Begin to create a collection of documents for your course project
Aim for 20-30 items to start with.
This is a flexible project, remember. Your collections and items will likely grow and change over the semester.
Examples of forms the "collection" could take at this point:
A list of items, perhaps with brief descriptions of the features/attributes of some or all of the items. The list of recipes I gave you in our first class session would count as a collection.
An actual collection. For example, if you are doing some kind of photographs in digital form, you could put a directory containing the digital photos online and link to it. Or upload your photos to the wiki and create a page for your collection.
Note that in this case, you should still make some sort of list of what the items are.
The collection can be made of
Documents you actually have or have access to
Made-up documents (I don't really have a Lentil soup recipe from The Grit restaurant in Athens, GA. I don't remember if they actually serve lentil soup since I only ordered the Golden Bowl. But the made up recipe fills a need in my collection for: another soup, another thing made with lentils, another source of recipe. See recipe collection list.
A combination of the two.
Be strategic.
The recipe collection list I gave you was put together with reasons for including those items:
The cheesecake recipe including the crust recipe referenced by the cream pie recipe: A document with multiple parts, and one of those parts is referenced by another document
The cheesecake, no-bake cheesecake, and New York style cheesecakes: different kinds of one thing
Inclusion of recipes that could be grouped together in different ways: by vegetarian-safeness, by ingredient, by world region, etc.
Recipes with different "authors" or sources
Recipes using different names for the same ingredient
If you can't think of different types of things to include, look at the problems of organizing information discussed in Svenonius, Ch 1., and examples of meeting user needs in Ch. 2. Can you think of how your these problems or needs might manifest in terms of your information type? Continuing the recipes example, I might ask myself: how might the vagueness of language create a challenge in designing a system to organize recipes? Different words are used to refer to the same ingredients, so I can include recipes using those ingredients. Some dishes have different names. Dressing and stuffing may technically have a slightly different meaning, but people tend to use them interchangeably. I can include recipes for those. Etc…
Put your list and/or link to your collection of digitally available items in your project wiki area.
Briefly explain why you included the items you did. The list of strategies for choosing recipes above can be used as an example.
Your descriptions here will greatly affect your evaluation. I won't know enough about all of your information types to judge how well the collection will serve the purposes of the class. You'll need to tell me. :-)
Remember that this is a draft. I'll give you a score for your first try, but if you make improvements over the semester, your final score will be higher.
2 Evaluation
Weight: 4
Rubric
Follows instructions (Weight: 1)
3 Created collection of 20-30 items. Made list available on wiki. Wrote a bit about why items were chosen.
2 Mostly followed directions.
1 Partially followed directions (more unfollowed than followed)
0 Did not complete component.
Choice of documents (Weight: 2)
3 Chose range of documents illustrating a number of challenges to organizing information.
2 Chose a good collection of documents, but they don't exhibit many features that will make them interesting for this class. The collection will have to be adjusted quite a bit through the project.
1 Chose documents so homogeneous or heterogeneous that the "collection" doesn't seem to hold together