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June 28, 2002
Metadata and RSS in Utah
The Shifted Librarian has this to say about the Metadata project that Utah's own state library division is working on:
Now this is an excellent resource! Put up by the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) folks in Utah, this one-page tutorial gives a brief overview of RSS, what it looks like, aggregators (they call them "viewers"), how to locate feeds, how to create your own feeds, how to validate your RSS, and more.
I'm not sure what impresses me the most - the link to Metabrowser (their "recommended tool for creating and editing UtahGILS and Dublin Core metadata"), their Metabrowser tutorial, the reminder about David Carter-Tod's Javascript code for embedding an RSS feed in a web page, that they're doing RSS with meta tags, or that it's the library folks doing it!
I r-e-a-l-l-y need to get these people to talk to the folks at the Illinois State Library so that they'll understand my vision of news aggregation for Illinois libraries.
This is cool! The good folks at the Utah State Library have been using technology to accomplish their mission for some time now. Hopefully we can make their life easier as we move to a content management system to manage utah.gov.
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Public Sector Jobs
Ellen Perlman's "TechTalk" column in Governing magazine quotes me a few times on what its like to make the leap from the private sector to the public sector. At some point in the interview, I'm pretty sure I said the word "gutwrenching." She didn't use that quote.
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Warchalking: Less is More
The warchalking site has a discussion going on about what form the warchalking icons should take. One side, the "more is more" crowd, wants to create lots of icons that carry lots of information. Frankly, most of it is information only a techie could love.
My organization networks over 250 buildings for 22,000 employees. We're also in the planning phase of deploying Wi-Fi access points at places where cops hang out so they can connect to the net during their shift (they use CDPD for low bandwidth ops, but need a high bandwidth option sometimes). In this kind of environment, warchalking has some important uses beyond finding a free net. I'm hoping to use warchalking icons to alert employees to the existence of wireless nets in conference rooms and other places.
Given all this, I have to come down in the less is more camp. The icons need to be kept simple and relatively few if we expect them to be used.