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Poster: GersonK Date: Jun 8, 2004 7:38am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Sex ed, sex ed, and sex ed.

From my experience with the open source collection, I think it's because spaces count, that is entering the category as "sex ed" for one film and "sex ed " for another creates different categories.

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Poster: Steve Nordby Date: Jun 8, 2004 1:25pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Sex ed, sex ed, and sex ed.

Extra spaces and CapiTalizaTion differences are easily overcome if programming in a language with good string methods or regular expressions.

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Poster: summerseve Date: Jun 9, 2004 1:20pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Categories

This is absolutely my favorite web site, and I love everyone involved with it. It is a brilliant idea, beautifully executed and generously provided free of charge.

BUT...

Let's face it, the category system is a complete mess!. There needs to be a smaller, finite number of categories from which contributors can choose, with sub-categories as appropriate, all approved by the curators. User-created categories have made this feature virtually useless. I discovered that fact during my first ten minutes here, and haven't browsed by category since.

Have I mentioned how much I love and appreciate this site?

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Poster: Administrator, Curator, or StaffJonathan Aizen Date: Jun 9, 2004 5:00pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

finite number of categories from which contributors can choose, with sub-categories as appropriate, all approved by the curators.

I presume you're talking about contributors to the Open Source Movies collection and such. This is certainly a good idea, the only major issue is that building a curation system for contributor suggested categories is a substational project and that we need volunteers to help do the curation. The latter is feasible, given that there seem to be eager folks out there. The former is just an issue of where time is spent - it can be spent building features like this one, or it can be spent building the Archive in other ways (such as adding the capability for users to contribute still images or software, or creating a new search engine for the content).

In any event, a good suggestion.

Jon

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Poster: summerseve Date: Jun 9, 2004 11:14pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

Thanks for the responses! And yes, though this was a response to something mentioned in the Prelinger forum, I was referring mainly to the Open Source categories (though it would be nice if the Prelinger categories were more hierarchical as well).
I'm sure everyone understands the difficulty of managing a huge site such as this, and that optional improvements often have to take a back seat to more pressing issues. Frankly it's amazing that you keep this thing running smoothly at all! So thank you again for everything, and for taking note of my two cents.
And Jonathan, I hereby volunteer for this, or anything else you may need help with...
Thanks again.

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Poster: Administrator, Curator, or Staffsimon c Date: Jun 10, 2004 12:55am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

As time permits, we may be able to fix the dupe categories in curated (non-public) forums, since only a very few people have access - I think this would help a lot. For example, it looks to me as if I could clean up those duplicate categories (without making any editorial decisions!) quite easily on Prelinger, given a few hours of spare time - and I will endeavor to do this!

As Jon says, we'd need some new code for fixed 'master' categories (which I definitely like the idea of!) for the publically uploadable forums, but it's a question of priorities, woohoo.

Thanks, y'all,
s!

This post was modified by simon c on 2004-06-10 07:55:19

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Poster: GersonK Date: Jun 11, 2004 12:49am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

Hey, I like being able to specify my own categories! I think Steve is still onto something in as much as making the categories case-insensitive and ignore leading and trailing whitespace should be a smaller allocation of resources than things like curator control and clean up of the categories.

Just look at all the categories that appear multiple times on the Open Source list:

http://www.archive.org/movies/movieslisting-browse.php?collection=opensource_movies

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Poster: Steve Nordby Date: Jun 11, 2004 2:43pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

White space and case insensitivity are easy but try coming up with categories to match every ephemeral film you might encounter. I'd start with the Dewey system... but heck I'm an old fart

This post was modified by Steve Nordby on 2004-06-11 21:43:10

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Poster: cashel Date: Jun 11, 2004 4:45pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

I think that many of the films in Open Source Movies DEFY classification.

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Poster: summerseve Date: Jun 12, 2004 10:03am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

That is certainly true. For example, there's a certain film involving a harmonica...

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Poster: summerseve Date: Jun 11, 2004 11:38am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

Gerson, I'm sure you have used your freedom responsibly and intelligently. But just click on "Browse the Collection" in Open Source Movies and I'm sure you'll agree that the result of this freedom has been chaos. Let's look at what makes the collection useful and easy to navigate. When a system isn't working, one needs to consider change, like it or not--don't you think?

Sometimes the greatest freedom is found in a limited number of choices.

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Poster: GersonK Date: Jun 13, 2004 2:06am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

I'll just say that limiting user defined categories to sub-categories is a pretty good compromise, so I won't bore you all with debating the pros and cons of user defined categories.

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Poster: Administrator, Curator, or Staffsimon c Date: Jun 11, 2004 1:08am
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

Well, when we discussed this before, we considered having certain top-level compulsory categories, and then user-settable categories underneath it, at least for some audio collections - I really like that approach, because then you can browse by basic 'style' and still get user-created categories underneath it.

But yeah, just a concept - your mileage may vary :)

s!

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Poster: Administrator, Curator, or StaffRick Prelinger Date: Jun 9, 2004 2:44pm
Forum: prelinger Subject: Re: Categories

For the Prelinger films there used to be what librarians call a "controlled vocabulary" of subject headings. Lots of work went into this, until I slacked off a couple years ago, and since then haven't been keeping these up to date. After we finish our crazy library project, I'll put the list on a webpage for everyone's reference, and in July start updating and expanding the list.

I won't pretend that these subject headings would work for the non-ephemeral films, but they could be expanded.

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