One Big Library.

Is there a common name for what you do in, say, flickr, when the process of adding descriptive metadata actually occurs in the UI where that metadata will primarily be seen? By which I mean: you see the same image other people see, you click on the "title" block to edit the title, you click on the "description" block to edit the description. Y'know, like this:

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I've been talking with enough folks lately who see this as an important principle that I'm wondering if it's already been named. For flickr users I guess they just call it "editing the title". But for a librarian, living in a world where most of our descriptive cataloging happens in strange forms where those forms themselves tend to be wholly unrelated to how our UIs render the data the forms capture, this seems an important distinction.

I've struggled to find my own name for it, though I'm tending to like the best one I've found so far, "in situ cataloging". i.e. "cataloging in the place where the descriptive information you're recording is both edited and then seen exactly in the place where your users will see it."

Did I miss something, and does this already have a name? Is this important enough to call it something agreeable-to-many? It's been around for years, sure, but it seems like if somebody'd named it (other than with something obvious like "useful dhtml") I'd remember.

"A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do it, and the whole field changes: it’s possible."

- Slavoj Žižek, during today's Democracy Now

Some conference thinks it'll abscond with my pagerank. Hrmpf! I'll show them... by... showing up, I hope?

Turning off twitter was a good idea. Shutting this site down seems like an even better one.

See ya.