Day 58: Home Sweet Search Engine

Given that today was a wrap up day, two last classes, I learned quite a lot!

Most interestingly, I learned about some of the more interesting search engines on the web.

Lesson 57: TinEye is a great way to either avoid using someone's image without proper credit or find out who is using your image without proper credit.

Though my prof didn't really think of that use, that is ultimately what it's good for. He thought that it was to find similar images, but really it's to find all incidents of that image. It's a really cool tool, but I think it's more of a straight up tool than a search engine.

Lesson 58: Liveplasma. Oh man, liveplasma.

So here's the deal, Liveplasma can search books, movies and most interestingly, music. And it shows you everything it can connect with that. It creates a kind of cloud of linked items. For Music, it apparently compares the notes in order to cluster and connect different bands. For movies, it seems to base it on genre, style, director and actors. For books, it seems to be primarily author based, genre being a secondary characteristic and possibly thematic links as another variable for constructing the clouds.

It's epic, exploratory and amazingly intriguing.

I could look things up all day on Liveplasma!

Some other interesting ones did things like organizing results with images or into shapes. Tag Galaxy makes solar systems of relations and see also references out of concept planets.

I swear I'm not stoned, that is a 100% legitimate description of what the website does.

Don't believe me?

Seriously. Check it out.

Day 55: Cinémathèque Québécoise

Honestly, I have a lot of feelings. And a lot of them can be summed up with nothing but long strings of vowels.

But I'll try to be brief.

And coherent.

Today the McGill Student Chapter of the ACA (Association of Canadian Archivists), which I am on the exec for as a member of the Commsquad, went on a field trip. And no, I wasn't the one who suggested the destination, as perfect for me as it was.

We went to the NFB's Cinémathèque Québécoise. And it was glorious.

Honestly, I knew I wanted to work for the NFB, because of my film background, and I'm so glad I got the opportunity to visit one of the places I could work if I do wind up there!

I learned a few things, more fun facts than lessons, but bear with me!

Lesson 53: The Cinémathèque developed its own thesaurus which it uses for indexing, and uses a modified version of the AACR2. Their organization system is (modified) Library of Congress.

Lesson 54: Not all libraries weed their collections.

For that second lesson, I had always hoped it existed, but I was worried it was just a silly, idealistic dream. But no! The Cinémathèque Québécoise aims to maintain a complete retrospective of film throughout time, so if they get rid of a document it's only ever because it has fallen into unusable disrepair, or is being replaced with a new copy. But preservation is a large part of what they're about.

Also, they're huge into making their collection digitally accessible.

A library after my own heart! *swoon*