A couple of thoughts after reading this report:
* The authors mention that one of the search tools in use at Oregon State University (as of March 2009) is called "LibraryFind", which they describe as a "locally developed open source research tool."
Curious, I decided to look into this further, and - sure enough - their website still incorporates this "software developed by the Oregon State University Libraries, in part funded from a grant from the State Library." Furthermore, there is a dedicated project website which boasts that "LibraryFind is an open source metasearch application developed by librarians for libraries."
Now, even though the point of this report is to see whether or not LibraryFind can be "effectively replaced" by WorldCat Local, I wish more libraries would look into developing their own tools and online applications; the authors seem to share this view, as they note that "giving up search and retrieval to OCLC" (in effect, giving up control of their online presence to an outside third party) may ultimately "[take them] out of the search and retrieval equation" while relegating the role of library staff to "teaching users how to use the system and cataloging materials for that system" (i.e. serving as "drones" who must follow how OCLC's system works, with no real input into how the system serves their local user community).
Kendall Wiggin gave a talk at this year's NETSL conference, where (amongst other topics) he spoke about how - and I'm paraphrasing here - "there are already enough nerds in the library profession, but now we need more geeks!" His point was that more librarians should be learning how to code and program and troubleshoot computer programs for themselves, so that they don't need to rely on the IT department or outside sources (like OCLC) to do the work for them ... It seems as if OSU's library staff has the "geek" thing well in hand (they have a web development group nicknamed "Team 200" working in-house on projects like LibraryFind), so perhaps they shouldn't be so eager to give up control of search and retrieval in their community, when they've developed a pretty robust system all on their own.
* When describing how WorldCat Local works, the authors state that "maintenance of a local catalog would remain necessary, although less attention would need to be devoted to customization of the catalog." [emphasis mine]
Now, I understand that there is a movement within the profession towards less "localized" cataloging, while having large databases (like OCLC) do the work in order to save time and resources ... After all, the Boston Public Library's copy of "Blink" is pretty much the same as UCLA's copy (i.e. each institution's copy of the book has the same identifying information, and their individual user communities do not require much in the way of heavily-scrutinized editing by local catalogers in order to find them).
However, I do think that individual library collections will lose some of that "local flavor" if they rely too much on outside sources to do that kind of cataloging work for them. Besides, by employing this strategy, libraries are putting a lot of faith in tools like WCL to get every cataloging detail correct ... While many preach the mantra of "good enough" when it comes to catalog records (Who cares if a book has 235 pages but the record says "236", patrons won't even notice!), I can't tell you how many records we've downloaded from OCLC at my library where important information (titles, authors, etc.) is just plain wrong! In fact, their errors can wind up being misleading to the point where it would actually hamper a patron's ability to find that particular item (if there wasn't a "local catalog" system in place to correct those errors, of course!).
Monday, June 27, 2011
"New generation of catalogues for the new generation of users: a comparison of six library catalogues" by Tanja Mercun and Maja Zumer
Mercun and Zumer's article touches on some subjects that I plan on bringing up in my paper, i.e. the belief by many within the library profession that "by not following technological innovations and the trends on the web, libraries will not be able to compete with services such as Amazon or Google and may lose their position as primary information providers". In other words, the theory goes that libraries must "copy" other Web 2.0 applications in order to remain relevant, and one of the ways to do this is to redesign and restructure the online catalog so that it can "bring convenience, trends and quality closer together" for the patrons.
One method of accomplishing this is to take advantage of the collaborative nature of the web by enticing patrons to contribute things like reviews, comments, and tags (the article calls this "[making] use of collective intelligence"); the authors argue that while traditional OPACs have "relied on the expertise of a small group of specialists" (i.e. catalogers), the next-generation catalogs should "take advantage of [patrons'] contributions" so that they can "become better and [have their] value enhanced."
