Tag: metadata

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The Librarian Avengers Film Rating System

Dear Film industry: Your metadata is not granular enough. The MPIAA ratings G, PG, PG-13, and R do not fulfill my needs.

I need information relevant to my particular disinterests. I need to know ahead of time if a movie contains elements that I consider unacceptable. I’m not talking about sex, drugs, or violence. I need to know if a movie contains cannibalism, synthesizers, or Jim Carrey.

Here is the film rating system we really need:

a.png Rated A for An Animal is Harmed

As far as I’m concerned, decapitated human heads can roll across the screen but if a Golden Retriever gets a hurty paw you had better warn me up front.

b.png Rated B for British Accent Faked by American

I’m looking at you, Andie MacDowell.

c.png Rated C for Creepy Child Singing

You know things are going to get bad when a little girl starts pushing flowers around and singing quietly to herself.

d.pngRated D for Dialog by Committee

“Oh aspiring teen heart-throb, I am attracted to your emergent yet non-threatening sexuality!”

e.png Rated E for Escape in front of Fireball

You know that scene in every action movie ever where the actors run very fast from some sort of physics phenomenon which approaches at exactly running speed? Rated E.

f1.png Rated F for Fun Filled Frolic

If a review or worse the movie poster itself describes a “fun filled frolic for the whole family”, Flee.

g.png Rated G for Grab My Hand

Oh no, that character is falling off a building! Grab my hand! DON’T LET GO!

h1.png Rated H for Hearts Pulled Out

A little warning before the monkey brains is all I ask.

i.png Rated I for Italian Stallion

Does this film contain excessive amounts of Sylvester Stallone or Jim Carrey? Librarian Avengers have determined that it will be Rated I or J.

j.png Rated J for Jim Carrey

I need advanced notice so I can start running.

Rated K for Keyboard Hacks Network in 2 Clicks

Did you know space aliens use Mac peripheral drivers?

l.png Rated L for Lead Actors in Real-Life Romance

Real-life chemistry rarely translates well to the big screen.

m.png Rated M for Motiveless Villain

“Hello! I AM EVIL! BECAUSE OF THE REASON!”

n.png Rated N for Natives

Noble Savages. Nubian Racist Constructs. Na’vi.

o.png Rated O for Overly Patriotic

If your eye-rolling is in any way disruptive to others, please note that this film has been Rated O.

p.png Rated P for Al Pacino Yelling

ARRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

(SKIPPING Q)

r.png Rated R for Remake of a Better Film

Tempted by Tarentino? Try Kurosawa!

s.png Rated S for Scientific Content ≠ Reality

Star Trek movies get a free pass.

t.png Rated T for T&A

If this film is intended as a star vehicle for >1 former Playboy centerfolds, it should be Rated T.

u.png Rated U for Un-ironic 80’s Soundtrack

Oh, Ladyhawke. You are such a good movie with the sound turned off.

v.png Rated V for Star Vehicle

AKA: Nick Cage needs a yacht payment

w.png Rated W for Woody Allen as romantic lead

It’s time to stop.

x.png Rated X for XENU-sponsored script

(SKIPPING Y and…)

z.png Rated Z for ZOMBIES!

EEK.

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Data munging

Recently I’ve been importing the ancient Librarian Avengers archives to live within WordPress. Because the site goes back to…hrm… 1997, there’s some data munging to do.

Right now I’m concerning myself with the period after Graduate School, when I moved to Ithaca, NY for an ostensibly-cool digital library fellowship. I couldn’t talk about how much I hated it at the time so the entries are mostly tangential to the work I was doing, but there’s still some fun stuff.

Importing ancient blog posts involves a bunch of tagging, titling, category-setting, and general modernization. I’ve been progressively making my way through the old posts, adding images, fixing spelling mistakes, and generally adding a bit of polish.

Part of the reason I’m taking on data scrubbing as my One Designated Personal Thing to Do this evening, is that today has been a study in helplessness. My daughter has a (small) fever. It’s the first time she’s been sick, and I’m trying to direct my need to control something (anything!) in a positive direction.

Also, cleaning data is pretty therapeutic after some of the body fluids I’ve encountered recently.

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Me, bouncing around onstage at an O’Reilly Conference

Above is a photo of me undergoing a brief moment of Muppetface onstage. Last week I spoke at OSCON Ignite, the evening entertainment bit of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and the Google Awards.

Talks took the traditional Ignite format of five minutes, 20 slides. Slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, ready or not.

Speakers were encouraged to address their personal brand of geekery. I chose to talk about the Librarian Avengers Film Rating System, which addresses some movie metadata I’d like to see. Things like “This film contains a Creepy child Singing” and “Warning! Sylvester Stallone!”

