Two blog posts made me think today of the need to name things, even things that name things: Dan Chudnov's post on in-situ cataloging and Lorcan Dempsey's post on four sources of metadata.

Naming confers identity which makes a thing easier to relate to other things. This is especially important for libraries as we try to integrate our professional expertise with other resources in a networked environment. Dempsey's taxonomy of metadata sources helps us relate, rather than pit against, our professionally-created metadata to that of metadata contributed by users or determined programmatically by software agents. Chudnov's question about what to call description right on the UI where we see both the item being described and the metadata together can be helpful in re-contextualizing our "item-in-hand" and other cataloging principles and practices. [But I'll think more about these to come up with good names.]

So, I'm a mother of three sons, the last one poised to leave the nest soon too. But I've had the pleasure of having all three of them home this Mother's Day, which made me reflect on this role/state/essence called motherhood. I thought of searching for old books (full-texts) on motherhood that may be available online and found the three books below on the Internet Archive. I find it interesting to note that the first two were written by suffragettes around the turn of the 20th century - reminds me that women's right to vote is a relatively recent constitutional amendment in several affluent Western societies. Browsing the texts however showed me that even though these two were written by women activists, their views on motherhood/womanhood are anything but what we might now expect as "feminist" in orientation.

• Radiant motherhood: A book for those who are creating the future. (1920) by Marie Carmichael Stopes
• The renaissance of motherhood. (1914) by Ellen Key
• Maidenhood and motherhood; or, Ten phases of women's life. (1887) by John D. West

Speaking of expectations, I've been amused over the years in some situations where I was mistaken as perhaps the nanny or the step-mother of these now three young men. I don't know if I should be flattered (I look young?), concerned (I don't have the mien of a mother?) or insulted (I'm lying or not fully qualifying what I mean by being a mother?). So, I'll fully qualify it and say, as far as I know, these three were bulges on my belly for nine months each and came out between my legs, 18 to 22 years ago.

If I were to design products and services for libraries, what personas would I create for this domain? This question was going through my mind as I listened this evening to Liz Bacon of Devise and Steve Calde of Cooper speak about personas as design tools. This was at the monthly meeting of CHIFOO.

Liz and Steve first tackled the arguments against personas - they're fluffy, they're not actionable, they're expensive, among other things - before laying out why personas are strong design tools. Personas are data-driven - their creation requires research into user behavior, attitudes, goals and needs. They facilitate communication and creative thinking between people involved in product design and development. And because people are creatures of habit, personas do have a relatively long shelf-life even if the contexts and tools in which they work change over time.

What interests me most about Liz Bacon's take on personas is her emphasis that they are design tools to understand interactions within an ecosystem or context in which a product will be used. In this sense, creating personas is not simply gathering user needs or letting users design the product. Users do know what they want or need and may actually articulate them well but they don't always do so from a holistic point of view. It is still the job of the designer to gather and analyze all the interacting elements within a domain of interest. Personas help bring some of these elements to an abstracted level but with some features like names and photos to keep them grounded in real contexts. They are also only one of several tools used in interaction design. Liz and Steve will be doing a full-day workshop on scenario-driven design this Friday.

As far as I know, interaction design has not penetrated into the library world yet though libraries now routinely include usability studies and testing in their projects. Interaction design is definitely one line of thinking that I'll try to get into some more if I am to be involved in designing new library products and services.

Anyway, it was nice to get back to CHIFOO. I haven't been attending their meetings for a year now. I served as secretary for this non-profit group in 2006 and I have very high regards for the dedication and commitment of the group of volunteers who put together these quality programs. And tonight is my lucky night - I won the book raffle and came home with "Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces" by Carolyn Snyder.

Face off, scoop, run, cradle, run, pass, score. I've watched my son's lacrosse team win yet another game tonight and my thoughts went back to six or seven years ago when our school district didn't have any lacrosse team at all. I remember a general meeting of parents in an auditorium of a middle school then. Most of us there didn't know a thing about lacrosse - only that it's a sport played mostly in the East Coast and a few schools in the Portland area. The organizers called for volunteer coaches anyway - no experience necessary. I didn't volunteer but a group of parents did. And look at the fruits of their dedication and commitment - high-performing teams and a league swarming with young boys and girls enthusiastically scooping and cradling balls with those mesh-headed sticks.

As my thoughts these days are focused on product design and development for bibliographic data for my job interviews, I can't help wondering how games, like lacrosse, were designed and developed. As the info goes in Wikipedia, lacrosse originated from Native American tribes who played the game on a much larger scale - hundreds of players and lasting several days and for purposes of conflict resolution and preparing young men for warfare. In the mid-19th century, a Canadian dentist (!) supposedly codified the game and scaled down the number of players and the length of time to finish the game. Other modifications to the game came later, including modifications to the design of equipment used.

Uhm. Where are my thoughts going to? Uh, I'm just wondering how folk practices become codified and applied to different contexts. Think of Linnaeus codifying folk taxonomies into his more structured hierarchy. But I digress. I'm trying too hard to fill my mind with substantial thoughts to keep out the pain and humiliation of losing a job like that.

I'm trying to understand one company's behavior, which I think is just bizarre by any standard, and I think this video feed from MIT titled Stuck: Why It’s So Hard to Do New Things in Old Organizations can explain some of it.

The speaker, Rebecca Henderson, focused on overload loops - self-defeating cycles that organizations tend to invest much of their energy on but still spiral it into failure and doom. For a solution, she suggests a "worse before better" strategy, supposedly Tiger Woods' theory of change - a change that involves a drastic dip in performance at the beginning but produces better and more sustainable performance over time.

More importantly, this change involves core conversations and time for reflection. Sounds fuzzy-wuzzy. But people in organizations do lose their core sense of commitment and start behaving and talking around in cliches and in cliques.

My heart is heavy but my ears are plugged into Pandora - opening up my soul to a glorious box of unique and related identities of songs. I started with an artist - John Michael Talbot which brings up songs by Michael Card, Phil Keaggy, Ric Blair, Bebo Norman...

If one can feel the organization of information, this is it.

There comes a time in life when one has to spend time contacting the Better Business Bureau, the WIPO and similar organizations...

Anywho, the 31st Portland International Film Festival is underway since the 7th of Feb and all I managed to see was one film - La Antena (The Aerial), an Argentine film by Esteban Sapir. I haven't seen a film quite like it - sort of a silent movie studded with metaphors of voice and word (voz y palabra) but evokes great emotions nevertheless. [See trailer on YouTube.]

I never thought I'd have to deal with it. All the weight of naivete and the evils of the Internet came crashing on me this morning as I looked at a site with my name as its domain name - glendaclaborne.com. A site with gibberish home marketing stuff. I'm so distressed about it.

Tom Peters at ALA TechSource posted something about free and fleeting digital content, particularly about HarperCollins' marketing experiment with free ebooks. I took a peek at Harp's offerings and took a pick: The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President. And Harp even gives me a widget that I can slap on my website and use to browse the content.

So, without much ado, let's click on the widget above, read the stuff over the weekend and make up our minds about Hillary by Monday, er, I mean make up our minds about ebooks. They're here, they're becoming free but may cost $10 by Monday.