Tom Cotton’s 8109

We walked out of today’s brainstorming meeting excited about a practical understanding of how we could fulfil our vision.

We’re looking at touching each of the big stepping stones for collection management:

From the Internet…

=> Discovery => Evaluation => Metadata =>

…Create a Collection suggestion

Nick had an idea to engage users: finding the wisdom of the crowd in the madness of the masses. We’ll evaluate a user’s del.icio.us tagged websites against the edna collection database to reveal who’s on-topic and who’s off-topic.

Nelly was looking at throwing the ‘knowledge’ embodied in the edna collection and categorised at a machine learning tool to evaluate websites associated with a del.icio.us tag.

What I realised is these two ideas are about discovering both authoritative users and authoritative tags. Like myedna POC, there’s also authoritative websites (resources) but we think that’s a step too far for this POC.

Evaluation only needs to be addressed too - a basic black list filter will do for now. In future, we’ll also look at collection quality and scope as criteria for evaluation.

Metadata will also initially tap into the quick and easy website’s name and tag. More thinking about that another day.

On thing about the meeting: whiteboards rock for brainstorming. Drawing out what each different one of us thought was quite inspiring. Some key principles were quickly discovered and everyone understood the one picture.

Lesson learnt from POC 1. Neat, hey?