Hullistic

It has been a good week for the oral history project though the project has morphed into essentially a digitization effort for the semester. No trouble though, since I plan to keep working as a volunteer. There is still room for someone to work with me in the Spring for directed project credit.

I received the sample files digitized from the reels. They sound decent and match up to the print material in the 3-ring binders so I received permission to move forward and get all of the reels digitized which should be done in the next week. Of course digitization is only the first of a multi-step process. For these recordings to actually be useful I need to combine files because some single interviews span multiple tapes. I also need to clean up the noise and levels of the recordings. I think I can manage this in Audacity but it will take some time.

Also, now that I know the print material matches, it can be marked for digitization as well. I have not looked at every page but random sampling suggests that there are typewritten transcripts, deeds of gift and even some subject matter indexing for all of the reel interviews. I am going to ask my employer to donate conversion of this material because they use the absolute best OCR technology in the industry.

Of course I still have to catalog and classify so there is still some library work, but digitization had become the primary issue for the semester and rightly so given the people whose histories are contained in these recordings.

I spent the last two days at the Oral History Symposium in Oklahoma City which was fun. I met some nice people, got my copy of “Doing Oral History” signed by Donald Ritchie and saw overviews of several existing projects. I will post more in the future as I have the opportunity to look them over more fully but Murmur and Celebrate Oklahoma Voices are particularly interesting…I wish I had known about them during Dr. Martens’ Digital Collections course.

This is so much fun…what if I am an archivist?

Met at the Historical Society on Saturday and discussed the current status of the oral history project and looked into the available technology. As previously noted the Society uses Past Perfect version 4.0. Some investigation shows that this version has an oral history module so next week I’ll be spending some time on site at the Society and on the phone with tech support to learn how to activate this module. Once it is activated I will work with it to learn how to use for cataloging, indexing and otherwise organizing oral history recordings and related files & documents.

Based on Saturday’s conversation the scope of my project has become better focused. The preliminary scope is to:

1. Create an overall project management plan including phases and a work breakdown structure to meet the immediate project needs and allow the project to continue beyond the fall 2009 semester.
2. Develop a funding strategy for immediate needs and for the ongoing project
3. Install & Configure the oral history module of past perfect
4. Digitize existing analog reels & cassettes delivering the audio on both compact disk audio tracks and MP3 files
5. Preserve existing analog reels & cassettes
6. Digitize existing paper documents to PDF format
7. Develop and implement a plan to organize all content, both physical and digital using the Past Perfect 4.0 oral history module. This strategy will carry forward as new content is added.
8. Insure that digitized files (MP3 audio and PDF documents) are included in the present backup strategy

These items represent the scope and not the specific tasks required which will be in the project work breakdown structure.

So it turns out that I have really just completed most of what PMI calls the “Initiating” phase of this project and I only just now am entering the real planning phase. It is tempting to jump right in to the “Executing” phase and in some sense that is happening as I work on Past Perfect, finish and submit the RFP, and plan for funding but to insure the continuation of the project beyond my “running” it, I think a solid project plan is worth the time and it has been part of the list of deliverables for course credit since the beginning anyway.

My list from last week included 3 items: 1). Completion of the RFP to convert analog tape to digital format, 2). Completion of the historical society technology audit and a wish list, and 3). A list of realistic grant opportunities.

I have the list of grant opportunities, and have completed the tech audit as far as is possible without incurring charges from the Society’s IT vendor. As to the RFP, I thought I had it close but after attending a preservation workshop sponsored by SLA presented by Amigos Library Services where I learned more about the process I am going to revisit the RFP and talk to a contact at Amigos for some advice…I want to get it right so that I need not do it again and so that I can rely on the responses for gaining funding.

I was recently introduced to Nicholas J. Belkin’s “Anomalous States of Knowledge.” Belkin’s position is meant to inform study of human information behavior and design of information retrieval systems.

One is in an Anomalous State of Knowledge when one is aware that they have a gap in knowledge but are uncertain as to how to fill it and also uncertain as to what counts as filled. Said another way, when you know you don’t know and you aren’t sure how to learn what you don’t know and how to tell when you come to know, you are in an anomalous state of knowledge. For Belkin this state is in relation to a goal one wants to achieve or a problem one wants to solve so the anomalous state of knowledge is relative to those particulars.

For example, suppose a child is diagnosed with a disease. The parents of the child naturally desire to get the best care possible for their child but how do they know what counts as the best care? In order to learn, they decide they first must know all they can about the disease, how it’s been treated, what studies have been and are being done and which doctors are experienced in treatments, the success rates of those doctors, which are involved in the research, in clinical trials and so on and so forth. Getting their child the best care is the parent’s first milestone to achieve with the ultimate goal of making their child well. At the moment that that becomes the goal and they recognize the gap in their knowledge along with the uncertainty of how best to fill it, they are in Belkin’s Anomalous State of Knowledge. And they stay in an Anomalous State of Knowledge as they seek out information to fill the gap and as they grapple with the uncertainty of whether the gap is truly filled properly. Now these parents may be in different anomalous states of knowledge along the way, but each cognitive state is still anomalous and so still fits Belkin’s description.

