Morales de Escárcega digital collection

Who would have thought, certainly not Morales Diaz back in 1899, this collection would one day be available to the world. He spent his life collecting books, manuscripts and broadsides about the history of Mexico. He guarded his collection and passed it down to his family who continued to maintain and protect the collection through the years. And now thanks to the digitization efforts of the University of Arizona Library, it is a digital collection which everyone can use and enjoy. The exlibris in his books read,“Verba volant scripta manent.” Here loosely, translated, “the word flies, the written is permanent.” He certainly had a purpose in collecting and maintaining these records, he believed in preservation and was a self-taught bibliophile.

For Morales the written was permanent and his preservation efforts were a success. But I find it ironic that these days the written in not permanent at least not in the digital world. This blog will be far from permanent and issues of preservation are a constant nag in the back of everyone’s mind. And yet here is Mr. Diaz’ collection, preserved and so far permanent.

Check out this awesome collection if you get a chance. Of course it will really be something special and very helpful if you can read Spanish (don’t worry there is plently of English translation and historical accounts). The collection includes nearly 2,800 books, 80 documents (broadsides and manuscripts), and about 10 photographs some of which are not currently in the on-line collection but digitization efforts are underway.

I suppose what attracts me to this collection more than some others is the personal care and passing down of these records for more than 100 years. It is absolutely fantastic that these documents have been preserved and are now available in this collection. One of my favorite pieces is a map from 1819 during Mexico’s war against Spain for independence, which was finally achieved when Mexico City was liberated in 1821. I have posted it here for all to look at.

 

digital blasphemy

There has been some talk lately about digital vs virtual vs physical, or maybe not versus but how they relate and how they are different. Some believe the terms virtual and physical to by synonomous, but I believe there is a distinction. There is the physical item that has been digitized and the things that are born digital, meaning there is no physical from which is came. The bottom line of the discussion so far is digital items can have a physical counterpart and are therefore not truly “virtual”.  The digital collection is more of a reflection of a physical collection where one can often borrow or request copies of the digital item such as from a library website. 

Items that are truly virtual only live in the digital world and have no physical counterpart and tend to be born digital. The name virtual means “not real” . So we cannot borrow anything from a Virtual Library. And yet this is not true, as I have just borrowed an image from this digital/virtual collection of Mr. Bliss and from looking at the website I can print out the images which then creates a physical counterpart.  I don’t know if anyone even cares about these distinctions, or if they truly exist, but I find this subject very interesting. Please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts or arguments concerning possible distinctions or similarities of digital and virtual.

I really like the idea of things being born digital, in that they would not exist without computers and the latest technolgies that enable them to be present and available to anyone who can find them on the web. In fact, I find it fasinating that the digital collection I am going to highlight here today would possibly have no role in a non-digital world.

It is simple in it’s function, it is a site for computer wallpaper. It’s called Digital Blasphemy and the wallpaper designs are the creation of Ryan Bliss. He states on his site that, “The feeling I got when I first starting making virtual worlds could only be described as godlike. I was adding (and deleting) worlds at will, and deciding which stars would shine and how bright. One of Webster’s definitions for the word blasphemy is “the act of claiming the attributes of deity”. Since this was exactly what I was doing on my computer, the name sort of fit”. He notes that he means no offense, the term is symbolic; much like his digital art, I think.

Although the site is mostly member only, it is a great example of a digital collection and the type of creativity that has been enhanced by digital technology. There is a free gallery of older material and so I have posted a sample below for everyone to see, otherwise feel free to check out the website.

 

 

 

dewey decimal: a taxonomy

This will probably be my last post on taxonomies unless I find some interesting link or article that I decide to post later on. But what I wanted to end with was a presentation of taxonomies that everyone can hopefully relate to in their lives. As we have previously discussed a taxonomy is a system for how items are arranged; they can be either heriarchical or not. The dewey decimal classification is probably the most widely known and used taxonomy or possibly the Library of Congress. Both are organized systems, a classification of order to arrange a group of materials. For some reason what threw me initially was Garshol’s mention of a taxonomy being part of metadata but not metadata itself, but what I think he must have been referring to was the relationship between the two; how they work together.

