Forever Frogs: Jumping into Attributes & Fields

LIS 5043: Organization of Information

Dr. Manika Lamba

Introduction

Welcome to the Forever Frogs exercise. This is a self paced exercise. You can complete it at your own speed.

So, let’s get started.

I have brought a very special collection of objects for you to work with. Feel free to browse the slides at your own pace.

The collection currently is about 300 items, though for the purpose of this exercise, think about the collection as being in a retail location and consisting of well over 1,000 items of various formats.

Our Collection: Forever Frogs

• Forever Frogs is a retail store that sells artistic representations of frogs, just frogs, everything froggy. It is located in an upscale village square of a progressive community in the Midwest. The collection contains several formats, for example:
  • Garden sculpture
  • Children’s toys
  • Fiction and nonfiction books
  • Realia, images, paintings, etc.
  • Music
  • Robots and other electronics
  • Clothing
• Because the owners are so terribly busy traveling the world to find all things froggy, they do not have the time to design an organization system for the collection. Your task is to model on paper the ideal organization system for Forever Frogs.

You have been commissioned to create an organization system for the retail store, Forever Frogs. The store is located in an upscale village square of a progressive community in the Midwest.

The collection contains several formats (as you will view on the next slides), for example:

• Garden sculpture

• Children’s toys

• Fiction and nonfiction books

• Realia, images, paintings, etc.

• Music Robots and other electronics

• Clothing

Who knew garden art could be so cute and so froggy? This object is made of tin and has been painted brown, two shades of green and some red. He is about 8 inches long and 6 inches high and is designed to sit in the garden or on a table in the sun. He doesn’t catch flies though.

This object is in three pieces. It is a salt and pepper shaker set. It is ceramic and painted green, yellow, orange, brown and some grays. It is about 3 inches high and 4 inches wide. It is also about 50 years old.

This is Bob. He is a bobble-head toy frog that children will love to play with. He depicts a red-eyed tree frog. See later slides for more on Bob.

He is also the owners’ favorite.

Some frogs are not only beautiful but also have a specific function to fulfill. This little one is a jewelry box. It is cloisonné, painted reds, pinks, greens, yellow and white. It is about 2.5 inches high and 3 inches long. The top comes off completely to reveal a golden interior for storage.

This object is also a jewelry box, though it is smaller and really only will fit a ring or a small set of earrings. The lid lifts back flat to reveal a gold interior. It is also cloisonné and painted green, gold, read, and has jewels for eyes. Detail includes a small gold butterfly. It is about 2 inches high and 2 inches long.

This object is very unique. It is a ring holder, so it has one specific purpose. It is brass, painted blue, green, red and some gold. The top frog and lilly pad lift off to slide the ring on. It is about 5 inches tall and the base is 1.25 inches across.

What a great picture frame for your own works of art! This object is about 5 inches high and about 1.5 inches wide. The back can be removed to insert pictures. It is painted green and silver and has jewel eyes.

Doesn’t everyone love robots? Well here is a robot frog. He hops, sings, dances, and catches flies. What more could you want? (His tongue actually extends to catch a fly off of a branch) He is 10 inches high, 14 inches long and made of green and silver plastic. His tongue is pink plastic. He needs four C batteries to work and has a remote to control the functions.

This is Ben. He is a plush puppet. He is soft, furry, and green, yellow, and orange. He has wonderful expressive red and black eyes. He has a sound box that allows him to croak if squeezed just right. He is about 12 inches long and 8 inches wide. He is very cuddly.

Here is an nonfiction book about frogs and their development. The pictures are in color and the book is 8.5 x 11 inches. More about this book later.

Can you believe an autobiography? This book contains the diary of a frog during its life and seasons. The pictures are all in color, it is hardbound, and 15 inches wide, 10 inches long.

This work is a wonderful old book about myths, legends, and lore about frogs. The pictures are very detailed and in black and white, sepia, and color. It is hardbound, 10 inches high x 8 inches wide. The stories are unique and it is a must to any froggy collection.

The last slides have shown you a representative sample of this diverse collection. As mentioned earlier you should view it as containing over 1,000 objects.

Now let’s talk about how to begin modeling the system for this collection.

Entity First Level

• Each object in the collection will be represented at one or many entity levels
• In this case one level is appropriate. The whole object level. This means that I will have one record in my system for each object.

First let’s consider the entity level. You might recall from the Module 2 lecture that the entity level is the “chunk” or portion of the object we are representing within one record in our system. Libraries tend to work at the whole object level and represent one book or dvd with one record in the system.

This is what we call the whole object entity level. Some collections have more than one level represented. For example, a collection of music cd’s might be represented at the whole object level (album) or it could also be represented at both the album and the song level. It you choose to have more than one level, your system (field structure) needs to be able to accommodate both levels.

So, the first step in the modeling of the objects is to determine the entity level. For our collection we will work at the whole object level.