Now, while the implemenation of social tagging and user-generated reviews into the library OPAC can certainly be helpful, the contributions of these "specialists" shouldn't be so easily dismissed (and I'm not just saying that for job security!); as I've previously mentioned, things like social tagging (which are generated by the patrons) and controlled vocabularies (which are generated by the "specialists") can work in tandem to produce the optimum search results for those seeking information.
Another problem with this strategy - and I again explore the subject in my paper - is that people are assuming that patrons are even willing to participate in their libraries in this way ... The article points out that "the problem with collective intelligence is that it is achieved only when a critical mass of participation is reached"; in other words, a lot of people have to contribute in order for the system to be useful. And yet, the authors admit that (at least at the time the article was published) "social features have added only little value to the library catalogue." In fact, they rightfully point out that libraries are "late-comers" in the area of user-generated content (patrons are already contributing content to sites like Amazon and Flickr and LibraryThing, why would they bother adding the library catalog to the list?), and that patrons have no real motivation to actively participate in such endeavors.
The bottom line is that if patrons aren't willing to contribute tags or reviews to the library catalog, then the very idea of a "social cataloging community" becomes meangingless ... If no one is providing content (other than the "specialists"), then patrons will not be motivated to participate, and the "next-generation catalog" will be ignored regardless.
Also, not to rehash old gripes, but I found that the authors used the same rhetoric in this article about "Web 2.0" that I just personally find to be very irksome ... In particular, they describe Web 2.0 as "a place of collaboration and participation where users no longer only receive but also create and share content"; the use of the phrase "no longer" implies that "Web 1.0" users could not create and share content, which is simply not true, they just did it on a smaller scale (back in the day people could "create" personal homepages and "share" information via message boards and newsgroups, it's certainly easier nowadays but the principles of participation and user-created content were still very much in place back then).
It doesn't stop there, though, as they go on to describe the "Web 2.0 trend" as "the collaboration of users in the creation of content on the web" ... which, once again, can just as easily be used to describe what "Web 1.0 did as well! In fact, that's been the whole concept behind the explosion of the "World Wide Web" since the '90s: the ability for everyday people to create content and share it with people around the world.
Seriously, were the people spouting this stuff just not paying attention back then?!
One method of accomplishing this is to take advantage of the collaborative nature of the web by enticing patrons to contribute things like reviews, comments, and tags (the article calls this "[making] use of collective intelligence"); the authors argue that while traditional OPACs have "relied on the expertise of a small group of specialists" (i.e. catalogers), the next-generation catalogs should "take advantage of [patrons'] contributions" so that they can "become better and [have their] value enhanced."
Now, while the implemenation of social tagging and user-generated reviews into the library OPAC can certainly be helpful, the contributions of these "specialists" shouldn't be so easily dismissed (and I'm not just saying that for job security!); as I've previously mentioned, things like social tagging (which are generated by the patrons) and controlled vocabularies (which are generated by the "specialists") can work in tandem to produce the optimum search results for those seeking information.
Another problem with this strategy - and I again explore the subject in my paper - is that people are assuming that patrons are even willing to participate in their libraries in this way ... The article points out that "the problem with collective intelligence is that it is achieved only when a critical mass of participation is reached"; in other words, a lot of people have to contribute in order for the system to be useful. And yet, the authors admit that (at least at the time the article was published) "social features have added only little value to the library catalogue." In fact, they rightfully point out that libraries are "late-comers" in the area of user-generated content (patrons are already contributing content to sites like Amazon and Flickr and LibraryThing, why would they bother adding the library catalog to the list?), and that patrons have no real motivation to actively participate in such endeavors.
The bottom line is that if patrons aren't willing to contribute tags or reviews to the library catalog, then the very idea of a "social cataloging community" becomes meangingless ... If no one is providing content (other than the "specialists"), then patrons will not be motivated to participate, and the "next-generation catalog" will be ignored regardless.
