[Clipart] Ideas for some new subcategories?

[Bryce Harrington]

----- Forwarded message from Nathan Eady <eady at galion.lib.oh.us> -----

Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 17:17:50 -0400
From: Nathan Eady <eady at galion.lib.oh.us>
To: Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.org>
Subject: Re: [Clipart] Ideas for some new subcategories?

Bryce Harrington wrote:

> As a rule of thumb, it seems like categories shouldn't have more than
> about half a dozen pages of images, else it gets really annoying to
> browse.  An ideal category has 2-3 pages of items - enough to give some
> good choices, but nothing more than a couple clicks away.

I tend to agree with this, mostly, but it does need to be balanced
with category nesting depth.  It would be best if no categories
were nested more than about six deep.

On the other hand, I don't think it would be a problem to have
more than six subcategories of a given category at a given level,
because those take up less space than images on the navigation page.

> With these two rules of thumb in mind, we've got a few categories in
> need of being subdivided.  Please take a look and share your ideas for
> structuring them:
> 
> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/computer

Just off the top of my head, without actually looking at the
collection, I tend to think along these lines:

computer
  hardware
     servers
     desktops
     laptops
     handhelds
     peripherals
        monitors
        keyboards
        mice
        hubs_and_routers
        cables_and_connectors
        external_drives
     components
        internal_drives
        expansion_cards
        motherboards
        chips_and_electronics
     media
        discs
  software

This, however, ignores the whole icons category, which
I'm not sure I want to think about.  Perhaps someone
more ambitious would have some suggestions there.

> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/geography

geography
   maps
      world
      america
      europe
      asia
      ...

There are also some geography images that are not maps,
or are not maps of a specific world location.  Non-map
images of the whole earth maybe belong in their own
subcategory, which could be called "globes" perhaps.

> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/office

Yeah.  There's also a *lot* of duplication between office
and education, enough that I think we may want to rethink
whether there's a more broad category we could place both
in, so it could have a "supplies" subcategory that would
encompass both office supplies and school supplies, where
we could put things like staplers and scissors.  Maybe
we could just call the category school_and_office ?
But yes, it would need some subcategories more than just
supplies, and supplies probably needs subcategories for
pens and pencils and maybe other things.

> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/people

Indeed.  Just off the top of my head:

people
   historic_people
   bodypart
   clothing
   smilies
   stickmen
   faces_and_heads
   occupations
   symbols

In some locales the faces_and_heads category should perhaps
be a subcategory of bodyparts, but not, I think, for en-US.

> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/signs_and_symbols
> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/tools
> 
> What do you think?  

I think someone should pass around a signup sheet with each of
these categories on it, and whatever other ones anyone thinks
need done, and people should sign up to reorganize just the
images within a given category category over the next, umm,
week and a half or so, zip or tar up the results (just the
category(ies) you signed up for).

There would be no need for every category on the signup
sheet to be signed up for right now, because once the
next release is out, we can pass around another signup
sheet.  We could do that every month, if need be, and if
only two or three categories get done each month, so be it.

----- End forwarded message -----