Bottom line what I want everyone to understand is that the taxonomy is used to organize the information and the metadata is the detailed record of that information. And even though small collections can be organized, as the number of items increase it is all the more imperitive to organize the information for findability. It is also imiportant not to allow the taxonomy to grow “oversized” splitting the classifications into too small of sections and subsections. I am probably not using the correct terminology here but I am trying to use normal terms for everyone to understand. The way I see it, rather than making the organization (taxonomy) too complicated one uses the imbedded metadata within each record for more precise searching and quick findability, with the use of indexing, subject headings, key words and tagging, etc.

Ultimately, the structure (taxonomy) brings order to a group/body/set of information or a collection of objects, ie photographs, museum artifacts or comics.

Furthermore, as I alluded to above, a taxonomy in and of itself is incomplete. I say this because it is limited or rather insufficient when we examine the meaning or content of the information and it’s ”record”. The taxonomy organizes the information but does not provide detail in describing the object, this I believe, must be the meaning behind Garshol’s relationship with metadata to taxonomies. The metadata fills this gap in the structure system, providing detail about the record and increasing its findability.

In an article by Denise Bruno and Heather Richmond I found a basic guide for creating a taxonomy (I have not included the details):

• Plan and gather data
• Build a draft taxonomy
• Create a pilot
• Refine and finalize
• User training
• Ensure continued development

The authors are writing about business taxonomies and records management and offer important criteria for creating a taxonomy. They emphasize that a records manager who is developing a taxonomy needs a good understanding of the organization and business process as well as terminology relevant to the industry. They also need a deep appreciation of the needs and benefits of information retrieval. And those who develop a functional taxonomy for an organization become invaluable because they become experts on the overall operations and knowledge of the organization. It seems like the taxonomy ends up being almost like an organized and searchable diagram of the organization.

Ok that’s it, I’m done.

my obsession with taxonomy and information architecture

Ok to answer some of my own questions from last week I have been doing some research. Luckily there are other taxonomy obsessed people out there and one of them is Samantha Bailey. Apparently she has a book and at least one article on the subject but I was able to find neither (I didn’t look that hard yet). But in an interview I found on the web she, as we hopefully know from last week, defines taxonomy as hierarchical schemes for classifying things. These taxonomies started long ago with Aristotle in 300 BC. And “modern” methods of taxonomic classification are attributed to Linnaeus, who introduced his methodology in the 1700’s. Linneaus was a botanist, and taxonomy was originally associated with biology and systematics (the term has obviously been adopted by library science, information architecture and classification schemes). Bailey notes that the taxonomy scheme should be a pure heirarchy with one to one relationships, meaning that items can be in one place only in a scheme, think family tree. But note there are polyhierarchical taxonomies where something can “live” in more than one place, think piano, both string and percussion classification.

I had also mentioned thesauri last week and Bailey also touches on the advantages of using a thesauri with a classification scheme. It is basically an information retrieval tool, used with in this case the taxonomy, that helps make connections between concepts. “An information retrieval thesaurus at its most basic relationship brings concepts together, grouping and clumping like terms. Subsequently the document that mentions the brown crayon and the separate document that discusses the sienna Crayola are both pulled together in the information system that has a thesaurus applied to it” (Bailey). The advantages of grouping or associating these like terms are very valuable and time saving in searching and retrieving information.

Well for me, this really helps in my understanding of taxonomies and how they are used. I am still a little fuzzy on how it inter-relates with metadata and why one would choose one over the other, but I still have some research to do on this subject. I’ll Start with Peter Morville’s book Information Architecture, which was recommended by Doc Martens a year ago( and by Bailey) and I think I better read it like now.

At the end of the article she gives a more complex and what I would term business defenition of taxonomy……….“A correlation of the different functional languages used by the enterprise to support a mechanism for navigating and gaining access to the intellectual capital of the enterprise.” (One of the more carefully justified definitions of taxonomy comes from research done by Alan Gilchrist and Peter Kibbey of TFPL, a leading taxonomy consulting firm. The definition can be found in the executive summary of the report “Taxonomies for Business: Access and Connectedness in a Wired World.”

Wow!

If any of you want to read the article it’s on boxesandarrows by Christina Wodtke at http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/unraveling_the_mysteries_of_metadata_and_taxonomies