Also, not to rehash old gripes, but I found that the authors used the same rhetoric in this article about "Web 2.0" that I just personally find to be very irksome ... In particular, they describe Web 2.0 as "a place of collaboration and participation where users no longer only receive but also create and share content"; the use of the phrase "no longer" implies that "Web 1.0" users could not create and share content, which is simply not true, they just did it on a smaller scale (back in the day people could "create" personal homepages and "share" information via message boards and newsgroups, it's certainly easier nowadays but the principles of participation and user-created content were still very much in place back then).
It doesn't stop there, though, as they go on to describe the "Web 2.0 trend" as "the collaboration of users in the creation of content on the web" ... which, once again, can just as easily be used to describe what "Web 1.0 did as well! In fact, that's been the whole concept behind the explosion of the "World Wide Web" since the '90s: the ability for everyday people to create content and share it with people around the world.
Seriously, were the people spouting this stuff just not paying attention back then?!
"Toward a twenty-first century library catalog" by Kristin Antelman, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace
Since I came into the library profession as a cataloger (and plan to keep on that path once I earn my degree), any discussion on the future of library catalogs holds great interest for me ... However, I found the language used in this article when describing the "traditional" catalog to be a little too negative for my tastes.
The article starts off with a very nice history of the development of the OPAC, but the authors seem to go out of their way to use terms and phrases that - for lack of a better term - "bad mouth" online catalogs as they are presently (at least in 2006) constituted: "stagnant technology"; "rich metadata trapped in the MARC record"; "closed, rigid and intricate online catalogs"; "the severity of the catalog problem"; "libraries are no better off."
Obviously, it should be the priority for the designers of these OPACs to update and adopt the technology in order to better reflect current trends in the world of searching, but there's no need to verbally tear down what came before just for the sake of making a point; after all, no system can achieve 100 percent search relevancy (they all have their own little "quirks" that keep them from reaching perfection).
Anyway, the article goes on to describe the implementation of Endeca's Information Access Platform at North Carolina State University; curious, I decided to see what kind of changes have occurred with NCSU's online catalog in the five years since this article was published.
Visiting the college's library homepage, I found that they are in fact still using the Endeca platform to power their online catalog (as helpfully pointed out by the "Guided Navigation by Endeca" byline at the bottom of the search results page) ... All of the bells and whistles touted in the article seem to be intact; for example, spell correction is present, as a search for "librerian" brings up "Also searched for: librarian". Also, subject headings and call number location are available in the left-hand column (180 results for "library science" appear under "subject", and 1046 results for "Z - Bibliography, Library Science" appears under "call number location").
The "Browse" tab mentioned in the article has been separated into two separate tabs: "Browse New Titles" (one can search for material newly added to their collection within the last week, the last month, or the last three months) and "Browse by Call Number" (which still includes a handy list of what all the groupings of Library of Congress call numbers stand for). Also, as the article suggests, users can still "submit a blank search and browse the entire collection by any of the dimensions" (taking this action produces a list of 2122255 results).
In addition, the article mentioned that there were "plans to pull out other dimensions, such as format, language, or library, for browsing" ... It looks like Endeca was able to live up to that promise, as clicking on the "Advanced Search" tab now provides these options (for example, selecting "Chinese" under "Language" in the "Optional limits" section produces a list of 2793 results, while selecting "Fiction" under "Genre" in the left-hand column cuts that number down to 127 results, just as the article predicted).
It appears that the old Web2 search system has been eliminated entirely (or else it has been "buried" to the point where I cannot easily find it), so I couldn't try the search results test that the authors used with the broad term "marsupial" ... However, I can report that the library's holdings in this area has jumped from 78 to 171 items, but the top five hits no longer have "marsupial" in the title and "marsupials" or "marsupialia" as a subject heading; of course, this is a minor gripe, as the top three results are e-books which do not include the traditional LC subject headings (anyway, there are no bogus "Tributes to Malcolm C. McKenna"-type results in the first several pages, so I think this search can still be considered extremely relevant).
