The morning was a bit rough trying to figure out what I missed on the day off. Weeded through the email for the important items. Went through the ticketing system to find any quick wins. Took care of a few items before the weekly UX touchbase meeting. The afternoon was more of the same — quick tickets, a meeting for search and product discovery on the site (yes — information architecture and taxonomy are integral to that process!), followed by a company leadership monthly meeting. I can’t tell you what went on in that meeting because it’s James Bond-like — if I told you, one of us would have to perish in some odd turn of events. Ok, not really, but it’s still confidential information.

Picked up Triumph of the City from the Zappos library to read this week. Ended up making it through 3 pages before falling asleep. Did I mention how tired I was?

Wednesday started out about the same, but a 9:30 meeting. The meeting went well, especially considering I’m trying to normalize the taxonomy so that no items are duplicated (one home — and only one home — for items). Worked out a work flow for this team which will help everyone out in the future, so a win first thing in the morning. Followed that up with a quick quality assurance test on a new feature for our in-house taxonomy tool. Found an error, and worked with the fab developer to get it fixed so that it might be released tomorrow.

After lunch, it was time for the weekly data sync, where the UX team, customer service people, analysts, and project & product managers get together to put everyone on the same page. I really like those meeting since there’s a lot of good information exchanged. The three o’clock crash then happened, where I felt like I needed a 2 hour nap. Acquired an Odwalla bar and some green tea to pick up my energy again, and pushed through another few tickets before the end of the day. Tickets ranged from taxonomy additions to search items that needed to be cleaned up or redirected to a taxonomy based search rather than a raw text search. That’s always an interesting vetting process since it’s a bit balance between search (the broad gathering of products) compared to taxonomy (the narrowed gathering of products), especially since you never want to assume what your user is thinking or for what they’re searching. They’re annoying little fights at time, but they’re what keep the job exciting day after day.

Oh, yes… and over the past two days we set up a new fish tank. The old one decided that it would be fun to short out on Friday. Smoke and everything. Glad it didn’t fry the lone tetra in the tank! But now fishy has a clean new home, and seems quite happy in his new digs.

Photo: Back To Work… by Richard Holster and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

I’m lucky.

Growing up with a wide range of technology gives a perspective that the Millennials missed and the Boomers didn’t fully understand. I’ve seen the progression from a mostly analogue world to a very wired and digital world. This instilled an appreciation for the ease, the simplicity, the complexity, and speed at which information is now passed. It also provides a great basis on organizing information so that both Boomers and Millennials can find what they’re looking for.

In music formats, I’ve used 33 and 45 RPM records, 8 Tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, minidisks, and now digital formats. In addition to that, my great grandparents had some 78 RPM records that I knew about, even if they couldn’t be played. I learned how to edit sound on a reel to reel — complete with fresh straight blade and tape — and also used one of the first commercially available sound editing programs for the computer.

Computing? I’ve used an electric typewriter, word processor, and computer. I used mainframes, terminals, towers, laptops, Palm Pilots, and tablets. Screens were once large, monochrome and heavy, and now they’re thin, full-color, and lightweight. Data storage has gone from punchcards to 5.5″ disks to 3.25″ disks, Zip and Jazz disks, CDs, DVDs, SD cards, thumb drives, external drives, servers, and now the Cloud (in the 80′s & 90′s, the Cloud was known as the Internet: same concept rebranded for the new millennium).

Phones at one point came big and black with a rotary dial, then touchtones, pagers, Nokia 6160, Razr, Blackberry, VoIP / Skype, iPhone / Android and other smartphones. Cameras had external flashes and used film (120, 110, 35mm, Polaroid…). Pictures often discolored due to the chemicals degrading. Slides and black and white film was still common. The first digital cameras hit the scene when I was a junior in college. In my senior year, I started to experiment with digital video, which meant recording it on VHS, encoding it, editing it, and then dropping it back to VHS. The school had one computer that was equipped for digital video editing. Now it’s everywhere, even on your home PC with digital in and digital out, and cell phones with the ability to upload it immediately to YouTube.

About that time, I also started playing with multimedia production. As a kid, I was really into drawing and animation, creating flipbooks because it was fun. I learned HTML my freshman year and could display pages on Mosaic. I took that and experimented with HyperCube. I did 3D animation, starting from wireframes that would take 5 days to render 15 seconds worth of a basic movement. And I figured out how to combine them.

I remember a time without cable where you had to get up and go to the TV to change the channel. Then the channel box on a long cord that snaked through the room, and finally the hefty infrared controllers. MTV was just beginning. And the cable company had a public access channel, didn’t dabble in phone service, or deliver your internet service (that was left to the phone company and dial-up modems!).

