As I look at the TC Library's description of itself on the home page as 'a comprehensive single location from which to access the complete body of knowledge in our field', I am thinking of the older, well-established Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (at http://www.swebok.org/) and the new (currently beta) Usability Body of Knowledge (at http://www.usabilitybok.org/). Both of those projects consist primarily of short written descriptions (à la Wikipedia) of various topics, issues or techniques each of in those fields. These, when you have enough of them to cover the breadth of a field, constitute one way of representing the state of knowledge in a field.
It occurs to me that it would be very difficult to incorporate such a vision into the TC Library website. Our site is set up primarily as a hypertextual bibliography of available writings, organized into tens of thousands of combinations of categories.
But it occurred to me that it would be possible to add an aspect to the interface that would permit us to write paragraphs (as many as needed) that would be placed at the head of each category page. These might provide, like the SEBok or the Usability BoK, a prose overview of a wide range of topics within our field.
I've created a few examples of how this might be done. You can see them, at:
- DocBook (http://tc.eserver.org/dir/DocBook)
- Typography (http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Typography),
- Geoffrey Sauer (http://tc.eserver.org/authors/Sauer,_Geoffrey), and
- Interaction Design (http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Interaction-Design)
I'm still thinking through how we might develop such a possibility. Should I make it editable by the public, like the Wikipedia? Should it be based on a free-registration system like our Discussion Forum? Or should writing/editing access be limited exclusively to the TC Library's editorial board?
Let me know what you think. Are there ways we could implement an idea like this one that might be particularly useful?