One more thing: I wanted to take a look at the "More titles like this" feature that the authors spoke about in the article ... So, I clicked on one of the results ("A fragile balance : the extraordinary story of Australian marsupials") and noticed a "Browse Shelf" link under "More Like This"; I clicked that link, which displayed a "virtual book shelf" of titles found around that particular book by call number:
I found this to be a great way to capture the serendipity of browsing the physical bookshelves (in order to discover works that one might have otherwise missed), and I hope that more libraries take the opportunity to adopt this feature into their online catalogs!
The article starts off with a very nice history of the development of the OPAC, but the authors seem to go out of their way to use terms and phrases that - for lack of a better term - "bad mouth" online catalogs as they are presently (at least in 2006) constituted: "stagnant technology"; "rich metadata trapped in the MARC record"; "closed, rigid and intricate online catalogs"; "the severity of the catalog problem"; "libraries are no better off."
Obviously, it should be the priority for the designers of these OPACs to update and adopt the technology in order to better reflect current trends in the world of searching, but there's no need to verbally tear down what came before just for the sake of making a point; after all, no system can achieve 100 percent search relevancy (they all have their own little "quirks" that keep them from reaching perfection).
Anyway, the article goes on to describe the implementation of Endeca's Information Access Platform at North Carolina State University; curious, I decided to see what kind of changes have occurred with NCSU's online catalog in the five years since this article was published.
Visiting the college's library homepage, I found that they are in fact still using the Endeca platform to power their online catalog (as helpfully pointed out by the "Guided Navigation by Endeca" byline at the bottom of the search results page) ... All of the bells and whistles touted in the article seem to be intact; for example, spell correction is present, as a search for "librerian" brings up "Also searched for: librarian". Also, subject headings and call number location are available in the left-hand column (180 results for "library science" appear under "subject", and 1046 results for "Z - Bibliography, Library Science" appears under "call number location").
The "Browse" tab mentioned in the article has been separated into two separate tabs: "Browse New Titles" (one can search for material newly added to their collection within the last week, the last month, or the last three months) and "Browse by Call Number" (which still includes a handy list of what all the groupings of Library of Congress call numbers stand for). Also, as the article suggests, users can still "submit a blank search and browse the entire collection by any of the dimensions" (taking this action produces a list of 2122255 results).
In addition, the article mentioned that there were "plans to pull out other dimensions, such as format, language, or library, for browsing" ... It looks like Endeca was able to live up to that promise, as clicking on the "Advanced Search" tab now provides these options (for example, selecting "Chinese" under "Language" in the "Optional limits" section produces a list of 2793 results, while selecting "Fiction" under "Genre" in the left-hand column cuts that number down to 127 results, just as the article predicted).
It appears that the old Web2 search system has been eliminated entirely (or else it has been "buried" to the point where I cannot easily find it), so I couldn't try the search results test that the authors used with the broad term "marsupial" ... However, I can report that the library's holdings in this area has jumped from 78 to 171 items, but the top five hits no longer have "marsupial" in the title and "marsupials" or "marsupialia" as a subject heading; of course, this is a minor gripe, as the top three results are e-books which do not include the traditional LC subject headings (anyway, there are no bogus "Tributes to Malcolm C. McKenna"-type results in the first several pages, so I think this search can still be considered extremely relevant).
One more thing: I wanted to take a look at the "More titles like this" feature that the authors spoke about in the article ... So, I clicked on one of the results ("A fragile balance : the extraordinary story of Australian marsupials") and noticed a "Browse Shelf" link under "More Like This"; I clicked that link, which displayed a "virtual book shelf" of titles found around that particular book by call number:
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Book review
Here is my book review for James Paul Gee's "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy" (the video is embedded below, or you can click the direct link here):
Here also is a transcript of the video:
Here also is a transcript of the video:
BOOK REVIEW OF
JAMES PAUL GEE'S
"WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US
ABOUT LEARNING & LITERACY"
By Alessandro (LSC 597)
Important knowledge ... is content in the sense of information
rooted in, or at least, related to, intellectual domains or academic
disciplines like physics, history, art, or literature. Work that does
not involve such learning is "meaningless." Activities that are
entertaining but that themselves do not involve such learning
are just "meaningless play."
