I'm collecting "search stories" these days. These are stories detailing a user's interaction with information online. Examples of these are Books by the Chapter? One Man's Quest and What Newspapers Still Don't Understand About the Web.

These stories are useful in writing out use cases for designing web-based library products and services. What do people go through when they are looking for information online? What obstructed or facilitated their wayfinding? What are their expectations about online information services?

Peter Morville's Ambient Findability came out in 2005 and I have heard him speak of his book in one of the sessions at ICKM 2005 but I've read the whole book only today. On a same-day, round-trip Greyhound bus ride to Seattle for job interviews.

There are several reasons why I would skim a book at one time and then immerse in it at another time. In 2005, seeing and hearing Morville in person was good enough for me. In 2008, his work was cited by several other material I've recently read so I thought I could understand better the intersection of all these ideas by fully reading a common link. And it helped that someone is doing the driving 3+ hours up to Seattle and another 3+ hours back down to Portland.

Some people knit their brows when I tell them I take the Greyhound. It was my mode of transportation between Seattle and Portland during the six residencies of my dMLIS program at the iSchool. My classmates from Portland either took the train or drove up by car. My second son hated his first experience of the Greyhound - from Corvallis to Los Angeles, with friends, during a spring break. The crying babies, the man who wouldn't stop yapping or snoring and the woman who insisted she was Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

Obviously, my son and I grew up in different worlds. The Greyhound is a luxury to me compared to the crowded buses between Manila and my province in the Philippines when I was a college student. I've learned to let life happen all around me and still stare out the window and feel bits of information from the chaos inside and the passing scenery outside cross synapses in my brain.

The interview. Everyone in libraryland, it seems, is looking out to the future or maybe they always have been. In one interview, I was told that I would notice a pattern in their questions. The questions started with an area of librarianship (collection development, cataloging, digital librarianship, etc.), a detailed description of the applicant's experience in that area, what he/she wants changed in or his/her vision for the future of library services in that area, and, if in a lead role, how he/she would make the change or the vision possible. And so we toured several functional areas of librarianship to see if I would qualify for a rotational position involving all areas.

The questions assume that an applicant's ability to think about change or improvements for the future depends on his/her past and current experiences in definable areas. Fair enough. My problem is that I have difficulty gathering my bits of experience here and there and articulating them within the framework defined by these kinds of questions. So, as an understandable perception, if one cannot describe or articulate one's experience in a defined area in spoken language then one probably cannot do the tasks related to that area. I find however that this is not true in my case. Once on the job, I'm able to quickly integrate my knowledge and skills from diverse areas, see the interrelationships of functional areas in a workplace and perform beyond expectations.

Same thing with the ability to ask questions: In my previous job, I was easily evaluated as someone who doesn't ask questions. I don't ask many in spoken language but I ask a lot in written form and I wanted them to realize that to produce the work that I did that I must have asked a lot of questions along the way. The problem is, in spontaneous situations, I find people to be unsatisfactory sources for answers - they don't know, they forgot, they're not sure or in worst situations, they give misleading answers. So most of my questioning processes, which appear to be soliloquys, actually occur when I'm interacting with information contained in documents. In this sense, the distance created by the written word is doing me no good, at least with perceptions of abilities deduced from articulating one's self in the spoken word.

The bus rolls down the stretch of I-5 between the Emerald City and the City of Roses. It is one of those beautiful evenings around the end of spring and the beginning of summer. The setting sun bathes the rolling hills in shades of yellow and shadows of gray. It's insane to take this trip for interviews that may never result in job offers. But I've read a whole book, I've connected with people in some way and somehow I find a piece of myself looking out the window of a bus.

Well, I got glendaclaborne.com back and have learned a lot about domain names in the process. I'm lucky that during the time it was registered by somebody else, it was used only for marketing/ linking purposes. It could have been worse. Like the case of a David Pecker whose name was used for a porn site and whose complaint to the WIPO was denied (see Protection of Personal Names in Domain Names and the WIPO decision).

I didn't have to go through WIPO. The people who purchased the domain name replied to my transfer request and we went through the transfer process smoothly. They explained that they purchase domain names in bulk - no personal interest or malice involved. It's all business and it's all legal - domain names are a commodity bought and sold.

I just have to be mindful of expiration dates and renewals from now on.

I'll be off this main site for a while to work on some projects. I'll be at ALA Annual in Anaheim at the end of this month and will be covering sessions related to cataloging and metadata. I'll be posting my reports on this page.

What do people see in pictures? How do we describe images mashed up from stock photos taken out of their original contexts?

I thought of these questions as I read about the controversy surrounding the Dunkin Donut ad in which Rachel Ray was promoting coffee against a backdrop of cherry trees in bloom and a picture of a stately building. The black and white scarf around Rachel's neck conjured jihad-like associations in many conservative minds. Oregonians saw past the controversial scarf and asked what their state capitol building is doing in a Dunking Donut ad.

The Dunkin Donut ad controversy made me think of one of the more difficult questions asked during my interview for a metadata management librarian position last week: To what extent would I describe a digital object? For example, for the subject description, there could be many possible headings to describe any object but when is enough?

Traditionally, subject description has been limited to the content of the item - it's aboutness - and catalogers have some ways of weighing this aboutness which could be elusive as Patrick Wilson wrote in his essay Two Kinds of Power. Say, include a subject heading that at least represents 20% of the content of the book and cite the first heading that best describes what the book is about and which will be used to determine the classification for that book.

Now, with our emphasis on the needs of the users, we try to assign subject descriptors beyond content to the possible contexts in which the information resource will be used - what keywords would users likely to use to to be able to retrieve the resource? The possibilities are endless especially with images. The problem is partly solved by giving users both the options to search and/or browse. But to optimize search by including as many subject descriptors as applicable can use up very limited staff resources.

How do you delimit user needs and contexts? For an academic library, do you limit it to the information needs of students, faculty and staff of one department, do you expand it to the general knowledge domain under which that department belongs and hence consider users outside of that geographic locality, do you start thinking that the publication department might want to use that image for uses not related to the knowledge domain in which it was originally created for, and so on.

To what extent can cataloging/metadata practices control the ways by which people might retrieve or interpret information resources?

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.