Tom Cotton’s 8109

Our vision calls us to improve the collection by engaging users and buidling better metadata tools.

What does that mean?

In our thoughts it means we have to address three elements of collection management:

1. Discovery
2. Evaluation
3. Metadata

[hmmm sounds like another triptych POC… we all quickly agreed we really don’t want to address each in isolation as POC 1 was done. Each POC phase will address each simultaneously but make each more sophisticated each time.]

So the vision means to us

• Collection - our discovered, evaluated and categorised web resources.
• To improve - both quality and quantity of web resources.
• Discovery - means any source of collected web resources. For example wikipedia, google, del.icio.us, flickr.
• Engaging users - making it easy for them to suggest eg their del.icio.us feeds, bookmark collections, wikipedia contributions.
• Evaluation - we already have well defined edna collection policy. Currently it’s largely a manual process.
• Collection Policy - reflected technically as filtering in and out.
• Meta-data - categorising web resources; again a largely manual process.
• Tools - automating capture of metadata

Boiling this down we have set for ourselves three clear goals:

1. Discovery
Diverse and high quality resources from non-traditional sources include social network communities, RSS, wikipedia, etcetera.

2. Evaluation
Automate the evaluation process based on edna collection policy.

3. Meta data
Automatic learning, abstraction and categorisation.

Onwards & upwards! Let’s start the brainstorming…