Thursday, July 28, 2005

What I plan to do in August at work? #

On June 6, 2005, I started to write about my big (professional) dreams, specifically, what "I've been trying to accomplish in my professional work over the last five years and where I want to go in the next five." I pointed out that the statement Seamless Use and Reuse of Digital Content By Scholars, a statement of current and future research plans and interests, is still mostly accurate. I didn't get very far in writing about those "big dreams" because I could not find a way to articulate how the big dreams were related to the "small things" that have caught my attention and my writing time. For instance, recent entries on my blog cover topics such as my dead camera, Virtual Earth, RDF, Web 2.0, and embedding URNs in HTML. On their own, these entries are reasonably coherent, but how do they tie into my stated research theme of "creating an ideal scholarly information environment that would give researchers seamless access to any digital content source, handle any content type, and apply any software service to this scholarly content"? Showing how all the pieces of my work (including what I write on my work blog) tie together is my major work-oriented goal for the next month. Specifically, some of the tasks I plan to accomplish in service of the goal are: describing the current state of the Scholar's Box and creating a plan for developing it as both as an "end-to-end" prototype for gather/create/share functionality and as a usable piece of software. outlining an architecture that should undergird a revision of the Scholar's Box describing how working on the Scholar's Box tool relates to furthering the causes of fostering gather/create/share services in systems outside of our control decide on the sources and types of content around which to focus future Scholar's Box development Clearly, such a list is only a small start to figuring out what to do. I'm pleased that I just came across the free chapter 3 of Scott Berkun's new book on project management: How to figure out what to do.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/28/05; 6:45:41 PM from the Bach dept. Discuss

Notelets for 2005.07.27 #

My Pentax Optio s5i is dead - a photoset on Flickr. Amassing a Treasury of Photography - New York Times is about photomuse.org: But now both institutions are at work on an ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs. About WSJ.com - The Doctor's Office, Brad King writes: The essence of the piece is this: the proliferation of general medical information has, for some people, started a wave of self-diagnosing, which oftentimes puts them at odds with their doctors.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/28/05; 11:49:49 AM from the Notelets dept. Discuss