Posts Tagged ‘classification’
lego and the future
October 7th, 2010 • 1 comment library
Tags: bricklink, cataloguing, classification, controlled vocabulary, description, lego, libr502, mlis, school, slais
In our classification class the other day we learned about faceted classification systems, which sounds amazingly exciting doesn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought so, except that our in-class activity was building one of these systems for organizing Lego. Which made it awesome.
I am a bit of a Lego nerd and loved the idea of building a system that would allow you to find things based on your needs at the time. If I may say so, we built a pretty good fucking scheme which, had we had more time, could have been extended to be much better than how Bricklink does it. I was really into the whole thing. As in, it was the kind of thing I’d have fun doing a lot of.
Which is interesting because I didn’t really come into the program thinking “I’m going to be a cataloguer” or anything like that. I’m not anal about keeping everything in its right place, which I’d had the impression was a requirement. But I’m kind of excited about the puzzles sorting Lego can provide. And creating these schemes is sort of a form of describing, right? Describing stuff is why I write, and this is describing with a very controlled vocabulary. Slotting things into their place in the world.