I’m giving the opening talk at this week’s “Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace II” conference at Garrett Seminary across the street from Seabury, and the topic will be the role of metadata in learning research skills, with a special emphasis on theological learners. In the first portion of the presentation, I talk through ways that metadata helped me learn which books my professors regarded as interesting and reliable — tangible, circumstantial metadata offered me important clues as a beginning researcher.
Of course, as libraries locate more and more of their metadata (card catalogs, circulation records) online behind more-or-less secure firewalls, beginning researchers have that many fewer clues to go on. When it comes to online resources — which many of our colleagues know only superficially, and which comes with much less [accessible] metadata — beginning theological researchers have significantly fewer breadcrumbs to follow.
The prevalent response to this problem has been the links page; the best of these provide annotations, but that’s hard and time-consuming, so useful annotations are uncommon. Several problems arise from links pages. First, they’re back-breakingly labor-intensive; only a researcher with good judgment and a troop of indentured student servants, or an independently wealthy researcher with no social life, can do a plausible job of keeping a links page up-to-date. Even then, new resources appear, contents of sites change, and the links page falls behind the forces of innovation and linkrot.
In the second phase of the presentation, I’ll introduce the theory behind Google’s PageRank algorithms, and Technorati’s indexing. Then I’ll describe steps such as Google’s new personalized search options and the seeded-search about which talked to Kevin Marks. The point here is that ingenuity in searching design will garner more interesting and (quite likely) more useful results with less labor than maintaining vast compendia of links pages.
I’ll add in stuff from a number of posts I’ve noticed on others’ sites recently — and if you make some useful comments, I’ll be sure to improve the presentation by incorporating the insight you offer (or provoke!).
Posted by AKMA at April 13, 2004 10:46 PM | TrackBack