--- James Paul Gee (p. 21)
Gee's argument is whether or not there is
value in how video games (a so-called
"frivolous" activity) can "teach" its users
how to play ...
Can a similar argument be made for how
social-networking tools like Facebook &
Twitter (also considered by many to be
time-wasting activities) can help users
"learn" new skills?
The theory of learning in good
video games fits better with the
modern, high-tech, global world
today's children and teenagers
live in than do the theories
(and practices) of learning that
they see in school.
-- James Paul Gee (p. 7)
Both video games & social media require
users to learn and think in new ways, ways
that they are not necessarily exposed to in
our school systems.
In fact, Gee argues that learning should be
a social experience, where students are not
"isolated" but are instead able to take
advantage of the "social world" in which
we live.
Learning ... is social, distributed,
and part and parcel of a network
composed of people, tools,
technologies, and companies all
interconnected together.
-- James Paul Gee (p. 177)
When we look at learning as a social
experience, an individual's knowledge and
skills are distributed across:
1) the self ("exists in his own head & body")
2) other people ("the social community")
3) various tools & technologies (computers,
the internet, etc.)
This creates a "social mind" that benefits all!
Social networking works the very same
way, in that other users of the
social-media tools (as well as the tools
themselves) "extend" an individual's
intelligence beyond what's simply in
his or her head ...
It's the "social mind" at work, and Gee
argues that it "plays a central role in
helping people to think about learning
in our modern, high-tech world" ...
Video-game players can be part of a
powerful network, if they so desire and
know how. Their own ineptness need
not stop them.
-- James Paul Gee (p. 187)
The power of the network is the ultimate
learning tool ... In video games, players are
asked to publicly display & share their
knowledge for the benefit of the group (and
the system as a whole), just like in social
networks.
The learner as "social isolate" (isolated
from other people & from knowledge
tools) is no longer the answer in our
modern "social" world!
Young people who play video games often experience
a more intense affinity group, leverage more knowledge
from other people and from various tools & technologies,
and are more powerfully networked with each other
than they ever are in school.
--- James Paul Gee (p. 194)
Much like in social media, there are no
"outsiders" when it comes to the world of
video games ...
Players are encouraged to produce & design
content themselves, rather than being mere
passive observers ... Gee points out that
"game designers & game players are both
insiders & producers," making the experience
more "vibrant" and real for the user!
In the modern world, language is not the only
important communicational system.
Today images, symbols, graphs, diagrams,
artifacts, and many other visual symbols
are particularly significant.
---James Paul Gee (p. 13)
Gee also stresses "visual literacy" (learning
to "read" images & symbols) ... Like video
games, social media has grown its own
visual language
[@SuellenPHD #LSC597] [Like Button] [Digg Button]
that you have to recognize or else you
won't understand what's being said.
As Gee points out with video games, social
media is its own unique "semiotic domain";
if you can't read/understand the meaning of
terms like "tweet" or "poke" in the context of
social networking, then you can't converse in
that world (you are "social-media illiterate")
Furthermore, one can better understand
the world of social media if one is an active
"producer" in that world (i.e. gain a better
understanding if one participates)!
The bottom line for Gee is that, in a specific
context (like video games or social media),
particular words, actions, objects, & images
take on distinctive meanings ... If you don't
know how to "read" these signs, then you
cannot be "literate" in that domain.
The lesson for us all: Understanding the ways
that things like video games & social media
"teach" us how they work can be applied to
our classrooms to great effect!
