Friday 12 June 2009

Updating the dictionary

Updating the dictionary to support the repository terms as they are used today

Devil's Dictionary Definitions:


DOId (pron. Doh-iyd)
State of wide-eyed euphoric ignorance in person(s) bedazzled by baroque identifier system (submitted by the tuxedo'd gentleman of the fens)

Duraspace (pron. Wat-ler-phauk)
What a system is prior to being useful. ("Is the system built yet, or is it just duraspaced?")

(Syn. - vapour, ethereal, nebulous, hot-air)

Persistent Identifier [Ed. note: existance of this is highly dubious]
Something librarians think is important, while the rest of the world couldn't give a toss as long as they can google it. If they can't google it, then it doesn't exist and it doesn't matter to them anymore.

Institutional Repository

"where research goes to die"

Harvesting

A mechanism to create multiple, incomplete copies of items, spread across the internet, in an apparent effort to make sure that when users search for something they find lots of useless links.

The actual aim is to make repository managers feel better about the tiny numbers of items they have by letting them see that everyone else has bugger all content as well.

Zentity (aka How to be able to use Open Office and still be tied to MS)
A really terribly closed system, which is "Open Source" in that you need to purchase a full MS server solution to host it and interact with it.

But, as noone gets fired for purchasing MS software like they should, this will likely have marketshare in the near future.

Agile development
This does not mean doing a waterfall method, but faster with more meetings and more milestones.

It also doesn't mean saying that you do pair-programming when you are the only developer.

A scrum is not another word for a meeting.

Agile development means being able to say "Fuck, I got it wrong" and changing the course of development to avoid a total waste of time and money to hit arbitrary and now, meaningless milestones.


Please, add your updated definitions to the bottom of this post!