Purpose/Goals

There are not many opportunities for me to use the web development skills I learned in school so I set up this website as a project for me to apply and continually improve my knowledge and skills in website development. As someone interested in going into the field of library and information science, I decided to focus my site on the organization and presentation of information on the Internet. Because the material that I am most likely to work with for this website is, well, personal in nature, I decided to further focus on organizing and presenting personal collections.

What constitute a personal collection that can be organized and presented on the Internet?

All (not one or two) of the following criteria apply:

  1. Some things that can be digitized. Texts, images, sounds. (This presupposes that you already have created/produced such things or have the ability to do so over time.)
  2. Some things that say something about who you are. (Who you are is what you value and strive to act on.)
  3. Some things that can be put together as a whole. (A whole is something that says more than its parts and which connects you to bigger wholes.)

How am I going to explore tools and issues of organizing and presenting personal collections on the Internet?

Although I can draw on traditional principles of organizing and presenting collections from the field of library and information science, I would like my approach with this web project to be intuitive. You know, to proceed with the basic problem of clutter of personal effects and to find ways to make order out of it so I (and hopefully others) can more effectively access whatever is useful information in that clutter. It will be like exploring ways to archive one's own personal effects using the tools of the Internet.

The procedure and the process looks fuzzy to me right now but I begin with what I have and with what I know at a point in time. The first collection I put together for this website were from my papers and drawings moldering in a box in my closet. I know some HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The papers and drawings have their own structures and properties. The tools for creating web pages have their own structures and properties too. These parts of the whole package play around in my mind and I strive to put out the best I can and then write about how I did it. Later, I may have better ideas as I receive feedback from my audience and as I learn some more. It's a process of knowing, learning, connecting, doing, and being.