Local Authorial Voice and Global Authorial Voice in Community-Authored Knowledge Organization Systems

Folksonomies are crowdsourced knowledge organization systems that rose to popularity during Web 2.0 and that are still actively used today. This crowdsourced approach to knowledge organization moves authorial voice from an individual expert or small group of experts to the community. What does it mean to have many voices contribute to a knowledge organization system? Do community members create a collective authorial voice? Are minority opinions more readily included? How does access to information, especially “long tail” information, change? This paper explores these questions by examining authorial voice in community-authored knowledge organization systems (CAKOS) and expert-authored knowledge organization systems (EAKOS)

The Sears List of Subject Headings: Social and Cultural Dimensions in Historical, Theoretical, and Design Contexts

The Sears List of Subject Headings was first published in 1923 to provide guidance to subject catalogers in small libraries in the United States. The Sears List, now in its 22nd edition, is still widely used for subject cataloging in small- and medium-sized libraries and in children’s and school libraries, but the Sears List is not nearly as widely studied as the more comprehensive Library of Congress Subject Headings. This paper aims to expand the critical discussion of the Sears List and to contextualize the List in contemporary cultural and social dimensions by reviewing its history, theory, and design. The paper looks specifically at how Black people and culture, Indigenous peoples and cultures, and LGBTQ+ people and cultures are represented in the Sears List throughout its history and how warrant, design, and theory inform this representation

CONTRACT LAW—ESTOPPING BIG BROTHER: THE CONSTITUTION, TOO, HAS SQUARE CORNERS

Equitable estoppel, also known as “estoppel in pais,” is a common law doctrine that “prevent[s] one party from taking unfair advantage of another when, through false language or conduct, the person to be estopped has induced another person to act in a certain way, with the result that the other person has been injured in some way.” While this doctrine has been invoked for hundreds of years among private litigants, courts still struggle mightily over if and when equitable estoppel should be applied against government action. Historically, equitable estoppel was not allowed against the government under any circumstance. The reasons for this are not without merit. These reasons include: protecting the public fisc (and fears of the resulting crushing liability from the numerous lawsuits emanating from the immense level of communication between the government and its citizenry), preventing the infringement of the federal government’s sovereign immunity, avoiding schemes to defraud the government, and recognizing separation of powers principles. In recent times, however, courts have realized that a failure to estop the government in every instance can lead to grave injustices. This Note explores the legal history of equitable estoppel as it is applied to the government, including Supreme Court case law and subsequent interpretations by lower courts. It then examines the various issues created by the current unsettled state of the equitable estoppel doctrine in the governmental context, and how various commentators have proposed remedying these issues. Next, it recognizes that there is no panacea; each of these remedies are inadequate. Finally, this Note puts forth a new idea, which is gaining traction in some circles, that when deciding equitable estoppel cases the government should apply each of these approaches in conjunction with each other, but with one additional element: when the government’s actions in effect allow it to substantially undermine the core legislative purpose of the Act in question, the government should be estopped

Moving Towards an Actor-Based Model for Subject Indexing

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of an actor-based model for subject indexing, which considers four types of actors: professional indexers, domain experts, casual indexers, and machine algorithms. The paper describes each of the four actors, enumerating differences in approach, training, methodology, priorities, and tools, as well as similarities and historical collaborations between actors. The paper then explores how the actor-based model for subject indexing might serve as a complement to existing models that focus on processes, methods, disciplinary norms, and cultural biases by defining and exploring the following key properties of an actor-based model for subject indexing: 1) actors are the primary drivers of subject indexing work, 2) observing and understanding many types of actors’ processes in real-life situations is as valuable as prescribing correct methods for professional subject indexing, and 3) multiple and different types of actors can perform subject analysis work and subject representation work on the same information objects, and these hybrid (multi-actor) approaches to subject indexing are explicitly supported. These key properties suggest that an actor-based model for subject indexing might open new research opportunities and encourage new hybrid and collaborative approaches to knowledge organization

Turbidity - Suspended Sediment Relations In a Subalpine Watershed

The effect of particle size distribution of suspended sediment vii upon a turbidity reading at a known concentration has been relatively quantified for stream bank materials on the Moccasin Basin - North Fork Fish Creek (MB-NFFC) Watershed, located in northwestern Wyoming. As expected, an increase in the median particle size in suspension results in a decrease of turbidity at a given concentration. The relationship derived correlates the particle size distribution of a chemically dispersed stream-bank material sample, with the Coefficient of Fineness for a mechanically dispersed portion of the sample

Skylab-EREP studies in computer mapping of terrain in the Cripple Creek-Canon City area of Colorado

Multispectral-scanner data from satellites are used as input to computers for automatically mapping terrain classes of ground cover. Some major problems faced in this remote-sensing task include: (1) the effect of mixtures of classes and, primarily because of mixtures, the problem of what constitutes accurate control data, and (2) effects of the atmosphere on spectral responses. The fundamental principles of these problems are presented along with results of studies of them for a test site of Colorado, using LANDSAT-1 data