PIM for Gecks

Now, this should be cause for waking up this wintered blog - two new books on PIM and ones, if I may be honored to mention, that I had the pleasure of proofreading in some ways.

1. Jones, W. (2008). Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
   • Book info at Morgan Kaufmann
   • Book info at Elsevier
2. Jones, W. & Teevan, J. (Eds.) (2007). Personal Information Management. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
   • Book info at Amazon
   • Book info at the University of Washington Press

Incidentally, also in 2007, Dr. Jones published a chapter on personal information management in the 41st volume of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST).

Doing Today’s Job with Yesterday’s Tools - a Boxes and Arrows article by Patrick Dubroy. He writes about the problem of information fragmentation and suggests some solutions. ‘Been thinking about the same as I was creating a tutorial using Onfolio as a possible tool for information integration.

This blog has dwindled down to being a mere keeper of PIM-related links that I encounter out there in the wild, wide web. But once in a while, I come across one that tells us of other ways we can make better use of this tool. Here’s Your Blog, Your To-Do List Manager.

Heya PIM for Gecks! Have almost forgotten I have this blog on PIM. I came across this blog post on passwords today and I need a place to keep it so I can get back to it later. Which reminds me to also bring in the ff password-related articles which I have sent to a journalist some months back. [Oh, I’m everywhere!]

• Passwords you’ll never forget, but can’t recall
• Using personal photos as pictorial passwords
• Improving interface designs to help users choose better passwords
• Authentication using graphical passwords: effects of tolerance and image choice
• Minimal-feedback hints for remembering passwords
• A convenient method for securely managing passwords

I have not been posting to this blog ‘coz I’m busy learning new (to me) web development tools, like Drupal, for example. See my emerging Drupal site. It’s not quite ready but please take a look and see if you’d want to join me in this new direction, especially you people working in libraries.

While waiting patiently for data to be sucked out of my old-model, really-dead laptop (on somebody’s kind, free service), I have decided to data-mine LibraryThing. [Yes, yours truly who blogs on PIM have yet to learn how to regularly back up her files.]

I want to know how groups and institutions are using LT…

• Reference library for the U of Texas’ School of Information IT Lab.
• Bookmobile library of the Linn Library League in Oregon.
• New books library for St. Petersburg College in Florida.
• A store inventory for Book Stop, a bookshop in Hood River, Oregon.
• Library for a gay student group at Washington U in St. Louis.
• A church library in D.C..

How many LT users in places where I have lived? (where provided in their profiles and as of this writing)…

[search terms as entered in LT’s search tool]
• Athens, Ohio = 1
• Brattleboro, Vermont = 1
• San Francisco, CA = 39
• Tucson, Arizona = 15
• Portland, Oregon = 38
• Sri Lanka = 0
• Philippines = 54 (bless my compatriots!)

I haven’t lived in Seattle but I was a dMLIS student of the UW’s iSchool so I searched for Seattle too. At 170 LT users, that darn city seems to beat so many other US cities. How so? And why is Tim Spalding’s Portland, Maine only counting at 9?

Out of further curiosity, I wanted to know if any Iraqi has discovered LT yet… Well, only 1 result came up - a couple- and they appear to be expats. I was intrigued that one of their tags is “throbbing loins”. They describe themselves as “happily married…”

La da de. I must stop here before I mine the prurient side of me.

Tim Spalding of LibraryThing was angry about unfree classification systems to which I commented here.

Incidentally, the ASIST 2006 Annual Meeting has a workshop on social classification.

Just to see what’s being studied about classification outside of the U.S., I found this site for the Annual Conference of the German Classification Society. Hmmn, heavy-duty stuff - classification at a much more basic level…

Anyway, my old laptop died on me and I feel soooo unplugged. Scary how my routine is so attached to a machine. I have to get on another computer and be able to blog at least.

I’m trying to define the content that I will put in my Moodle courses and I’m trying to understand where information behaviors around social software come in. Take LibraryThing for example. Users of this tool organize their personal collections of books using metadata from Amazon.com, Library of Congress, 45 other libraries, or from the users themselves. The functions of finding and collocating information resources are accomplished not only through the use of these different sources of metadata but also through the creation of a social layer of metadata by which users’ preferences and profiles are related to one another. How do we account for these processes in our standards of information organization and in our understanding of information behaviors?

I’m thinking while I’m exploring. I have created an account. Searched for titles or authors that I have in my possession or that I have read in the past ten years. Clicked the item that best matches what I have (or read) in the results set and it is added to my library. Most of the records come with cover images and the usual metadata elements of author, title, year of pub, ISBN, and fields where I can enter reviews or other URLs related to the resource. I am shown links to users who also have the same items in their collection. I joined a group called Librarians who LibraryThing. And so many other features.

