Information Management

• Introduction
• Organization and File Structure
• Bibliographic Software
• Digital Bibliography
• Metadata
• Related Articles

Introduction
The focus of this module will be on managing information, research and documents in the digital age. In a world where the total yearly production of information exceeds 1.5 billion gigabytes [1]("approximately 250 megabytes of text for every man, woman and child on earth" or, to put it in analog terms, the textual content of 1,500,000,000,000 books), the organization and cataloging of that information becomes increasingly important. Even for those of us doing research, the enormous amount of information available and useful to us must, once it's in our possession, be made easily accessed and recalled.

Organization and File Structure (top)

Those responsible for the design and development of useful user interfaces (UIs) have been hassling for years with the cognitive hurdles that make computers difficult to use. Computer users, despite real-world metaphors like "file" and "folder" being used in our UIs, have to learn how to make sense of the abstract position of their data relative to that of their other data. This organizational step is always the first to take, since it can help to speed along even the smallest research undertaking.

• filenaming (Windows filenames can go on forever but are restricted as to the characters they can use/Mac filenames can use any character but are restricted in length) because of these restrictions, it's important that users develop a standard system of filenaming and structure. Often, just letting Microsoft Word provide a filename from the first few characters in a document can lead to a paper about Kant's metaphysics of morals named "Little did we know that.doc." For that reason, it becomes to develop a system that can reflect its contents without asking the user to just try and remember.
• an example would be to create a folder for my Kant paper (called Kant-morals). In that folder I would put all my drafts of my paper, saved under different names that I could identify right away (draft1.doc, draft2.doc). Also, I would create a subfolder that holds all my clearly named digital sources, like my eserver.org etext of the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals (intro-to-metaphys-of-morals.txt). Remember here that it's possible and quite helpful to rename files that others create.

For websites, this system becomes even more critical since you have files referring and even interacting with one another. When a webpage tries to pull up an image or link to another page, any missing or incorrect folder or file information can give you the dreaded "busted image" placeholder or 404-Page Not Found. For that reason, web designers try to follow some extra guidelines.

• lowercase letters and numbers - the web is case sensitive, so using capital letters adds an unnecessary level of complexity to your filenaming system. Also, things like spaces, slashes, extra periods and other punctuation marks don't work in filenames for some filesystems and will keep things from working properly. Using only lowercase letters and numbers in filenames always works, so there's no reason to use anything else.
• content organization - using logical file organization can make your site more navigable and useful. Put graphics in a "graphics" folder, put articles in an "articles" folder. This will help you make a system for you links, by reminding you that all of you links to articles should have "articles/" before the file they reference.
  
  

Several companies have gotten into the infoglut management business by helping researchers manage and utilize bibliographic information using computers. Programs including (but not limited to) EndNote, Reference Manager and ProCite allow you to automatically collect book and journal references from databases or library catalogues, search the Internet or organize the bibliographic references you find yourself.

• EndNote
• Reference Manager
• ProCite
• Bibliography on Demand
  

Digital Bibliography (top)

An alternative metaphor for approaching the organization of exponentially expanding information is that of digital bibliography. In addition to the benefits that metadata cataloging offers, digital bibliography makes part of its method the skills and technologies that librarians and researchers have used for ages. By creating "subject gateways" that take advantage of standards and templates, digital bibliographers create focused hypertext lists of sources useful to the researcher.[2]

• The Art and Science of Digital Bibliography

Metadata (top)

For large amounts of data (those 1.5*10¹² books we're producing every year, for example), we need to create a system of data that describes that data. Card catalogs in libraries are fairly familiar metadata systems. Hopefully, with the use of structured and standardized methods of describing our data, we can create descriptive systems that can make it easier for computers to do much of our searching for us.

Some That Explain and Illustrate Metadata's Usefulness

• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative - The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.
• W3C Metadata Activity Statement - A description of the actions the W3C is taking to support the use of metadata.

HTML, for example, has a structure for metadata inclusion in HTML documents. Meta tags are used to define meta data. META tags can be very useful for Web developers. They can be used to identify the creator of the page, what HTML specs the page follows, the keywords and description of the page, and the refresh parameter (which can be used to cause the page to reload itself, or to load another page). And these are just a few of the common uses!

How to Use Meta Tags
(Based on cnet.com)

Meta tags are easy to implement on your Web pages. They look just like regular HTML tags, but they follow a few rules:

All begin with the word META, the element name.

All are located within the HEAD element.

No closing tag is used; the META element is an empty element.

When you use a meta tag, you define attribute/value sets. For each attribute, you assign a value. If you look back at the element declaration, you'll see there are several available attributes, only one of which is required. So, the format might be diagrammed as: <META attributeName="value" attributeName="value">.

And, since content is required, it will always appear in your meta tags.

This structure can be seen in all of the following meta tags:

<META name="author" content="Amy Cowen">
<META name="title" content="Mastering the Meta Tag">
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="5;http://www.cnet.com/">
<META name="Generator" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<META name="description" content="Answers to Your Top Questions Regarding Meta Tags.")>

All of these tags provide different information about the page. None of them contribute to how the content is formatted or looks.

[1] How Much Information?
[2] The Art and Science of Digital Bibliography