Who Loves Lists?

Well, I guess I do. Who knew? Not only have I turned into a list maniac about Jordan and our Europe plans (you should see the spreadsheets), my school life has turned into listmania too! I have been working on the last big group project for my Information Retrieval class and I'll just tell you a little bit about what we have to do.

My group has to read 15 articles and create a searchable database to house them and records to represent them and vocabularies to search them by. The searchable part is what is difficult. We each read a few articles and then we had to create what are called pre-coordinated vocabularies and post-coordinated vocabularies for the concepts in the articles. The Vocabularies are the terms that you would search for in a library catalog or database. So we have to determine what the concepts of the article are and guess what terms would most likely be searched to put on our record. Each term or term phrase is associated with an article (or sometimes several articles).

The Pre-coordinated terms are the hardest I think because we have to combine several terms that represent the articles. Example: If the article were talking about how to train poodles we would create a subject heading string that looked like this "Dogs-training-poodles". But perhaps several more until we had adequately covered the article We have to anticipate the users search methods and make sure that the terms are enough the same (aggregation) and enough different (discrimination). (There may be many articles about Dogs, but as we start to descriminate the terms, training, poodles, it becomes more specific - make sense?)

Anyway, working as a group has also been challenging. One persons terms say "User Interfaces" and the other says "Patron Interfaces". They may mean exactly the same thing but trying to combine 5 people's different terms that use the same words for the same thing has been a tasky tootle. I volunteered for this part, and it has taken more time than I thought. It's not "hard", but it is time consuming.

All that being said, I have enjoyed them mental excersize of breaking information into its largest concepts on down to its smallest. There is something about disecting information that way that is soothing to me, like those little sand boxes that you rake through with a tiny fork. Call me crazy.