Tag: Transportation

  • Freight data makes me feel like a failure

    Freight, originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk. Yesterday I got one of my least favourite types of reference questions: somebody wanted freight data. Not just that, but freight data about how much it costs to ship dry goods in different types of container ships. Why do I hate freight data? It’s opaque. It’s inaccessible. It’s expensive.…

  • Building a tiny taxonomy: Getting back to my IA roots.

    This morning I decided to buckle down and dig into my website redesign project. The main hurdle this week has been getting the taxonomy designed so that content can be filtered and organized by it. I discussed my taxonomy tales a bit before, but now let me tell you where I am.

  • Becoming your subject: Thoughts I had on my bike ride to the doctors.

    minor repairs, originally uploaded by neal..patel. I am a transportation librarian, which isn’t really news to anybody anymore. (Or it shouldn’t be…) It’s a very narrow view of the world. Everything can be tied back to transportation. Economics? Engineering? Planning? The environment? Politics? History? Art? Seriously, my brain has a knack to make it all…

  • Stuck in the middle, or how I try to play both sides

    This is related to my previous post, where somebody threw a fellow librarian under the bus, to use a transportation metaphor. I was horrified. How dare they complain about one of my colleagues like that in a meeting! But I don’t work with them directly and I don’t know their situation. That aside, it’s endemic…

  • Organize anything with a controlled vocabulary – or why I’m obsessed with taxonomies.

    Record taxonomy at Rainy Day Records, originally uploaded by moustache. As I alluded to in another post, I’m working on a taxonomy for transportation websites. Why? I’m trying to redesign my library’s website, we’re moving to Drupal, and all my ideas and fantasies hinge on content being aggregated by thematic types. It’s magical, really. OK,…