursuing that trail further may have actually yielded a suitably captioned vodcast or two. But entertainment was the aim, so I didn’t bother.

I did discover that PBS’s NOVA ScienceNow includes captioned videos; and there is an RSS feed for the vodcasts also. Unfortunately, the videos linked to by the feed don’t include the caption options. And the captioned videos on the website – to cut a long story short – aren’t working for me.

Will give NOVA another try at work, in hopes of getting those captioned videos working. So there may be an update to this post early next week.

In the meantime, my preliminary conclusion about vodcasting is that it is too new a technology to have yet started providing much support in the way of captioned and subtitled vodcasts. So not much use to me at this point. Maybe that’ll come later; but if it does, one thing is a foregone conclusion – only a miniscle proportion of vodcasts will ever be captioned.

UPDATE: OK, the captions work at work. It appears that the captions only work under QuickTime, not Windows Media. But as far as NOVA ScienceNow goes, captioned vodcasting is a dud, as the vodcasts don’t include the captions and the feeds just include a direct link to the m4v files, not to the streaming video with the captioning options. So useless as far as captioning goes.