July 27

Thom & I attended this lecture on information architecture, taxonomy and controlled vocabulary. Heady stuff. The speaker was a woman named Denise Bedford. She works at Worldbank and basically described their attempts to build a satisfactory search engine for their users and mentioned some of her findings. I thought it was pretty interesting, although a lot of it went over my head. She talks about some pretty common sensical stuff that is typically overlooked. For instance, she wants her search engine to be able to include misspellings. She pointed out how search engines like Google will ask, "Did you mean..." and then if you click 'yes', well you've lost all the misspelled hits. It's not completely impossible that you can find some relevant information that has a misspelling. Anyway, things like that for 90 minutes is how it went. I was interested to hear about their success with Teragram, which is an information processing software package - basically it's the type of program that was looking to take my indexing/abstracting job away. It lost out to the much cheaper Indian labor force but it sounds like the software has advanced to a point where it is pretty successful and needs only minimal human supervision. Interesting... I'm sure Gale is all over that.

Beyond that, I processed CDs in the morning and tried to find "treasures" in the afternoon, same as usual.