Bibliographic Wilderness

So, I’m back from my vacation. Still working out a piece on proper conceptual modelling of authority work as a critique of FRAD. But it’s tricky. In the meantime, here’s a more technical piece on Ruby on Rails and threading (Well, FRAD is ‘technical’ too. So let’s say a piece about programming). For whatever reasons, I get non-trivial web traffic from web searches leading to my fairly useless ramblings about Rails, so here’s a more useful piece instead.

You can’t thread in Rails? Sure you can!

But you may or may not want to.

People often say “Rails doesn’t do threading/concurrency”. This isn’t really true, what they really mean is that Rails synchronizes access to the “request-response loop”—from when a request comes in, to when the response is returned to the browser, only one of those request-response actions can happen concurrently. If you want to handle more traffic, add instances. And this is true, and fine, so far as it goes. But there are still some cases where you really could use concurrency/threading in a Rails app, and adding more instances won’t help. (more…)

I havent’ actually read it yet, but just the abstract alone of this Dlib article makes me think of a reoccurent problem I think about. If showing the user all the subjects that matched their query along with hits is useful (we often describe this as ‘facetted’ display, which I think is actually a misnomer), that might work well when you only have LCSH, but what the heck do you do when you have a corpus involving disparate controlled vocabularies?

Just listing all the controlled terms raw can easily give users misleading ideas in several ways, or just be plain confusing.

And what if some items in the corpus don’t have controlled subject/genre vocab at all?

So on reading that abstract I think, hmm, assuming LCSH is still the most common controlled vocab in your corpus could you use automated clustering algorithms to map other items to LCSH, to actually provide a meaningful list of subjects across your corpus?

Maybe.

So I’ve been not blogging for a while–I managed to arrange my job so I could devote myself to some serious software development, and have been reminded of both what I liked AND what I didn’t about how obsessive I can get about coding. I get really caught up in it. Hopefully some news on what I’ve coded soon.

But meanwhile, I’ve been wanting for a while to write about authority control and identifiers, a topic I have written about before. There are some points I’ve really wanted to make, but I’ve had a bit of writer’s block on it, because it is so hard to talk clearly on this subject—it’s hard to even think clearly on this subject. But I think it’s crucial, and I think there are some important things to be said, that I’m getting a bit clearer thinking about and saying.

After trying to figure out how to say these things clearly, I decided that first we need to establish some basic agreement about the purpose of authority control. I’m sorry that this ends up being so lengthy, but I think it’s necessary to be clear.

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