Now, if you look at My LibraryThing Catalog, I must say I really don’t have all these books in my possession. I was working from memory. Perhaps this is not a legitimate use of the tool. But I was using the tool to recollect the books that I have really dug into in the past ten years and this process has helped me reconstruct the contexts in which I have read these books. Like, I read Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the family because my tennis instructor in Sri Lanka was the husband of the sister of the author. Or my interest in Virginia Woolf peaked from reading a novel written by her husband Leonard who briefly served as a British civil servant in Sri Lanka. Or I’ve read C.S. Lewis at a time when I needed to get in touch with why I consider myself a Christian.

I really do not collect books. We’ve moved a lot. Books quickly take up a lot of alloted shipping weight so we gave them away each time we moved. I keep only a few on our shelves. My personal collection of books is more of a jangle of connections in my memory than they are an orderly line-up of physical books on my shelves. Tools like LibraryThing help me recreate and rearrange my collections by providing new ways of viewing and connecting to books.

P.S. - here’s a blog post on the ethics of what’s being cataloged on LT: what you really own, what your spouse/significant other owns, what you have read but don’t really own, what you have on your shelves but actually haven’t read, etc. What do you think?

Summer is ending. Whaddya do when your brain and hands are itching to be put to use and you’re still technically unemployed? Moodle, yes, moodle around.

In an effort to add teaching and web application development projects to my portfolio, I’ve downloaded to my computer and then uploaded to my web host server this open-source course management system called Moodle. At first, I chose the latest release (1.6.1) but my web host service does not have the required MySQL 4.1.16 or later version. So, I tried the earlier, bulkier but stable Moodle 1.5.4. The installation on my web host’s server went well except for a low php memory setting which I don’t have much control of.

So, here’s the shell of my Moodle installation. The interface appears cranky, it doesn’t look right sometimes and I suspect a tweak of the stylesheets is in order sometime. As you can see, I played around a bit with creating a course in Moodle just to explore some of its features. I find it rather too busy and I would need to trim it to a few basics for the series of tutorials I will be developing on the subject of reference management for research and scholarly purposes.

Most of the Moodle sites I’ve looked at seemed to have not gone beyond installation and surface exploration as I have just done. I tried hard to find one that used Moodle for information literacy courses but so far found none. The closest I could find that used it well for library-related courses is Electronic Resources & Libraries, an online community around the subject of electronic resources and digital services. Most of the courses offered were from ER&L’s first conference earlier this year in Atlanta, GA. Excellent set-up and presentation of conference materials (freely available) but I have not seen much discussion around the content. [Reminds me of someone telling me about the law of conversation conservation…]

It is interesting to note that the content on ER&L’s Moodle learning center is also given a stable and permanent residence in Georgia Tech’s institutional repository, SMARTech, which uses DSpace, another open-source software. I’m very interested to see how these tools are being put together to manage and make accessible digital resources to users in academia (and to those of us outside of it but who can exploit these resources too).

ER&L has already put out a call for participation for its 2007 conference in Georgia which reminded me to look up what’s going on with Code4Lib. I see, it is also having its 2007 conference in Georgia. The concerns of these two communities overlap at some points and it would be interesting to see if they would collaborate in the future.

But I moodle on…Thoughts on how library schools could better prepare their students for exploiting open-source software led me to The Chandos Series for the Information Professional. One of its upcoming title, Open Source Database Driven Web Development by Isaac Hunter Dunlap might be more helpful in preparing students for the technological side of libraries than a regular IR or database development textbook. I mean, given the time and inclination, library students and professionals can experiment with so many freely available software and learn hands-on about exploiting these for many uses.

Well, let’s see. I still have to show that I can indeed exploit Moodle to develop the series of tutorials I am planning to do. Installation and successful configuration was a big step but it’s only the beginning.

For those of us who cannot attend SIGIR 2006 up in Seattle, we can at least read the position papers and posters of the PIM workshop participants. An impressive community of researchers indeed.

Am looking at the papers describing the flow of information between public and private spaces. We in the library world should start taking note of this and design services to help our users manage that. Next week, I will be doing a presentation on the identity of information resources (call numbers, ISBN, ISSN, DOI, URI, SICI, etc.) and how these relate to workflows in libraries and data flows between agents in the publishing supply chain. It would be nice to also study how users use these information ‘nomenclature’ to find and keep information objects.