Quote to Note: Curation Means from Somewhere Else

March 13, 2012

Short honk: I find it fascinating that today’s generation of journalists, blog experts, journalists, and information gurus with “at” signs as part of their names don’t use library reference tools. Sure, these “experts” assert that each and every one knows how to search and “do research.”

Navigate to “A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators” if the link is still valid. The story appears in the New York Times, an outfit which has more content which is sometimes there and sometimes not. The story is about content aggregators and a “code of conduct” for those creatures. The idea is that someone thinks creating new graphics to indicate that stories come from somewhere else.

Consider this passage:

She [a person suggesting a content curation code] is careful about attribution and thinks others should be mindful as well. The Curator’s Code is a shorthand tool to signify that on the Web, most things come from somewhere else. Neither of these initiatives seems intended to serve as a posse to bring justice and order to the digital Wild West. In a sense, they are an effort to bring back the promise of the consumer Internet, creating visible connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information. It’s called the Web for a reason, after all.

I agree, most things come from somewhere else. Is not learning anchored in that method?

The origin of a bibliographic citation and abstract presented as a blog post in Beyond Search. Too bad most of the “experts” tracking multimedia have not donned white gloves and examined source documents and the often prescient glosses. Oh, I forgot. That’s not what “real” journalists and experts do. My apologies.

My thought is that codes are okay, but the core method is one of selection, citation, and commentary. In the scriptorum (alternate spelling scriptorium) (you know what that is, gentle reader), patient folk would add a gloss to a document. Then when books became the cat’s pajamas, some folks created citations which provided information about the book. Citations about books became catalogs. Write ups about individual articles became bibliographic citations with or without an abstract of the source.

Beyond Search is a hybrid. It combines the ABI/INFORM type of abstract, a citation (now expressed as a link), and a critical comment by the librarian or professional who creates the information. You can, for example, use one of the search boxes to locate information on a specific topic. The top box on the Beyond Search Web page provides access to the Blossom Software index. Blossom is a search system developed by a person who was at Bell Labs when Howard Flank and I were doing the MARS (market analysis and retrieval service) and BASIS implementation for the outfit. The other search box is an implementation of the Google Custom Search Engine. The idea is that a person visiting Beyond Search can get a sense of how two different systems process the same corpus of content.

Will Beyond Search implement a graphic gizmo? Nope. Will I change what is has been doing for the last 30 years? Nope. Will I keep in mind that on the Web “most things come from somewhere else”? Nope. The value of a series of citations generated for the query “Autonomy” in this blog is that I have a quick way of seeing the milestones in that company’s business trajectory.

The flaw in curation comes from some “experts” failure to see that the gloss of scriptorum laborers is alive and well in certain Web logs. No one thinks of a copyist creating a version of Euclid’s geometry. What’s clear to me is that we now have a generation of folks who don’t know much about reference works like Constance Winchell’s Guide to Reference Books, 8th edition, commercial databases like Chemical Abstracts, or the value of annotated bibliographies with critical commentary.

Journalists and self appointed experts no longer can be given a free pass when it comes to citation-centric content objects. But if you think news is your hammer, then every problem is one that one can pound with the journalistic Jingo. A little more fine grained thinking would make this addled goose a trifle more calm.

Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.