I wrote a piece over on my work blog that may be of interest to some of you. I took some time to write up the history of classification (in the library sense) and posted it to my blog.

A Brief History of Classification at TriviumRLG.

This is a re-working of a manual I created as the terminal assignment for a course I took in graduate school: “Basic Materials Repair” offered at Simmons College (Spring, 1999). Prof. Sheila Intner coordinated the class, and Todd Pattison of the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, MA provided lessons in repairs, resources, tools and a great deal of fun!

I finally “re-discovered” my course materials in 2011 and set about re-creating the text and images electronically, in a format usable by today’s computers. I am also incorporating the suggestions made by Prof. Intner which would have made my ’97’ a full ‘100!’ I hope the formatting updates make this easier to use. It is my intention to take this piece by piece and add photographic images and video.

I am releasing this work under a Creative Commons license. I do so in the hopes that others may add their knowledge, experience and questions to make it a better resource - I am far from being a true expert in conservation! In a nutshell, you may use this work for non-commercial purposes - ie, you can’t make any money from it - as long as you give me credit for what I’ve created and release your new version with the same license. I credit Mr. Pattison for sharing his knowledge and expertise with my fellow students and I; all I ask is that you do the same. Thank you!

Basic Material Repair by Christine Manuel Connors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A quick, funny read. Honest, down-to-earth and insightful, this book makes you feel as though Nora Ephron could be any one of your good girlfriends.

A collection of short essays, which really could have been from a blog, Ms. Ephron invites the reader into her mind and heart. There is very little by the way of name dropping, and factual, not self-promoting, references to her works.



View all my reviews

What do we do with the promises we make in our youth? Promises to others, promises to ourselves; promises that are wrapped in immaturity and inexperience; promises that should never have been? Do we have the courage to break those promises? Or do we transform them into personal rules that make our lives hard and unbearable?

but who do I need to be at any given time?

After all, if we can be whatever we want...

If we can be as expansive as the universe or as small as an individual part of ourselves...

Maybe what we really need to learn is how to cultivate and when to invoke those different parts of our psyche.

Inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor's TED Talk.

TechCrunch had an interesting article on Apollo, a project by Hawthorne Labs to be the "Newspaper of the Future™." It also references Pulse and mentions the dozens of startups trying to be THE news platform.

Apollo supposedly behaves more like Pandora with its algorithmic selection of content. Great. It could be wonderfully accurate.

But how do I get news that makes me think? That pushes me to reconsider my viewpoints as well as others and hopefully helps me become a better person? Will these algorithms become digital blinders as we race towards some bizarre finish line? Will there be social tools to help us engage others in conversation about what we're reading?

One of the reasons I like human curated news is that it provides variety and greater opportunities for humans to engage in discourse. Which is not to say we can't engage our family and friends in regards to what we read on these sites. We can, and should. Whether or not we do is the scariest part.

I've been thinking a great deal about personal growth lately. What does it take to truly evolve, and be a better person? To really embrace a new belief or outlook or way of living?

For many people it is about maturing. But I think that how we define maturity matters. Is it behaving better? Is it greater self-awareness or self-discipline? Is it overcoming something that really isn't working for you, while maintaining respect for others and the ability to provide for oneself and any dependents?

Does aligning more to a set of rules, of your society or social strata, mean you're growing?

Or does it simply mean that you've hidden under the comfy covers of a no-thought-required dogma?

Is that growing?

UPDATE This quote was delivered to my inbox yesterday by the Positive Press... eerie! ;) And I'm not entirely sure I agree!

Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for
long-term values.

-- Joshua L. Liebman

I saw an interesting presentation online today on Social Business Design. One of the slides points out that in business today a person must "always be on."

This reminded me of my days in the theatre. Some of the actors that I worked with were the kind of divas who were "always on" - always acting. Expending energy to make everyone - including themselves - believe that they were among the best in their craft, popular, funny: talented. Many of them crashed, hard. As Elizabeth Gilbert mentions in her Ted talk, an alarmingly high percentage of creative types have a short lifespan.