Libraries still used card catalogs. Each book had a card that was stamped with a due date. We scoured through large paper tomes and volumes to find the necessary data for research papers, often trading the index for scholarly publications that were obviously used quite often. Microfiche was common. In the 1990s, computerized OPACs were commonplace but often terminal based and a pain to use. Now they use the same technology that websites use coupled with RFID, self-checkout, email notifications, and online renewals. Scholarly indexes are now electronic databases, often displaying PDFs of the articles within one or two clicks. Microfiche is being transferred to digital formats.

And that’s just in 30 or so years. Imagine what the next 30 will bring!

Photo: Old Technology by Robin Kaspar and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0) license.

The month of November is almost half over, if you can believe it. Which also marks the halfway point of NaBloPoMo.

It also means that the Occupy Wall Street movement is almost 2 months old. I’m sure most of you have heard that the New York occupation was evicted from sleeping in the park. Everything went. Tents, sleeping bags, personal items, the library.

Amazingly, the media has been covering the loss of the library’s 5,000+ books with great interest. What I didn’t know before today was that it was organized and cared for by a volunteer staff of around 15 people, and one of the first community-like features to evolve in OccupyCity. Which is quite a feat outdoors. Kinda cool when you think about it.

Having just opened a membership-driven community tech library, I love to see how it pulls everyone together and centers the community. Not only is a library a place to read and gain information, it’s a place to gather and share information. It’s an inexpensive meeting place for the entrepreneurs. It’s a place for established businesses to share information or meet potential employees or clients. It’s a place that encourages the melding between programmers and hackers (think the people who dismantled their radios by the time they were 10 years old and made something else from the parts just because they were curious).

A library levels the metaphorical playing field. People use libraries to find information that they seek. Everyone is there for that reason. It’s a keystone to understanding your community and engaging the local community. The curious high school student may attend a talk or class by a top business leader and ask a question that’s the catalyst for the student’s life work. The business leader may encounter another person who helps her have another perspective on a problem he’s been pondering. The library is the core of a honeycomb that holds these chance encounters and serendipitous relationships in place.

Photo: Occupy Wall Street Library by Spaztacular (Flickr user name) and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.

Hmm… using today’s NaBloPoMo prompt, and it’s about passions.

What is your secret (or not-so-secret) passion?

This is something that I’ve been thinking of a lot lately. At work, one of the core values is Be Passionate and Determined. Many people know what they’re passionate about.

Me? Well, that’s a bit harder to pinpoint.

I’m passionate about organizing stuff. I’ve been passionate about organization since I was a kid. What 7 year old places all of their books on their shelf in alphabetical order? And it gets better from there. As a teenager, all of my cassette tapes needed to be in alphabetical order, too. Which meant shifting all of the tapes every time I purchased a new one (which was often!). My hats were organized by style. Shirts separated by solids and prints, long sleeves and short sleeves. Shoes in a certain way. Even down to how things were placed on my dresser.

But I’m also passionate about community. It’s in my blood, with my grandparents being involved with the town I grew up in by opening the public swimming pool. My mom was always volunteering for church or community events, either by baking or taking turns manning a table. I enjoy volunteering for the local library system. I like helping out CCFA’s Team Challenge to get the word out and make their events go smoothly.

Art, too. Art takes many different forms, from words to photos to paintings to music to theatre. Especially a combination of these items. I love poetry readings, and wish there were more hours in a day so I could attend the local events. I wish I had more time to write and paint and create.

Can’t forget about technology, too. Technology is my gateway to knowledge and learning.

So… combine all of those and you get me. Which is why I’m glad to be a part of the team opening up /usr/lib. A bit of funky art, combined with a space to support the Vegas technology community where I could organize books? I’m happy as a clam!

Photo: Can the open source way help nurture passion in classrooms? by opensourceway (Flickr name) and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

Many hands make light work, and it’s no different when trying to open /usr/lib. About 20 people showed up tonight to unpack the books, catalog them, place them on shelves in order, finish last minute programming stuff, construction work, clean up… and generally anything else that needed to be done. The grand opening is on Friday, and rumor has it that there’s going to be quite a bit of media coverage there. For Pawel — the guy who took the lead in this project — it’s been quite a labour of love. The first semi-coworking space in Las Vegas. A library to support the burgeoning tech community, hackerspace, bike co-op, and various other geeky endeavors. It’s a funky little space on the second floor of a coffee house / artist studio space repurposed from a former medical building — about as quirky as Vegas itself. The old sits among the high-tech again.

Right where it should be.

