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Category Archives: collection improvement

Innovating collection management

Budget - Resources - Time

This week the POC2-EDITH team have been struggling with managing the magic project troika of resources, priorities and time.
Each one of us have had competing priorities affecting what we can achieve.  The will and skill are there. Education.au’s experience for Proof of Concept issues has revealed time is our most critical factor in these projects.  […]

Learning lessons at each milestone

This post on learning lessons is a week late. Learning the lessons at the end of each milestone rather than at the end of the project is a key POC characteristic.
The effort put into the Show and Tell 1 paid off. Everyone was engaged with the topic and there were even a few laughs. […]

Whiplashed by The Long Tail effect

Mike’s messing with my mind again. Here I was, innocently prep’ing the POC SnT and he waltzes in and drops another concept like a smart bomb for the collection management proof of concept.
While we’re trying to find authoritative social bookmarking users, we’ll be finding those bookmarkers whose sheer quantity of bookmarks can create a […]

The elves and the shoe maker

Code is being cut. Presentation is being prepared. Speeches are being spun. We have EDITH prepared for display next week.
The mining of http://del.icio.us/ is showing very interesting results with 1000’s of suggested sites based on the authoritative tags and users. Importantly the early indications of quality means the underlying assumptions are working well.
This is […]

What’s cool about evaluating?

Sarah has got us all thinking about the evaluation in while we prepare for show and tell 1. Hopefully this strategy will help minimise the project slippage.
Evaluation discussion stepped around filtering the SnT-1 discovered resource candidates. The list was fairly straight forward:

Check edna for duplicates
Check SPAM
Check blacklists
Check Scope criteria: language, geographic info.

All very […]

Telling shows and tells

Development time is tight - the SnT-1 delay needs to be two weeks.
Nick pointed out that we don’t need to delay thinking about SnT-2 and in fact we can start on scoping SnT-2 (next post).
But first we need to sort out the SnT-1. I prepared a running sheet for it; & crikey it is boring.
We […]

A POC’s unintended consequences

A serendipitous outcome from today’s meeting were some tips to make our jobs just that little bit easier - totally separate from POC.
With this POC, we’re wrestling in detail with understanding the way an Information Officer works to provide resources for educators.
Our discussion prompted Nick to suggest using Google alerts to monitor websites without RSS […]

Change tack? No. We evolve our decisions

POC is a fluid by it’s very nature. This POC-2 week has challenged how we want to run this project.
Evolution 0
The POC Collection Management engine / blackbox’s name has now evolved to:
EDITH - Edna Discovery Information Trapper and Hoarder (edna’s little sister).
Evolution 1
Cool thought for the day. We evolved the idea that we’re […]

Focusing on discovery

Last meeting achieved so much that this catch-up was really quite task oriented.
The POC leader Sarah is ill today so thankyou to her back-up, Pru, for stepping in and helped push the ideas about discovery onwards.
Two interesting broad questions emerged today:
1. What do we do with our list of suggested resources? Do we

Simply have a […]

Brainstorming discovery

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 […]