Before jumping on the bandwagon, have a plan for your career and business social networking. Stick to a schedule or set contextual boundaries.

Ubiquitous computing, omni-present social networks, smartphones, augmented reality - being firm in one's choice to disconnect is critical to sanity.

I am reviewing a presentation I am giving tomorrow night to the San Andreas chapter of the Special Libraries Association in San Jose CA. In it I talk a bit about embedded librarians - information specialists who do not necessarily work in a traditional library, but with a specific group within an organization. I am encouraging attendees at the event to consider the new career opportunities available to them thanks to semantic technologies - careers around knowledge organization and representation. I liken it to Database Journalism, which seems to be having a bit of a renaissance. This is a practice that began in the 1950s, where journalists would use computers and databases to retrieve and analyze data of interest. The semantic web stack is giving librarians a similar kind of renaissance in the realm of information management.

So I thought to myself, why not embed journalists? Newspapers are struggling, but how else do we get news? We could get it if each entity was responsible for managing its own data. But organizations need someone to manage that data, and report it out.

But wait you say - aren't those folks called PR people? And, don't they put a spin on things?

Yes. And that's the last thing we need. We need people who can remain unbiased and report fairly. How many organizations would be willing to allow a 3rd party to roam its halls? With appropriate trade secret protections, would an embedded journalist serve as much as an ethics officer as reporter?

This would likely be a less than full time position for most organizations. But it would have the trust and authority that comes with the organization providing the journalistic staff. Could the NYTimes or the WSJ embed a reporter in firms on Wall Street? Or would it be too tempting to cheat?

Perhaps I'm too much an optimist. I certainly don't want Big Brother either. Anyway, it's just an idea, and ideas are good.

I live in a quiet upscale town in PA. It's nice here, not too much different than the places that my husband and I grew up in. Big mall, specialized grocers, a PTA with co-presidents and 4 vice presidents. Sometimes I feel out of place being a working Mom, but everyone is generally friendly, and I don't get close enough to get splashed with guilt that I can't be a classroom parent or pack leader.

But sometimes things just get silly. Like last week. During recess, some of the moms who go and play with the kids saw a hunter leave the woods behind the school. They saw no weapons, just a guy in camouflage and orange gear. They told the principal immediately. The principal called the cops. The cops searched the woods. Yeah...

My husband hunts, and has become quite the responsible sportsman, both in terms of safety and security and responsible harvesting. Sometimes he just goes to the woods to run his bird dog, and track game - learn where they bed, where they eat, where they drink. Sometimes I think he just likes the peace and quiet away from a household with small children!

What if this man in the woods near the school were just out scouting for the weekend? Even if he wasn't, I have never seen any "No Hunting" signs on this area, nor am I aware of any laws/ordinances regarding hunting in the area. Nor do I believe he was inside any buffer zone. I could certainly be wrong.

I don't like being wrong. ESPECIALLY when weapons and children are involved.

If I were this guy, how could I have KNOWN what the rules were, and that there was a school nearby? Augmented reality and the semantic web come to mind. If the local and state laws were modeled in an openly available format, and the ordinance surveys were online, the data could be mashed together, and then combined in an AR mobile app. I could point my smartphone at the woods, and between recognizing the trees as forest, the direction of the user and the location of the user, and overlay could appear saying - "yes, you can hunt here." Or, "Nope, you can't hunt here - it's Wednesday at 10am and there's a school nearby." Even better for the hunters, it could say "yes, you could hunt here, but if you want until tomorrow it should be stocked with fresh game according to observations by friends you trust."

Such an app would have prevented panic at the school, an uncomfortable chat with the police, and ensured a more successful and enjoyable time in nature. It would take some work to get it done. But it's work that people would appreciate.