Digital Library Center Blog | UF

FIU’s Wolfsonian Museum blog explains a wonderful assignment where students will select an individual object from the Wolfsonian collections for a project. Over the course of the semester-long project, the students will analyze the purpose of the object, investigate its social context and message, identify the artist and the artist’s aim in creating the piece, pair the historical artifact with a contemporary variant that shares a similar function in today’s society, and to explore the implications of social and technological change over time. This is a great assignment because students will learn about the specifics of their projects as well as about the Wolfsonian’s collections and methods for approaching and undertaking research on ephemeral and museum materials. The assignment teaches specific information, builds critical skills, and teaches about resources. Plus, the assignment could easily be used for objects in physical or digital collections.

Yahoo recently improved their web search to by adding related terms and other possible searches in a directory-esque structure for general searches. The change means that general searches bring up the other concepts. This is an interesting and useful change because it will likely help people improve their searches and their search abilities by teaching people how the search works (at least in terms of the words-concepts and general hierarchy) and how to think of their terms/topics in order to get the best results.

I’m hoping this will be a great way for people to learn how to better search by searching. Because the learning aspect is embedded and helpful, and requires no additional effort, this should be really useful and really well used by many. This is also a great example of an interface being more complex and less complicated at the same time. This is elegant design because it embeds the additional material after the search instead of requiring users to see or use new information until after it benefits them.