Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (edition 2007)

If I hadn't just finished a Masters degree in Library and Information Science I may have been more engrossed with Everything is Miscellaneous- David Weinberger's look at the contemporary issues of knowledge classification in our digital environments. He does, however, write entertainingly on the subject and provides an array of appropriate examples to bolster his arguments. A light and readable introduction to these issues. ( )

Read the title and you're done. ( )

As far as I got, anyway, the author has one thing he wants to tell you in this book: faceted classification is awesome, and now that more things are digitized, we can actually use it.

(Faceted classification is where something is categorized in more than one place, e.g. how you can put a book on more than one Goodreads shelf, as opposed to in real life where it can only be in one physical location)

I kept skipping chapters to see if he had anything else to say, but if he did I missed it. He does have a lot of interesting metaphors that he uses to explain things, at least. Like if your kitchen was the Dewey Decimal System, chocolate sprinkles would be a spice. Or something.

I don't mean to be rude about it, but I kept checking to see what year this was written. He keeps talking about card catalogs! And I'm not sure if he thinks these ideas are going to be news to librarians, but hm, not since about 1930 (see S.R. Ranganathan).

I think I would have found this fascinating if I hadn't already gone and went to library school. ( )

In this book, David Weinberger calls for a total re-thinking of the definition of metadata itself. For him, "metadata is what you already know and data is what you are are trying to find out" (p.104), making the existing definition of '˜data about data' untenable. This surely will have greater implications on the way metadata is created, used and maintained. This also has implications on the choice of number of metadata elements, if that itself will remain relevant at all. One may raise a question, on how much metadata is enough? Who gets to decide on metadata elements, to what extent metadata reflects the user' expectations and most importantly what philosophical and theoretical perspectives guide metadata creation?

David Weinberger fiercely criticise current metadata models and he argues that these limitations "on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have given the people who control the organization of information more power than those who create the information" (p 89). I found this book very appealing and I strongly recommend it to my LIS friends. ( )

Okay - prepare yourself for a rave. To say I loved this book is an understatement. I couldn't get enough of it. You simply must read it. I flagged just about every page with a yellow sticky until it got embarrassing. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to digital or social media or the power of the world wide web, this is the book to inspire you. Weinberger tells a good story, lots in fact. He pulls everything together seamlessly and, it seems, effortlessly. He is my new personal hero. As you can tell he has reduced me to a blithering devotee. Oooh...and he's a Librarything author....off to check out his collection of miscellanea..... ( )