Tango-lishious!

Another crazy day in my neighborhood. Lol. But seriously I have been going since 7:30 this morning and now it is just 11 pm. I had many hangers-on type errands to run this morning and so I got those out of the way before I went to my dr.'s appt. downtown. I am sort of feeling very ambivalent towards the medical profession today. You see I have chronic sinus problems. So much so that I opted to have surgery a few years ago. Well guess what? I still have blockages and so I have been having problems lately. I don't have much confidence that another surgery will help (uhm, the last didn't really fix things did it?) and there aren't many other alternatives. I am just hopeful that the several other drugs which were added to my daily regiment will paste me together enough to be functional. I can't keep feeling like crap. Last week I had headaches for 3 days straight with nausea and dizziness. It isn't a whole lot of fun trying to work like a fiend (and needing to flex one's brain) when you feel less than fine in a region close to the brain.

I did manage to get a good bit of reading done today. Amen! I finished the Saracevic article. I found the article to be useful for expanding one's concept of what relevance means and for making a number of theories explicit. It would be a very good read for people interested in the concept of relevance as it relates to the communication of information. If I go any further in this discussion I might get myself into a corner and need to profess the various theories. The article is a bit long and sometimes a little convoluted in terms of its construction, but it offers an excellent recounting of the theoretical flavors of relevance. After this I read a short study of the Perseus digital library/collections. I didn't get much out of the article, since it didn't really report much. The study consisted of observations (think-aloud) and interviews of 6 participants using the resource for a course. 3 participants performed one task and 3 performed a different task. The researcher made some broad observations about how their searching techniques developed during the interaction with the resource.

The last paper I read was the one by Bradley on image users across various disciplines. She looked at 9 participants from several departments at the UMD and gathered information using one-on-one interviews in which they were asked (among other things) to recall their last image search experience. She reports that the task breakdown fell into these groups: presentations 5; print pubs 5; research 2, web page 1, video 1, and identification 1. The resources the participants used are a bit surprising: Google Image 7; create own image 4; search engine 4; known web site 3, Google Video 1; personal contacts 1; books 1; image CD with textbook 1; clip art 1, specialized image dbs 1. Those figures are really telling of the situation with images -- there is little professional support for visual materials. I am not saying that there is none, since there are several good resources for images out there, only that few scholars would turn immediately to Google to find their "perfect" resource. She notes that the majority of participants (8) used proper nouns ("names of people, institutions, conferences, journals, brains and geographic locations). The next largest category was topic or description searches (6) and finally by date (1). Another aspect she investigated was the participants' degree of success at finding images. This depended upon 3 criteria 1) making an exact match, 2) finding something useful, and 3) the amount of time spent. Frustrations were expressed as: image quality 4; didn't meet specific needs 3; relocating images 2, unrelated results 2, format 2, knowing where to look 1, too many results 1, too few results 1, attribution 1, authority 1. Their search success, she states, is easier to define for specific searches when compared to generic searches. The latter are more difficult in this regard because they "require a judgement call by the researcher."

After all that lovely reading I gave myself a little treat and got a few shirts and stuff for spring. Then this afternoon I had a meeting about the development of a software to provide course content. Interesting ideas and experience were exchanged. Hopefully the future will be very bright indeed for this idea which marries technology with content. Lord knows we can use some assistance. Teaching is such a labor intensive job. Few people realize how draining it can be until they have to be the entertainment committee and produce all this content and do it in an engaging way!

Ok, it is nearly midnight and I need some sleep. I have been really pushing this week and I have a long day ahead tomorrow.