Operation Airplane
Find the best textual means to not going crazy on a long flight
Patrick Wilson defines two types of “bibliographic control,” or power over the universe of documents.
The first power is exploitative control, or finding “the best textual means to an end.” The second power is
descriptive control, or finding documents that match a description that I generate.
With exploitative power, I magically receive documents that I might not even know that I need: I think
I’m looking for a chocolate mousse recipe, but really I want the most impressive dessert I can most easily
prepare for a dinner party with the new neighbors, and that’s actually lemon sorbet. (One of the neighbors
is allergic to chocolate, and I don’t know it. Plus, it’s citrus-sation time at the Central Market!) With
descriptive power, I get the documents that I ask for: a chocolate mousse recipe, which will turn the party
into a disaster. Descriptive power is not easy to achieve, but it is straightforward to imagine. Exploitative
power is complex, and it requires judgment to be rendered on the items being described.
Is it possible to achieve some level of exploitative power through structured description, or systems of
attributes and values? A difficulty with such attempts lies in that element of appraisal. Appraisal isn’t
limited to assessments of quality; as Lee and colleagues note, determining characteristics such as genre,
mood, theme, and visual style of video games is similarly a matter of interpretive appraisal. While such
attributes can be highly valued and useful, they are also the most difficult to describe precisely and
consistently. When attributes are applied inconsistently, the information being organized becomes
incoherent and hard to understand. This only gets worse if we have many people creating many records at
different times, in different institutions. That’s the whole point of Dublin Core: a simple set of attributes
that works across many situations. Or does it? This is what we shall investigate.
I don’t know about you, but finding the right book for a long flight is a difficult task for me. I hate flying:
it’s uncomfortable in that tiny seat, plus I fear death up there. And so I want a book that’s engrossing but
yet not so intense that I can’t get into it. And it has to be long enough to last 5-10 hours, but short enough
so that I can contemplate getting to the end by the time we land. Perhaps this is a scenario that could
benefit from some exploitative control...
This mission has three parts:
 Define two sets of attributes for two potential audience groups for a specific information-seeking
task.
 Compare these brief schemas with a subset of Dublin Core, using some specific examples.
 Discuss the relative advantages of each schema. Can one be considered “best”?
Define two schemas to facilitate exploitative control over the bibliographic universe for two
different audience groups
Lee and colleagues suggest that particular audience groups may have specific goals that align with certain
attributes and associated values. They ultimately designed one schema for all uses, but they found the
their audience conceptualizations to be useful nonetheless.
Here, we will develop two sets of approximately five attributes each for the task of finding something to
read for a long flight (over 5 hours), for two audience groups: one, yourself; and two, Francesca. Details
about Francesca appear below.
For each brief schema, label and define each attribute and provide some parameters for the value space (a
numerical scale? A date? A name? An image?). You can describe an envisioned controlled vocabulary if
you want (we’ll talk about that more next week).
A tip: when developing attributes, it is usually best to define a wide value space, with a range of
expressivity, as opposed to a narrow one. A dichotomous yes/no value space is typically not very flexible.
So if we wanted to express aspects of a complicated plot, we might consider attributes like the number of
concurrent storylines, the number of characters, the span of time in the narrative, the density of events,
and so on, and not something like “Complicated: yes/no.”
Brief schema 1: attributes to help you select something to read for a long airline flight (10 minutes)
Brief schema 2: attributes to help Francesca select something to read for a long airline flight (10 minutes)
Some information about Francesca
She is a 32-year-old woman with a BS in computer science from UT; she is a software architect for a
game company in Austin. She’s going on a business trip to Copenhagen. (Her company recently
purchased a Danish game-design studio, known for their mobile game Death by Design, where the player
must complete a bicycle route through Copenhagen streets while avoiding airborne objects of mid-century
modern furniture.) She doesn’t need to read anything work-related on the plane.
Francesca enjoys international politics and most regularly reads The Economist. In fiction, she likes plotdriven adventures, often science fiction and sometimes mysteries. She likes settings where she learns
things that she didn’t know before: it could be about other cultures or times, or just knowledge and
expertise, like sailing or farming. She is especially averse to paranormal romance. Vampires, bleh. She
just reread the first two of Larry Niven’s Ringworld books and enjoyed their inventiveness. But she hates
when authors keep revisiting their old series and beating them to death.
Help Francesca find the best textual means to her ends!
Compare these two schemas to a subset of Dublin Core
Five Dublin Core elements are:
 Title
 Creator
 Date
 Subject
 Description
There are a bunch of books on the table. See how you would describe 1-2 of these books with each
schema: Dublin Core subset, the Schema for You, the Schema for Francesca. (10 minutes)
Dublin Core
Book 1
Book 2
Schema for You
Book 1
Book 2
Schema for Francesca
Book 1
Book 2
Assessment: which schema for who and why?
Which of the three schemas seems to best facilitate the goal of identifying a good book for a long plane
flight...for you, for Francesca, and for “anyone”? On what basis can you make such a determination?
After considering this for a moment, we’ll discuss in small groups, where each person will describe their
schemas and their assessments of them, in comparison to Dublin Core.