ASIS&T leftovers

Here are a bunch of things I forgot to mention earlier, including a bunch of links. I can't really vouch for most of these, as they are on my 'to look at' list.

JC Herz mentioned soldier blogs, such as My War as a profoundly weird moment in writing (or maybe in war). Realtime public dispatches from those involved. Once this I didn't mention before about her talk is that she seemed a little too enamored of the military for my taste. But she did make note of a split in her personality--during her adult life she has alternated between hippy and defense contractor.

She also mentioned a non-violent organizing strategy game as a role playing alternative to Command & Conquer-type games--but she didn't mention the name. Anyone???

Tim Berners-Lee did mention a couple projects that I haven't been tracking on and feel silly for not knowing more about them:

• OWL
  
  an ontology description language designed for the web environment rather than for a work domain.
  


• SPARQL
  
  a query language for collections of RDF documents


• Longwell
  
  a browser for the semantic web

The k-blog group made me write down a bunch of URLs, including:

• Library Elf: RSS feeds for your books' due dates. I guess this would be a good service for people like me that are continually handing in their books late. (I know, it's embarassing--I work in a library. But mostly it's public library books that get overdue. The ones borrowed from work get back on time.)


• Share your opml is for those addicted to RSS feeds. This is a way to share your subscription files.


• Frassle looks like it just might be the aggregator for me. It also has online bookmark management. Me thinks I'll have to check it out.


• And what's this? A collaborative blog that moves from host to host? What an interesting idea. I know what I'll be reading on the reference desk today: Tangledbank. Hey--it's work related. The authors are scientists.

In another program, survey results were presented that showed that digital collections have a problem distinguishing collections and subcollections. It's sort of a conceptual problem, but one I think is probably valid: Is a library's main entry point to digitized works a collection and then every grouping inside of that entry point a subcollection? Is that main entry point not even a collection? It seems to be a nesting problem. One conspicuous absence: what do the users think? I tend to think that they are confused. Not by the nesting problem--but rather, by what the heck 'digital collections' are. We have a link that says that on our homepage, but most of the other links on that page also point to things that are collections of things that are digital. See the problem?

And that is about all I have to say for this year's conference. Don't trust my views? Go here to see a few others who were blogging. I'm shocked, simply shocked, there aren't a few more.