About
I named this site "Berry Picker" after Marcia Bates' model of information seeking as described in her 1989 article "THE DESIGN OF BROWSING AND BERRYPICKING TECHNIQUES FOR THE ONLINE SEARCH INTERFACE". She wrote the article years before the Web came into widespread use by the public but her model is still very relevant in understanding how we search and gather information in this age of Google. Our searches are not static; they evolve. We gather information in bits and pieces as we navigate the Web or the Net, not from one huge set of results from one search entry into a simple search box. I come to the simple search box with a clear or a vague idea of what it is I'm looking for. Then I encounter information which leads me to related or to totally different information. My search gets modified, amplified, clarified, expanded or diversified as my search area broadens and narrows.
There are no distinct categories to cover for this site. It could be Pakistan since I'm going to live there in the next year or two or three. But what about Pakistan? It's food, people, culture, language, cities, libraries, what?
I thought of focusing this site on knowledge or information management for international NGOs but as a personal website, I know that it will circle back to a personal path where everything is encountered. As a librarian, I will certainly create pre-defined categories or vocabularies behind the scenes but basically, I will be berry-picking offline and online. I just hope that this site will offer a few tasty bites along the way.