Some More Library Stuff
The Salvo and Rosinki reading for this week really brought back memories. As the two scholars mention in “Information Design”, librarians, who have to deal with databases all the time, consider a few of the terms and concepts defined in this reading as key pieces of their lexicon: Precision, recall, and metadata.
One thing I’d like to stress about metadata (as librarians understand it) is that metadata is not only helpful for organizing “information for readers” (I’m conflating readers with end users here) (Salvo & Rosinki 110), or for making any readers’ search experience more pleasant – that’s a huge piece of the pie, but metadata can also serve other functions. The metadata Salvo and Rosinki are primarily interested in is descriptive metadata, which describes the characteristics/attributes of a document that’s in a database. Descriptive metadata is the kind that readers generally search for. Metadata created to express the different useful entity levels, or constituent parts, of a resource, is referred to as structural metadata; it can help a database user know, for example, how many parts there are to a journal or book. The last kind of metadata librarians occupy themselves with is administrative metadata – the metadata that isn’t much fun. This metadata lets those running the database know about the rights information of a document (will Copyright Law let someone download this?) and its preservation details (when was a document created, how long should we keep it around, and what special care is required for this document?). It’s important to note that some administrative metadata, likes rights metadata, is helpful for users, too.
The Salvo and Rosinki reading also brought some memories of this class’s earlier discussions of the meaning of language to mind. At some points in their paper, Salvo and Rosinki refer to documents and databases as “containers for information” (112) or “as written information conveyance systems” (114). As the members of this class know, these are problematic ways to view texts. Then again, much of the rest of the Salvo and Rosinki paper covers information design while viewing it through a rhetorical lense, at one point claiming that databases are organized according to a rhetorical context (109), so I’m not sure what to make of their inconsistent “containers” contentions.