Next Let’s Talk About Attributes

Bob is a bobble-head toy or artifact that can sit on a shelf. He is 4 inches tall, 6 inches long, and is green, gold, blue and red. He represents a red-eyed tree frog. He has soft, felt on his body. He has a moving head that bobs when you touch it. He was made by Zoologics Inc.

Now we can talk about attributes.

Attributes are the general characteristics of objects. When I say “general”, I mean that we are looking for characteristics that are represented by the objects in the collection but at the least specific level.

Bob is described more above. From the description and your observation, you can begin to pick out the attributes that describe Bob, but that also describe the other objects in the collection.

Attributes for Bob?

Bob is a bobble-head toy or artifact that can sit on a shelf. He is 4 inches tall, 6 inches long, and is green, gold, and red. He represents a red-eyed tree frog. He has soft, felt on his body. He has a moving head that bobs when you touch it. He was made by Zoologics Inc.

I have highlighted the attributes I can identify from the description of Bob. These describe the Name, Physical Description, Creator and Subject.

Attributes for Bob?

• Bob – his Name
• bobble-head toy – is his Format
• 4 inches tall, 6 inches long – is his Size
• green, gold, and red – is his Color
• red-eyed tree frog – is the Subject? Species? Style?
• soft, felt – is his Texture
• moving head made by Zoologics Inc. – is his Creator (manufacturer)

Here is another way to look at attributes. Most, if not all objects, will have a Name. For books we think of this as Title. For 3-D objects we think of this as Name so let’s stick with Name so that we can generally describe the objects.

For Bob we also have Format. He is a toy. We could also include this attribute under Physical Description if we like.

Physical Description includes: Color, Texture, Size, etc. For books we might think of number of pages, dimension, material made of, etc.

He was made by a company called Zoologics. This is a Creator attribute. We could structure this into a field called Manufacturer later, or Publisher for books. Creator, again allows us to generally describe the objects in the collection.

Attributes for Books?

• If I were a frog = NAME
• Sherry Been = CREATOR
• Reader’s Digest Childrens Publishers Inc. = CREATOR
• Autobiography = SUBJECT
• Frogs = SUBJECT
• Book = FORMAT

Books are a little easier to extract attributes. A book has a Creator (author, publisher, illustrator, etc.), it has a Name (we think of Title), Subject, and Physical Description.

Data Modeling

Attribute	Field Name	Searchable Y or N?	Physical or Subject
Name	Name Title	Y Y	Physical
Creator	M anufacturer Publisher Author	Y Y Y	Physical
Physical Description	Format Color(s) Texture Size	N N N N	Physical
Subject	Function Subject	Y Y	Subject

Now let’s take what we just discussed and model the attributes into a table.

The first column includes the attributes we extracted from the objects in the collection. Again, think about the representative sample of objects you are using to illustrate the collection. This table only shows a few we discussed for Bob and for books. You will need to include ALL in your project.

The second column includes the field or field names that your attributes becomes in the system structure (metadata scheme). These can be a one to one or one to many relationship, meaning one attribute can become one or many fields in the system.

For example, the Creator attribute is expressed in the system design as three fields. It could even be more if you want to include Illustrator information. The Name attribute has been expressed here as two fields but you could opt to include only one field, using Name as the general field name to accommodate all potential issues with naming the various formats of objects.

The third column is where you show your decision of whether or not to make a field searchable. If you want a field to be searchable within the system, you have to index it. That in turn tells the system that an inverted index should be created by the system.

It also tells the system to make that field available for searching. When someone then uses the system and they search the Name field, they are ONLY searching the inverted index for the Name field. Your indexing decisions should be based upon what you know about your users and how they use the collection.

The last column is to illustrate if the field is related to the physical aspects (container aspects) or the subject (content aspects) of the object.

Implementation of Data Model

Now that we have our system field structure (metadata scheme) in place, let’s think about creating a record for one of our objects. The table above shows you how the record might appear in the system. Note that not all fields have values assigned to them. Name is not related to this object, but Title is, so we ONLY fill in the Title field.

We can either leave the Name field (and all other unused fields) blank or we can write into our rule to include a statement like “Not applicable”. The point here, is that you can have blank fields in a record. You also have to make it clear in your rule if this is the case or if a special statement should instead be entered into the field.

Bob’s Record in the System

• Record ID: 0001

• Name: Bob

• Manufacturer: ZooLogics Inc.

• Format: toy

• Size: 6 inches long, 4 inches high

• Color: green, gold, red

• Features: movable head

• Subject: red-eyed tree frog

• Function: entertainment

• Image:

Here is what Bob’s record might look like in your system. Each field’s value will be created following the input rules you create for each field in the system.

I have included an image field so that the “Forever Frogs” customers could see the object before they go to the trouble of locating the toy in the store. You can also include an image field if important to your users and their system use.

You have successfully designed an information organization system—beginning with a setting, a collection, and potential users. You then used this information to develop a data model of the system. You would then implement the data model in a field structure, created input rules for each field, and then use both the structure and the input rules to create records to describe the objects in the collection.

CONGRATULATIONS!