Appropriate Organizational Scheme for Diverse Web Collection

[Gerry Mckiernan]

To All/

   I have been contacted by Dan Doernberg  (dan at fairness.com ) of fairness.com, a forthcoming Web site devoted to a wide variety of information resources devoted to Fairness. Dan is interested in suggestions for 
appropriate schemes for organizing his diverse collection. Please find below the details of his project and its constraints.

  Dan and I would very much appreciate Any and All suggestions for schemes for organizing this collection.
Please reply to this list and to Dan as well, as he is not subscribed to this list.

  Thanks!

/Gerry McKiernan
Theoretical Librarian
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

                             "Life is what happens while you're making other plans"

> Fairness.com, due to be launched in August, will be a site offering a wide
> variety of information related to the general topic of fairness (e.g.
> consumer protection, public policy issues, access to legal services,
> philosophical and religious perspectives, and much more).  The website's
> URL is:
> 
>                http://www.fairness.com/ 
> 
> Here is a description of the problem I am facing:
> 
>      Needed--- Information schema to organize a database-backed 
> website which in turn will run a public interest website, Fairness.com
> (note--- the underlying Postgres software is comparable in power to
> Oracle).  For example, all the material we have in the database on welfare
> reform should be categorized/linked together in some way (distinct from
> materials on fair elections, family relationships, and other unrelated
> topics). 
> 
>      Overview--- We need to organize content on the Fairness.com 
> website via an overarching knowledge schema that:
> 
>   a)  is easy enough for non-librarians (web system administrators and
> hopefully authors of articles) to use to catalog, in some reasonable way,
> new articles and essays that get added to the database;
> 
>   b)  would allow users to fairly easily locate information in a variety of
> formats and media (newspaper articles, interviews, pictures, sound files,
> etc.) that all address the same subject. Most of the items to be cataloged
> will be (i) articles from newspapers and magazines, and (ii) essays from
> writers, professionals and non-professionals "published" via my site.
> 
> I have no information science or library science background, but have
> worked in the book business (bookstores and book publishing) and thus am
> aware of Library of Congress and Dewey systems, though I don't know the
> details of how either work at all.
> 
> Using the Library of Congress system as an example, the following 
> factors seem key to me:
> 
>    1)  Breadth of the schema--- the schema must be very very broad to meet
> our needs (i.e. fairness issues range in scope from art forgeries to
> scientific research fraud). On this factor, the Library of Congress scheme,
> which seems capable of addressing every topic known to mankind, seems broad
> enough!  :->
> 
>    2)  Flexibility of the schema to different content formats and media
> (print and electronic). For example, could the Library of Congress' book ID
> system for books be adapted for use with periodical articles, movies, and
> other media as well as books?
> 
>    3)  Ease of administration--- This one is key... we have no staff 
> librarians but anticipate having a huge amount of material in our 
> database. Again taking Library of Congress as an example, I have heard that
> using LC system requires (i) significant training and knowledge as a
> prerequisite, and (ii) a lot of time per item categorized. Fairness.com
> does *not* have a staff to do such categorizing, so assignments of ID#s
> will have to be done either (1) in an automated manner, perhaps by
> human-assigned keywords, or (2) by volunteers with no library training.
> 
>     4)  Links between items--- it would be helpful to permit one item in
> the schema to link to one or more other items (e.g. links between articles
> comprising day-by-day coverage of a topic in a newspaper).  
> 
>     5)  Whatever system I implement must to be able to scale up to
> hundreds of thousands of entries.
> 
> 
> Hopefully this communicates at least the essentials of what we're 
> looking for. It seems likely that we should be able to build on some 
> existing library science foundations and not have to "re-invent the wheel"
> (and probably re-invent it in a clumsy way!).  
> 
> My questions are:
> 
>    a)  what existing schemas would work (not necessarily perfectly or
> easily!) for our purposes? 
>    b)  how would I evaluate and choose among candidate schemas, 
> assuming there are several that might work?
> 
> --------------
> 
> more recent than the overview above:
> 
> 
   ......  others have mentioned the Dublin Core 
> project to me, which looks interesting based on a quick view of their
> website (i.e. emphasis on simplicity, at least relative simplicity)... but
> as I understand it DC doesn't address cataloging/indexing.
> 
> What my project is most immediately concerned with seems to fall 
> under the heading of "periodical indexing", i.e. I want to to be able to
> read the morning newspaper and add articles on welfare reform, campaign
> finance, and any brand new topics immediately into my database of articles
> coded to be "in with" other articles on the same or similar topics.
> 
> ------------
> 
> Thanks in advance;  I'll appreciate any ideas whatsoever on this topic (or
> related topics for which I may not have the background to realize they need
> to be thought out!).
> 
> 
> ===============================================
>     Dan Doernberg, dan at fairness.com 
>     Fairness.com LLC
>     The Online Guide to Fair Deals and Fair Treatment
>     Phone: + 1 804/975-0780
>     Fax:     + 1 804/975-0790
> 
> ===============================================