The proliferation of ways to find stuff means that more stuff gets found, and has to be dealt with, so we have to find and develop the tools and skills that facilitate management of our personal information resources. This is a tall order, and will be a continuing problem as more and more stuff enters our own personal digital realms. In the last decade, I have tracked my own 'information evolution' in a forest of Web pages, most of them very imperfectly interlinked, and few of them constructed with any overarching system clearly in mind. Thanks to Google (augmented by a bookmarklet), I can search a lot of that territory by keyword and find bits that I'd forgotten... but my personal digital libary is, to say the least, imperfectly organized. That's a problem we all have, and will have more and more as our lives become more and more digital. The MP3s and images and texts that pile up in our personal storage spaces need to be organized and cross-connected...
My logfiles page is a recent attempt to make some order out of my sprawling digital real estate, but it really is linked here to introduce the medium to those who aren't already familiar, and to encourage creative engagement during the duration of INTR131. I've done the same in many courses over the last few years, always with mixed results: a few people take one look at the format and dive right in... most use it only when they have specific assignments to make entries... now why is this? What can I do about it?
Perhaps the problem is that many don't see the computer as a primary everyday work tool, though it's also possible that there are software limitations: if one uses FrontPage to make Web pages, it's necessary to 'work' in campus labs, or else buy the software from Bill Gates. There are alternatives, like the HTML option in Word, though they have drawbacks (Word puts all sorts of junk into a file, making it necessary to use ONLY Word on a particular page or risk htmeltdown...). Personally, I don't use a WYSIWYG editor for Web pages, which means that my pages are all pretty primitive... but I can work on hem anywhere, in WordPad, coding the HTML myself on the fly.
Tools I'm using these days:
- Google, of course, in various of its incarnations (see advanced search for some of the power under the hood)
- Grokker (a "personal data-mining tool" that presently searches the Web [but not google], or amazon.com, or a connected drive [C:, H:, etc.]. More plugins are promised soon)
- SnipIt (instructions need to be updated) and Pirarucu are home-brewed PDL apps
- bookmarklets which work with any search that passes a string
- registry entry abbreviations
- Kartoo, a lovely visualization tool for Web searches
- OAIster (search "a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources.." from 'exposed' collections whose metadata is harvested) which is in its infancy, but of great interest
- Amazon.com --when I'm logged in as myself, a phrase entered into the search box gets books containing that phrase