Dan Brickley’s Taxonomy of Everything

Posted by David Weinberger

We’ve been working with the brilliant Dan Brickley all summer (he’s very modest, so now I’ve embarrassed him) trying to figure out how to use all available metadata to slot Web content into library categorization schemes automagically. For example, if we include in our collection—or, more to the point, if the DPLA includes in its collection—library-worthy material such as TED talks, is there a way in which we could automatically categorize those talks within the general mix of library items? We’d like to be able to do this at scale, even if roughly.

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How we assess credibility

Posted by David Weinberger

Soo Young Rieh is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. She recently finished a study (funded in part by MacArthur) on how people assess the credibility of sources when they are just searching for information and when they are actually posting information. Her study didn’t focus on a particular age or gender, and found [SPOILER] that we don’t take extra steps to assess the credibility of information when we are publishing it.

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ShelfLife, LibraryCloud, and DPLA

Posted by David Weinberger

We’re really really really pleased that the Digital Public Library of America has chosen two of our projects to be considered (at an Oct. 21 open plenary meeting) for implementation as part of the DPLA’s beta sprint. We worked insanely hard all summer to turn our prototypes for Harvard into services suitable for a national public library. We’re proud of what we accomplished, and below is a link that will let you try out what we came up with.

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