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There is an exhibition at Tate Exchange which is using the hashtag in the subject which I think must be a first.  Some of the people involved are students about to do dissertations, possibly in art, but needing some access to stories to make a dissertation.  I was having a chat trying to explain how to find stuff given the complexity of this polysemantic complexity with either classical library catalogues, including exhibitions and museum stuff, and aquabreezer #aquabreezer environments (which I have explained before).


Now the digitized form of Librarians for Social Change is appearing, and I find google images the easiest way of finding issues as the cartoons have been more successfully done, the issues at Tate Exchange take us back to 1974 or so, when information systems was used as a concept to explain this complexity.  I'm using the idea of joining Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, short form GLAM, with our, and then a string for a particularity such as LfSC, with which some lis-linkers might still have been engaged.


There is another exhibition, at the British Museum, called Living with gods, and a person at Tate Exchanged immediately asked me whether it was singular, and I immediately replied with the lower case signification, which was immediately understood, from which was immediately generate the neologism to relegate Hockney to being palatable for Tate.  The Living with gods exhibition and the associated radio programme series adds the complexity of religion to the traditions of political organization represented in Tate Exchange but not appearing.


Now the purpose behind all this rhodomontage is to wonder whether this sort of semantic complexity which can't be identified by more that topic tuples #topictuples as we currently stand might be better represented by picking out events and people of some significance?  A long time ago I coined saelb as a short mnemonic device for users looking for something (in other words it is particular and you know it, now WorldCat has just about solved this matter); anything, you just want a start, and in the days of public libraries with librarians that would have been the first point of call, but no longer; everything (which really applies only in special cases and I think I now would use earliest for I have found much repeated stories based on first erroneous stories); the latest, which is now probably google; and the best which has always been a much more complex matter.  Once one deals with matters of the complexity of #bbzxtate (and I've just noticed I typed it wrong in the subject and had to go back to check and change) I don't think any of our current tools work. But to pick out events such as Grunwicks, which for 40 years on has a Facebook page, might connect you with people and resources which would give you a gateway.  This might vary from subject to subject, and in the case of art histories perhaps be of no use at all, but I think trying to develop a controlled vocabulary linked to using Wikipedia for scopenotes and the use of categories might be worth exploring.


John Lindsay
Reader in Information Systems Design
Kingston University,
Kingston Upon Thames,
London.