John Smith

From GSLISWiki

Professor John Smith is a librarian specializing in the classification of fiction. He has done much work examining the collaborative processes surrounding Unicorn sightings reported on the internet, especially the knowledge management problem that has developed with the recent explosion of text messaging in China. Inspired by a catalog entry from the Mundaneum, his current research focuses on the parallels between the Yeti and the Bigfoot stories, and is currently on sabattical tracking down the elusive creature, whom he now believes to be residing in the Andes, in order to explore how its metadata fits in with existing descriptions in zoological databases, with the theory that by studying how scientists actually collect metadata, one can design more appropriate support software. He is also interested in collecting recordings of the creatures song with open source lossless audio encoding so that valuable data is not lost and its preservation is facilitated. He is also testing out on-site rapid prototyping of digital library interfaces, for he figures that, as a non-human, the Yeti/Bigfoot is an excellent control subject for a user-study.