Wednesday, February 15, 2006

This Is a Job for... a Cognitive Librarian!

Okay, so remember that post wherein I wished someone would do a research project about people's idiosyncratic filing systems, how they think about the organization of their home libraries, and so on? Well, there is a website that does something similar: Library Thing. Unsystematic, but interesting. In fact, probably most interesting because it's unsystematic.

(It strikes me that I could probably stand to do a bit of research before posting some of my brilliant ideas. But I probably won't, because the thing that gets me interested enough to do the research... is the musing.)

(It also strikes me to wonder what insights a cognitive psychologist might bring to filing system research.)

Ezra Pound apparently experimented with a truly idiosyncratic filing system: he would hang things off the ceiling by strings. I wonder what Pound would have made of a "tag cloud"; and I wonder further what use a research library could make of such a thing. Also, somewhere I've seen a sort of "dynamic cloud" that shifted links three-dimensionally as I clicked through it... it was neat, but I couldn't think for the life of me how what problem it solved. I also can't remember what it was called, or where it was.

What a mess this post is.

1 Comments:

At 9:02 PM, Blogger M Taher said...

Thanks for this cognitive stuff. Information Visulization needs cognitive (i.e., knowledgable) librarians on this planet. Because, affective (i.e., feelings) or pshycomotor (i.e., doing) domains (in bloom's taxonomical lingo) are required on other planets.
I have added your's in my professional links.

 

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