Photo: Library Under Construction by William & Mary Law Library and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

Never achieved in classification.

There’s always that one odd item that sticks out like a sore thumb. Tonight I classified over 150 books for /usr/lib, and found what I created to be swiss cheese. Which does not make the information architect side of me happy as everything needs a place. But the other part of me really likes knowing about the grey areas and seeing the interconnectedness of all of the topics.

But it’s there. And right now done is good. Cleanup will come later. Along with tweaking the classification in Protege (ontology editor).

Photo: UF Library Shelves Book Place Books Here Sign by Christopher Sessums and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.

It’s November, which is always a busy time of year. Holidays approach, relatives’ and friends’ birthdays…

Training for and running half marathons…

Creating content for the Vegas Tech site…

Opening a library…

And now NaBloPoMo.

Yep. I want to have my cake and eat it, too.

Bring it, November.

Been training to run three half-marathons in ~60 days. Three days of running, three days of cross training / stretching, and a day of recovery.

I have some writing to finish about the Vegas Tech scene for a new site. Due date: sooner than later!

Created a new cataloging method for the tech/business books for /usr/lib, which is now being put to the test while I classify approximately 400 books. It’s Swiss cheese, and there’s a lot of work to do in the next two weeks!

And I’ve also taken on writing a blog post a day for NaBloPoMo. See the three topics above? Chances are the blog posts are going to revolve around one of them.

So enjoy, and hope you enjoy the wild adventure that will be November!

Photo: Gas Pump by Brian Mitchell and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

Morning = taking care of business. Poorly. (thanks, convention center Wi-Fi!)

Lunch = Awards Luncheon

Infomatics & Bibliometrics

Information Retrieval (IR) systems
Length of search time + search terms (long) = intervene and help the user (?)
Competitive Intelligence

How far do we reduce until there is no longer value to the data?
What can be done for advocacy of this area?

Be good at what people want or expect. Talk like politicians and persuade them!

Plenary:
How To Identify Ducks In Flight
Steve Kelling

Starts with duck identification. Males different identification marks than female. ~100 species in US.

Citizen Science Projects: Captcha, Fold It (proteins folded), Galaxy Zoo (digital map ID of galaxy)

eBird
Pretty dull interface, but asks for necessary information about sightings.
1.7 million of checklists worldwide, 99% data collected in 2011

Building community:
Key: understanding audiences!
Using crowdsourcing techniques to develop their community (pic of Crowdsourcing book)
My eBird, names on lists (’cause everyone likes to see their name in print), competitions
Tools to access the data submitted in different ways

Use mashup technologies — Google maps & purple dots

1,300,000 hours volunteered to eBird

Data use:
humans the only one who can identify biodiversity. Equipment can observe individual items such as environmental conditions.
Data ONE: how to pull all the data together and create meaningful associations between the datasets
data interoperability challenges
link semantic relationships & syntactic data

Used dublin (Darwin) core, expanded out to to create system that researchers can use.
50-75 publications per year from dataset

Create the data, also provides access to data and publishes results. Full scale!
Concerned with scalability — local to regional to national

Can see migratory patterns over time
Zoom in to allow land managers to see impacts of decision on bird species
Allows to see habitat preferences of birds — unknown before project started

How to apply information?
State of the Birds report from Secretary of the Interior — biological indicator
How birds use public lands? GIS analysis overlay public lands map w/ birds
Most birds found on BLM lands (BLM energy extraction, not conservation)

Used during oil spill to track affects on birds
Found very few died from result of spill

Gulf of Mexico environmental report card
several environmental indicies, grade for different regions

Next?
NEXrad imagery to see migration + sounds at different locations
Sounds hard to identify to species, use to sound waves to use machines to identify birds. Very accurate
Use to see how birds migrate, make forecasts to help mitigate hazards to birds (wind turbines, skyscrapers, etc)

Sessions:

Ux: Novelty Aesthetic appeal, usability, focus attention, felt involvement, endurability
Why needed for framework of human / information interactions?

Background
Literacy
Demographics
Process
Behavioural
Self-report
Outcome
User Engagement Scale (31 point scale)
Interviews
Reflection on the research product

Snapshots, log files, interviews
Change in competence? Needs? Motivation? Comprehension?

Affects
Contextual Variables Measurements
Context = mood, activities prior to info interactions
Experience = perceptions and memories of interactions
Preference = changes in info behaviours

Emotions can affect how a user completes a task. Does a user have information preferences? Better interaction or worse interaction = stronger the memory.

Credibility
Continuity — prior experience & knowledge
Pertinent eval — Subjective assessment
Heuristics — judgements based on mind’s basic computations