A Series of Connections

So, my progress has not been nearly as good as I expected or hoped. I've been giving a lot of thought to my approach to composing entries. As you can see in previous posts I've already changed my mind in one respect: going from a "starting with one master entry on the Knowledge Society that branches out to smaller articles approach" to a "smaller articles that will build up to the master entry approach." Now I have also decided, since it is starting to happen anyhow, that one of the most effective approaches will be to work on multiple entries concurrently. If I establish a network of basic articles that roughly cover the topics I intend to write about I should be able to save time citing sources, especially using the tag and search features on Zotero (where I am compiling my sources). Besides, I figure that even the most rudimentary of entries is more likely to invite other author's contributions when the project goes "live".

My work to this point has given me a new appreciation for the amount of effort, and collective time, that must be behind well-written (and referenced) Wikipedia articles. I suppose browsing their history can give you a similar idea. Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but it appears that the most effective contributions to wiki resources are ongoing and long-term.

I've offered myself up for adoption on Wikipedia. It is a program that pairs experienced users with those who have less. I'm hoping to find someone with helpful article development tips.

My newest entries:
Internet service providers
Landline phones
Fiber-optic connections

Caught working in the Phags-pa

A fair portion of my day today has been devoted to working on an entry for Phags-pa script. It's reasonably substantial, especially for something I knew nothing about this morning, so that's good. It also led me to information that clarified a misstatement I made in another article. But I got awfully hung up getting things in the infobox sidebar to show correctly. Even now the display is awkward in places and I have no idea how to fix it. If you have any suggestions how to deal with this I suggest linking here where I've started a discussion about it. I'm not entirely clear how the templates are supposed to work, but it looks like the data entry for a similar table on wikipedia is much more straightforward.


Some other entries I've made recently Örtöge, ICT infrastructure, and Population.

And I'm about to dive into one on fiber-optic connections. Rock n' roll!

Week Three: Getting Some Momentum

So I've changed my mind. Posting a larger article on the Knowledge Society and then working out to smaller articles doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore. 1) The paper I was going to crib from isn't really written in a way that is appropriate to an encyclopedic resource, and 2) fleshing out the individual subheadings for a knowledge society, as listed below (and as Brian encouraged me to do), then connecting them in a larger article towards the end of this internship seems like a better chronology to follow.

Here are the first two entries started by me last week:
Mongolian Script
Literacy

There is something weird going on with the Literacy entry that I can't figure out. For some reason the references have been inserted inbetween two paragraphs even thought hey are not written that way in the code. I butted heads with this glitch too long last week. It's probably going to be something simple that I'm just overlooking. It makes me wonder if there is a wiki-script validator out there like they have for HTML. The other thing that would be handy is a script writer that color coded the sections as you wrote them, like they have for HTML. I'll have to poke around for those when I have some time.

As of right now I would like to challenge myself to doing about three articles per day for the next few weeks. I realize that some articles will require more time than others, but I would really like to get this wiki fleshed out more. The main thing I need to emphasize to myself is that the articles do not need to be perfect, that is part of the beauty of a wiki, right? Where you don't have all the info others can help fill it in. I would like to have good and plentiful citations however. I think that this reference resource will differ some from Wikipedia in that it should be able to guide scholars to resources in addition to providing quick information.

I'm continuing to learn more about wikis as I go too. Last week I got two books from area libraries to learn more. The first one I looked at was Using Interactive Technologies in Libraries, which turned out not to be very helpful. It mainly covered things I already knew or how examples of how libraries are approaching wiki technology. The other book I got, Wiki: Web Collaboration, looks like it will be much more useful. It is fairly in-depth and easy to find information in. It can also be fun to read a book written in English by German authors.

Week two

Here I am at the start of week two. At this point I have learned more about HTML, wikis and blogs in general. I've been taking advantage of the UW-Madison DoIt student software training courses. I'm sure there is much more to learn, but at least now I can start looking at HTML code and figure out in some ways what it is saying. I've also learned a little bit more about how to write in a wiki format.