With that example in mind then we can consider where these parents go for information and how they acquire it in order to fill the gaps, achieve the goal and solve the problem. That is, we can reflect on their information behavior.

Belkin supposed that the written word was a message that contained not only the explicit content but also the cognitive state of the sender of the message (the author). Belkin explicitly says that the author’s cognitive state includes his or her purpose, intention, desire and also their beliefs about who the recipient might be and the recipient’s state of knowledge vis-à-vis the subject of the message.

This latter part looks to me a like Belkin is saying that the author is makes assumptions about the recipient and that those assumptions are part of the information of the text or message they are sending. Not wild guesses exactly but nevertheless assumptions based in part on the author’s own beliefs, desires and intentions regarding the potential audience for the message.

Recalling the parents in the example, they are engaging in information behavior because of their own purpose, intention and desire and they select information based on their beliefs about the author and his or her state of knowledge vis-à-vis the subject of the message. Thus the parents, the seekers of information, are making assumptions too. Again, not wild guesses, but nevertheless assumptions based in part on the parent’s own beliefs, desires and intentions regarding the author of the message AND ALSO assumptions about their own states of knowledge.

To me, it is reasonable to describe both the authors and the information seekers in Belkin’s view as operating under hypotheses about the other. And I’ll quote Willard Quine who says “People adopt or entertain a hypothesis because it would explain, if it were true, some things they already believe.”

I suggest that Belkin’s anomalous states of knowledge are states in which information seekers develop, tacitly and rapidly in most cases, hypotheses about themselves, their knowledge gaps, the information they need, the places to get information, and even about the mediums of delivery and the authors of the information they do find. I further suggest that these hypotheses are required as a means to “hook in” what seekers are looking for and finding, to what they already know. If this is right then it means that information retrieval systems must include tools to exploit those hooks while also adding to, or altering, the stock of knowledge already connected to them.

This may not imply anything new to information studies. Then again, maybe considering people as hypothesizing during their information search can be a useful way of describing the situation.

I understand how my examples might suggest that I have set theory in mind, but I do not.

The point is to show that the kinds of collections about which we have been learning this semester are subjective, particular and stipulated. That is to say that a collection *is* whatever the particular collector(s) and/or particular user(s) SAY it is in each particular instance. There seem to be very few expedient global or objective characteristics of collections, digital or otherwise. It being then a matter of stipulation, theorizing about the language used to stipulate in particular instances seems more useful than wild speculation about universal features of ALL collections.

I am essentially asserting that information studies contains a lot of wild speculation in search of non-existent, or at least impractical universals, an issue that is illuminated nicely by asking “what is a digital collection?” I think that this issue, like others within the discipline, is a merely verbal dispute. Recognizing it as such, I think theorizing over linguistic practices is preferable to theorizing over collections in order to get anywhere.

So, I do not theorize about collections per se, I am more interested in the descriptive language. Does my using of the term ‘collection’ carry an ontological commitment? Maybe, but the commitment would still have to be described.

All of That said, set theory is, by definition, the study of collections where the fundamental relation is membership…so there is apparently *some* overlap.

Digital Collections Theory.

I guess one can theorize about anything and generally I dig into theory.  But digital collections theory? I am not losing sleep over the abstract principles of collections, digital or otherwise and since I *do* tend to lose sleep over the abstract principles of many things, I wonder what is going on.

Basically, I am not sure that there is anything to gain by merely theorizing over collections. It is part of information *science* after all and everything about collections outside of intellectual property issues and predicting the future seems testable. If it is not testable, then maybe it ought not belong to the ISchool. One question that keeps repeating for example is,  “what *is* a digital collection?”. That’s a question into the nature of a thing or whether the thing exists in the first place…a metaphysical question…what qualifies the ISchool to answer?

My point is that the really interesting theoretical issues in information science that are not practically testable are not problems unique to the discipline. The issues *all* seem to be metaphysical concerns and in many cases are purely speculative which means they are not science at all and probably aren’t anything else either.

I don’t actually think that collections theory is a mass of impractical, useless speculative metaphysics, I just think that it *looks* like it as the result of linguistic muddles. I have been accused of channeling Wittgenstein on this point. I freely accept that I am doing exactly that…he and many others I suspect, but only because it happens to be right.

