Have you ever seen or heard a word and thought, what does it mean? Have you known about something but could not put the word to its definition? That is how I felt about this chapter. It was full of words and definitions that I hear on a daily basis at work. I kept having Ah Hah moments and moments of complete agreement.
Take a problem and find the best solution. Findability and usability, these are phrases from The Portable MLS that I use on a daily basis. When you work with people everyday they become your focus. In this chapter these phrases are applied to information retrieval. I liked the talk about wicked problems and tame problems. Wicked problems being ambiguous and tame problems having definition and an end. This was one of the points that I think about every day but had never put into words, "I like these words." Where I work I deal with databases on a daily basis. Never before did I understand that representations are things like author and title and classification, is the way information is grouped. Just the other day in a meeting our IT librarian was talking about meta data. I knew what he meant within our project but I had never seen a formal definition. I like to think of myself as a person who is adept at using search engines. However, I had never thought about one word having many meanings, or two different words that have similar meanings. There were lots of words that I had no idea what they meant (thank goodness for the book). I now feel very well informed. This is the chapter that I took the most notes on and will probably learn the most from. At this point it might be embarrassing so I will keep you posted on what I learn.
Weedman, J. (2008). Information Retrieval: Designing, Querying,
and Evaluating Information Systems. In Haycock, K., & Sheldon B. E.
(Eds.) The Portable MLIS: Insights from the experts. (pp. 112-126).
Westport, Connecticut. Libraries Unlimited
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