At this point I need to establish some concrete goals that I can accomplish before the end of the semester. It is so easy to be distracted by all the diversions offered by the Internet, so some definitive projects should give me something to focus on. I am going to keep poking around in wiki sandboxes and start trying to format and post a paper I wrote on the Mongolian Knowledge Society on the ACMS site. This article can act as a starting point and comprehensive overview of the topic "Mongolian Knowledge Society" to which I can link subtopics that flesh out certain points. It can also be my guinea pig to experiment working with formating and whatever other issues I'll need to figure out.

I have edited one article on the ACMS site so far on Education for Blind and Visually Impaired Students. I happened to know of a news story about a "speaking library," so I contributed that information. But I couldn't figure out how to make a hyperlinked reference, something that will be important to figure out considering the nature of the work I am doing.

Getting started

It has been a few days since I should have started this blog, but here goes anyhow. The purpose of this blog is to both provide a record of my experience doing a digital internship with the incredibly hip American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) and to help me organize my ideas. As you can probably already tell, I intend to keep the writing here pretty informal-- as if I were simply writing in a notebook. At the risk of making myself look like a fool I will attempt to be brutally honest about the internship. Looking like a fool will be inevitable since I am learning computer stuff that I was convinced at one time I would never be able to handle. One year of graduate school has made me realize that not only can I handle the digital world (at one time I was convinced I could not look at a computer screen for more than half and hour because it would give me a headache-- it must have just been that monitor), I have to learn more about the digital world if I want to be a librarian.

So, speaking of myself, I am a student in the School of Library and Information Studies at UW-Madison. I got here by being one of those people who knock around not knowing what to do with themselves after college. When I got my undergraduate degree in English from UW-Milwaukee I managed to land a choice job parking cars for rich people at a condominium. That lasted until I ran away for a summer to Eastern Europe. I did manage to get more interesting jobs when I returned to Milwaukee, such as organizing an Asian Film Festival, but nothing with a real future. After taking another summer to wander around the globe with my wife, we ended up in Madison so that she could go to school. Those plans were interrupted by a pregnancy. So I applied to graduate school to pursue a degree in library studies. I figured that since I liked hanging out in them I could probably see myself working in one.

Studying Chinese and going on shoestring backpacking trips have given me a strong interest in international cultures and affairs. Part of the reason why I kept procrastinating about finding a "real" job is because I was afraid of being tied down. When my wife and I were in Mongolia we vowed to go back when we had the chance. Since then I have been trying to find an excuse for a return trip. I haven't found one yet, but I guess I am getting closer. This last spring semester I took an excellent class with Professor Louise Robbins about the global knowledge society. As part of the class we got to study a country of interest to us, and as you might imagine I chose Mongolia. As part of my research I got in contact with ACMS, which in turn led to the internship I am now starting.

Researching Mongolia's knowledge society is no easy feat. I quickly realized during my class with Professor Robbins that there is no easy way to find good information in English on modern Mongolia. In many ways it seems as if modern Mongolia is stuck in the shadow of the Mongolian empires of yore. One of the main objectives of this internship will be to collect or guide researchers to information on Mongolia's knowledge society. At this point I am defining knowledge society in same way as we did in Professor Robbins' class using the Lor and Britz model with the below categories:

ICT Infrastructure:	Information Content	Physical Delivery Capability	Human Capacity
Communication infrastructure	Access to relevant information	Transportation	Education
Technology availability	Affordability	Warehouses	Literacy
	Timeliness	Physical addresses	Information literacy
	Presentation in languages and contexts users understand	Libraries and other cultural institutions	Information intermediaries

Lor and Britz. "Challenges of the Approaching Knowledge Society: Major Issues Facing LIS Professionals." Libri 57, 2007.

Because of the digital nature of this internship some areas will receive more focus than others. ICT infrastructure and digital information content will be strong focuses for obvious reasons. Other areas, such as physical delivery capability, are topics I will not be able to address as well. The end result of this project should help ACMS flesh out their reference wiki, while making me learn a whole lot of digital stuff I never would have otherwise.

During this internship I will be supervised ACMS Resident Director Brian White (check out his This Month in Mongolian Studies Blog) and my faculty adviser will be the aforementioned Professor Robbins.

I more than encourage your feedback, I crave it. So please feel free to let me know what you think or any Mongolia related leads you think I should look into or any wiki tips you might have.