Kendall Grant Clark starts a new column on XML.com, called "Hacking the Library":

"That's the curious space I and others like me inhabit today: Digital, but not purely digital; analog, but not only analog. We live in the space between these two, in the space carved out by their now haphazard, now principled mixture. It is a space worthy, or so I like to think, of its own name. I have taken to calling it "dijalog", that is, "digital plus analog". We're all -- at least all of us of a certain age -- dijaloggers now.

[...] Second, while geeks have lots of tools -- programming languages, data storage mechanisms, exchange formats, and global message passing systems of various kinds -- for managing their personal dijalog collections, we tend to be a bit weak on the details of ordering schemes.

In other words, we're geeks; we're not library or information scientists. But these -- computer and library science -- are kissing cousin fields, parasitic and dependent on one another in important, deep ways. Geeks can learn information and library science easily enough, but especially if they have a real, hackable motivation for doing so. I'm suggesting in this column what I intend to prove in future columns, namely, that the dijalog lifestyle, which is the one most of us are actually living, is uniquely suited to the confluence of geek hackery and certains parts of library science.

That's why I'm calling this series of columns Hacking the Library, because I want to share some of the library science tricks I've picked up in my own efforts to manage my dijalog lifestyle, and I want a motivation to learn new ones and share them with you. Thus, in the coming months, XML.com audience willing and if the creek don't rise, I'll be talking about things like

• personal libraries as information problems, or why you need a spatial arrangement and information query scheme;
• how to choose an ordering scheme for your media collection;
• how to implement the Library of Congress at home;
• how to use weblogs as a way to catalogue and categorize personal information;
• how to use big-time metadata standards and techniques, like Dublin Core and faceted metadata, to manage dijalog artifacts;
• how to manage non-textual artifacts like photos, videos, and music files;
• why RDF and other Semantic Web technologies are ideal for dijalog management;
• open source library frameworks, so you can make sure you get back the things that you lend;
• how personal libraries can be spokes in the Digital Hub;
• distributed collection management."