Ken, Terry, Teena, Mads, Kari-Hans, Teena, Ranulph, and colleagues,
I have been exploring and pondering what a bibliographic system to support design education, scholarship and research might include and how it might be organized to provide a window into other resources. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can respond to guide us.
It has been suggested that a bibliographic database with source identifiers, an abstract or statement of scope and purpose for each bibliography, keywords, a common citation format, and url links to digital documents at academia.edu or other digital depositories would offer a feasible portal for accessing bibliographic content relative to design provided by its authors subject to guidelines from a committee representing the field.
Source identifiers and abstracts or guides to content are needed to give focus and context for judgment of potential value to the searcher. Other judgment may follow by scanning the listing content for originality, relevance, quality, etc.
Keywords are needed both for this reason and to focus search. Academia.edu exploits keywords to score those frequently used to reach particular content. The search terms are not limited to the given keywords but may include other terms.
They help the author see what searchers are looking for when they reach a citation. For example, I have learned that the words "design thinking", "problem solving", "roles", and "modes" which are in the titles of papers I have written have been used in different ways to access my papers on academia.edu from google. Academia.edu ranks successful search terms enabling you to see what people want to find. "Management roles in group problem solving" for example got its author from google to my paper "A Role-Oriented Approach to Group Problem Solving". If a keyword ranks high enough it gets you on google's first page for searches for example typing "modes of philosophy " gets you a link to my paper "Philosophical Modes in Design Thinking Revised 1:25:2012 Academia.edu analytics shows me that "modes of philosophy" is one of the top search terms for this paper. Anyway open keyword searching is desirable.
The connection to academia.edu as a depository is really worthwhile. Not only do they host your full documents, photo, CV and URL links they also notify your followers and designated fields of new posts and display the number of times each document has been viewed. Their analytics notify you of search terms and the country they come from, give you the number of searches from different sources each week (440 from academia.edu, 61 facebook, 37 google, 7 Google Canada and 551 document views and 665 profile views this week (this suggests I should update my profile).
If you don't know the school and name of an author or that I'm independent (retired) you may not find what you are looking for. ex just googling Ken Friedman will not get you to his home page at academia.edu - just at Swinburne. Also Ken is so famous as a Fluxus artist that his wikipedia profile doesn't give access to his papers. Academia is an important new resource for design but I still think we need a bibliographic portal just for us.
I had somehow misconstrued that Ken was going to post access to a list of digital depositories as resources. His list of nine books was a real contribution, I think that a list of links to especially valuable depositories would make a wonderful addition to the database. (Loughborough, Swinburne, The Interaction Institute, The library of Congress, The British Library,etc) This one might even be annotated. (I'm not asking that of you Ken! )
Anyway, food for thought,
Chuck
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