Christian, you raise some great points in response to my admittedly late
Friday provocation (one reason I do things like this periodically is to
get good responses from folks like you - I'm going to have to check out
folksonomies) I actually am fairly optimistic as well about the growing
ability to tag information more effectively over time as the tools get
more sophisticated, including automatic classification (which I expect
will eventually get to the point where its good enough, and is already
there within certain contexts). However, I'm also not sure that tools
designed to provide access to knowledge or information are necessarily
the same as tools designed to maintain records keeping systems, which
Nolene kind of touches upon. Again, there's a bit of an apples and
oranges conversation going on here. When I think of "big bucket", I
think of it as a way of applying retentions to large bodies of
information. It has nothing to do with how the information within that
bucket is organized, either by meta-data or a file classification
scheme. In fact, the whole attraction of big bucket to me is it can be
applied to mass quantifies of stuff that's not necessarily well
organized (e-mail) so you can get rid of it in a legal fashion! However,
ultimately the holy grail is not how the information is found, or how
its is presented, but how the metadata is assigned to unstructured data
so that it can be found and properly presented hopefully in compliance
with record keeping requirements. With more structured process oriented
systems, I really don't think there is even an issue, as the processes
are fairly mechanical.
Many of the issues here strike me as similar conversations I have with
our web builders group. They are always recommending new templates and
standards that are going to "fix" the county's (admittedly) horrific web
sites. Lots of visioning, lots of references to web gurus. However, the
problem is not with "look and feel", the real problem is a lack of
resources to develop the content that would give the sites value, and
the lack of a web leader to ensure consistency and maintain standards,
because the county doesn't want to pay for it. To me, the discussion of
big bucket vs. file classification seems to be a lot about "look and
feel" when the real issue is one of a lack of time/technology to do the
work necessary to make the metadata scheme work effectively in an
unstructured environment. When you start having that conversation, its
possible you may be able to deal with the problem now, not necessarily
at a theoretical future point. That's why some good ROI information on
this stuff would be wonderful - it would change the whole conversation
to a more immediately doable goal (I'm getting impatient!).
Unfortunately, I've been looking and can't say I've seen a lot that's
useful.
Have a great weekend and enjoy your music!
Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Fleet, Records, Electronics, Distribution and Stores
(FREDS)
1620 S.E. 190th Avenue
Portland, OR 97233
Phone: (503)988-3741
Fax: (503)988-3754
[log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Christian Meinke
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 4:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Big Buckets, iTunes and a different kind of records
management
Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]> wrote on 10/26/2007
03:24:56 PM:
> > If metadata tags consist of categories such as genre, artist, beats
per
> minute - or anything else - what's the difference of that type of
system
> and a file classification system - other than one is laid out
> hierarchically, and the other utilizes metadata tags? Don't both still
> use searchable key words of some kind? Doesn't the necessity of
> assigning a value to the item in question still exist? It doesn't
appear
> to me that there is a lot of difference here because the key challenge
> is.... the act of assigning a value to the item in question. While I'm
> sure I could download metadata to describe my wife's Partridge Family
> collection (I know a bucket I'd like to throw that stuff into....) I'm
> not sure if there is a records site that can automatically download
> metadata tags to that report I recently wrote at work.
Maybe not everything, but as you log in to your portal in the morning
the
stuff you work on can be tagged with your name, and maybe even the role
you
were playing when you interacted with it (Creator, reviewer, Approver).
If
you've got some ERP solution you can maybe even tie your documents to
specific business processes. To be sure we're not there yet, but we seem
to
be headed in that direction - though I admit I may be hopelessly
optimistic.
>
> Also, what one person calls things in their big bucket may not be what
> someone else calls stuff. For example, I would probably call anything
by
> KC and the Sunshine Band "INFUWCSCNY (Insufferable Noise Foisted on an
> Undeserving World Coming Soon to the Casino Nearest You)" while others
> might call it "Disco" or even "Nostalgia", yet my collection of Frank
> Zappa would be found under "Genius" while others might call it
"MSWRKDB
> (Music Significantly Worse than Road Kill with Dirty Bits)". What if
we
> start sharing buckets? Someone may say tomato and I may say red round
> vegetable (or is it a fruit?).... Is a controlled vocabulary
> unnecessary? If you gave your metadata driven machine to someone else,
> would it make any sense to them?
>
I'm not sure that's a problem - isn't that the approach of "folksonomy"
that as people use information and start tagging it for their personal
use,
value is added in unknown ways. Going back to the early days of music
file
sharing, I discovered lots of cool stuff by finding like minded users
and
relying on their classifications to find stuff that I in turn valued. I
suppose at some point you run the risk of information overload, and
something will fall through the cracks - but I'm not so sure those flaws
are any worse than the one's we experience today when things are
misclassified, or placed in the wrong bucket.
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