Consider that next to my desk I have a full garbage can. Were I to remove the contents, photograph them and post them online, I would have a digitial collection. What *is* that collection? The answer is a matter of description: It is a collection of photos. It is a collection of photos of the contents of Dennis’s desk garbage can on December 3, 2008 at 10:00AM Central Time (the spacio-temporal specification matters, the contents are likely to change in a few hours and there are other garbage cans in my house). The contents of my garbage can include about 20 catalogs, I guess this a sub-collection. 5 of those are “Oriental Trading” catalogs…a sub-sub-collection. All of the garbage is made of some sort of paper..some is colored, some black & white…etc. I think you take the point that I can describe the contents of my garbage can in infinite ways…some people may not even describe the catalogs as garbage…maybe they are recyclables, or art & craft supplies. It is not even a matter of perpective! It is description.

Any group of stuff can be a collection, it merely needs be described as such. The factors that allow some stuff in and leave other stuff out are arbitrary and still linguistic. A collection of green things (colored stuff, or the environmentally friendly stuff?).  A collection of chairs (does this include ALL things upon which one can sit?). A collection of stamps (postage, rubber, concrete detail?) 

The way the group is described is the key to what the collection “is.” A collection is not anything at all in the metaphysical sense…it is a group of stuff under a particular description.  Thus I do not lose sleep because the theorizing is done, the only thing to theorize over is *why* particular groups of stuff are described as they are by particular individuals. If it’s not all linguistic, why is there so much emphasis on metadata, a method of…say it with me…DESCRIPTION!

OK, I admit it. My Knowledge Management thesaurus project has a bit of a hidden agenda. As a both a KM student and a job seeker, I feel that when I am asked, “what do knowledge managers do?” that I ought to have an answer.

When I was recently asked this question in a job interview, I nervously tried to discuss knowledge retention, knowledge audit and other vagaries. At some point I managed to pull myself together to say, “a Knowledge Management degree is a generalist degree not entirely dissimilar from an MBA, I mean, when you think of it in isolation, what does a Business Administrator do?” We moved on from the question and the rest of the interview is irrelevant. What IS relevant is my revelation that when I needed an answer to “what do KM’s do?”, not only did I have one…I think it is the RIGHT one.

Think about the question as I phrased it in the title of this post and start plugging in for X. We already have, “Knowledge Manager,” and “Business Administrator” so let’s add some other professional titles. Some are quite clear, vocational titles like “plumber,” “welder,” “electrician,” and perhaps “accountant.” But what about “general manager,” or “engineer,” or even “CEO?” We are all aware that job titles just do not cleanly tell the story of the work to be done.

Consider this example of the skills employers seek. Inasmuch as these skills can be taught, KM can teach them as well as anyone but the real point is that these are general skills desired by employers for ALL of their workers. Hard, targeted skills are important, clearly, a job programming in C++ requires the knowledge and skill to write in that language, but in this “knowledge economy” with the emphasis on organizational culture, the generalist has new life.

This may alter my Digital Collections project slightly. My intent was to build a vocabulary and use it to inform curriculum development and job exepectations. But as my advisor pointed out, there IS curriculum and there ARE job expectations today, even though KM terms are ambiguous and/or vague.

I think that my concern over what knowledge managers do in the “hard skill” sense is misplaced, and in fact the question itself may be flawed but at minimum Knowledge Managers must have one relevant skill, tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness. So the right way for me to go about building my thesaurus is to embrace the ambiguity and look at job descriptions to solve for X not universally, but in particular situations.

In considering the  “Digital Collection Proposal Framework’s” basic questions for my digital collection, the first 2 items on the list keep ringing in my ears. That they are the first two items is important too.

1. What is the purpose?

2. Who are the targeted users, what do they need…?

When I consider a particular collections idea these two questions resonate a a little differently with me. Effectively the question I ask myself is “who cares?”

In part this is fueled by the response I received from 10 random folks when I floated last week’s LinkedIn idea past them…100% responded saying they would not participate in, or contribute to such a system. They all gave slightly diferrent reasons but  essentially there was a 50/50 split between “what’s in it for me?” and “who cares?” I actually think I can handle the first but confronted with the second, I am forced to wonder who really does care?

I am not complaining mind you because the point I think is to build something of value to others (even if “others” is a small number). The point is that in this framework it’s the first question to answer. What if the answer is only that I care?

Thinking this way has me reaching for my marketing hat where on the one hand the answer is that if I care and I think others *should* care I have to create a sales message. If, on the other hand I first identify what a group cares about, create something for them and then create a message to notify them that what I have is available.

If I am comfortable pushing what I care about, I build one type of collection, if I a prefer instead having what others care about pulled from me, I build a different type. Ideally, it is a little of both but there has to be enough pull in the first place according to the framework.

Of course this push-pull issue is not limited to digital collections. Libraries (and everybody else I guess) probably need to constantly be asking themselves whether they are content to serve the pull (which I think libraries at least must do) or whether they in fact have something more than that that’s worth pushing.

Before you critize just remember that when it comes to my opinion, which is all this is, I ask the same question…who cares?