OSCON Ignite is online at blip.tv here

My bit starts around (44:45), but stick around for the whole thing. Make sure to check out Kirrily’s talk on Geeky Things you can Do with Textiles, and Liz Henry talking about the barriers to wheelchair hacking.

The format kept everyone pithy, and although I had to speak before the amazing Damian Conway, I didn’t throw up from stage fright once!

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Freebase Hack Day II: The Return of Hack Day

Librarian?

Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.

It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.

Drop me a note if you are going. :)

-Erica

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Shh. “The Library” is the subject of the Freebase Data Mob

I’m a librarian by ethnicity, if not profession these days, and there’s nothing I like better than free information. Free as in beer and free as in speech. Which is why I like Freebase.

Freebase is a free database. Of data. On everything.

Everything in Freebase is publicly available, including the relationships between topics. The information is culled from a variety of open sources, and includes things like, say US zip codes and Walmart Store locations.  Every week their community manager (who happens to be my flatmate and a fellow Victorian Housekeeping Aficionado) picks a topic for a “data mob”, and the community adds information to Freebase on that topic.

This week it’s libraries. So, Librarian Avengers, I encourage you to go in and add stuff. I suspect you know a bit on the subject.

Who knows? Maybe one of you will make a video showing the correlation between library locations and Something Really Good…

*Edit* You gotta have an account first. Just so you know.

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Oldschool Metadata

Binders of field notes sit in the common area of the Macaulay library, the audio/video library where I spent three years working as a software interface designer.

These are all digitized now, but the collection goes back to the 1950’s so these books are the last line of defense in case of a digital preservation catastrophe.

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SxSw Analog Tagging

More analog tagging from South by Southwest Interactive…

photo by noneck

I’m trying to start a trend. Conference badges need more than just geographic metadata.

Together we can raise the level of schmoozy conference discourse!
Grab some stickers and tag yourself! It’s your duty as a librarian!


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Deliver my books bitch.

I tried out Cornell Library’s book-delivery service this week. A nice stack of David Foster Wallace books quickly appeared at my workplace yesterday afternoon, and I got a friendly call when they arrived.

redbooks.pngIf you are a Cornell student or staff, you can have library books delivered to any library-location of your choice for free. For me, this means walking upstairs to our sunny little ornithology library overlooking the pond, and sitting by the fireplace for a bit.

I’m an irredeemable Amazon.com addict, so I view as a right the ability to learn about a book, click a few links, and have said book delivered to me. Imagine my pleasure at being able to do this without paying for it.

pinkbooks.pngUnfortunately, you pretty much have to be told about the service to find out about it, unless you are the type of user who clicks links labeled “requests” on library websites and enjoy library jargon. Like many public services in the country, the crucial step of communicating to humans was overlooked.*

*Many nonprofits seem to say to their clients: “Look, we provide a valuable and benevolent service. You could at least be arsed enough to jump through a few design hurdles in order to discover our valuable service that you don’t know exists because of our design hurdles.”

I’m not sure, but I think the Cornell Library Patron narrative is supposed to go like this:

  1. A student or staff member goes into the library catalog and searches for some interesting books, thinking “Hey, I’ll go pick these up at the five separate library locations where they are housed”
  2. The patron adds each book to her “bookbag” (navigating a series of hurdles involving ID numbers, multiple passwords unique to the library system, and cute-not-descriptive service names) to create a list of books she wants to get.
  3. yelbooks.pngA MIRACLE OCCURS HERE
  4. The patron mysteriously knows that she can have her books delivered.
  5. The patron clicks into the catalog page for each book (students love catalog pages!) and separately clicks “requests” at the bottom of the page, knowing instinctively that book delivery is a “request”.
  6. greenbooks.pngThe patron chooses “Book Delivery Services (9996 available)” from a dropdown list conveniently located below the fold.
  7. Assuming the patron does not receive the helpful error message “Your Patron Initiated Call Slip Request failed. This item is not available for Call Slip requests.” like I just did (Patrons Love Call Slip Requests!), she enters her ID number again.
  8. The patron is familiar with the names and locations of the dozens of small on-campus libraries and selects her nearest branch.
  9. bloobooks.pngThe patron knows that, unlike use of the weight rooms, climbing wall, or campus cinema, the library book delivery service is free.
  10. The patron clicks “submit request”, then repeats the process for each item she wants delivered.
  11. The patron celebrates her triumph with a fine malt beverage.

Still, mad useful if you know about it.

blackbooks1.pngThe financial advice site Get Rich Slowly suggests using the library as a frugal way to save money on books. I agree, and am going to endure more bad OPAC design in the interest of financial progress. Stay tuned.

Cornell librarians: Please do not kill me. I’m glad to have your services. Bad online user experiences are common in the library world. I’m sure you are busy right now improving the OPAC and writing clear non-jargon filled text describing your services. Go Big Red!