Gee, J.P. (2003). What video games have to
teach us about learning and literacy.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
VIDEO CREATED USING
Windows Movie Maker ver. 5.1
MUSIC:
"Saving The Shy Librarian"
from "Famicom Sessions Special Edition"
By MisfitChris
Used under Creative Commons license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-nd/3.0/
Images inspired by the sprite artwork of
Kouichi Ooyama
("Earthbound", c1995 Nintendo of America)
Created using
Paint Shop Pro ver. 5.01
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Tagging sites (LibraryThing, CiteULike, PennTags)
LibraryThing (librarything.com)
I've been meaning to create an account with LibraryThing for awhile now ... as a member of our library's Technical Services staff, I'm immediately drawn to any service that promotes itself with the ability to "catalog your books online"!
As of this writing, the site boasts 1,360,184 members with 63,542,867 books cataloged (6,173,071 of those are described as "unique works"); also, there have been 76,978,503 tags added to the site - wow, that's a lot of social participation! - and 1,433,245 reviews ... Very impressive stats all around!
I clicked on the "tour" link in order to get a better idea of how the site worked ... First off, it's apparent that the creators of the site want people to know that LibraryThing emphasizes a community experience (the sentence "LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for book lovers" is repeated twice on the first page); users are encouraged to "contribute tags" and share "common knowledge" (i.e. facts about a book or author), as well as "participate in member forums or join the Early Reviewers program."
It is also a great resource for gathering information about the books that one has in their personal collection; LibraryThing draws its cataloging information from Amazon (which non-library users will easily recognize), but also "over 700 libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress."
Of course, the main drawing point is the ability to create one's own descriptive terms via social tagging (here called "LibraryThing concepts"); on this page, the author - I assume it's Tim Spalding but it doesn't actually say - talks about the necessity for a system to organize collections of books, but that "for most personal libraries ... subject classifications [such as Library of Congress subject headings] aren't much use" (sad but true). The author goes on to compare the admittedly cumbersome subject heading "Bible. N.T. Romans I, 18-32 -- Criticism, interpretation, etc. -- History -- Early church, ca. 30-600" (which a lot of patrons won't make heads or tails out of) against the more straightforward concepts of "early church" and "homosexuality". In this case, I would agree that simplicity is sometimes for the better!
All in all, this site is a great resource for book lovers, not only in keeping track of their own collections, but - as the site puts it - "providing some of the best recommendations on the web" through "social information" such as "which members have the book and what they think about it - tags, reviews and even links to conversations about the book."
CiteULike (citeulike.org)
I've come across a few scholarly journals linked through CiteULike via Google, but never actually took the opportunity to explore the site more fully ... Clicking the "Frequently Asked Questions" link found at the top of the very sparse frontpage, I found that the site promises to "store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading." It emphasizes simplicity ("When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library ... CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself") as well as the social aspects of the service ("You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource").
I tried searching for "librarianship" and came up with over 800 results ... Aside from a list of the articles tagged with the term "libraranship", the search also included a list of groups interested in that term (like "librarian" and "Semantic-Social-Networks"), and it produced a tag cloud of other users interested in the term "librarianship" (with users like Joachim Schopfel and David Bibb in bold text for emphasis). This is a great example of the social power of CiteULike, as I can now see what other articles are being used/cited by people within the library profession, thereby discovering sources of information that I might have otherwise missed out on.
PennTags (tags.library.upenn.edu)
The University of Pennsylvania's social-tagging project seems to be one of the first (and most successful) endeavors by the profession to integrate the controlled vocabularies of "traditional" catalogs with the simplicity of user-generated tags ... Of course, since I'm not a student at the university, I can't create my own tags, but the system still allows "outsiders" to browse and see what others have come up with.
The frontpage immediately greets visitors with a tag cloud of the most popular terms ("tags used at least 110 times"). Many of these highlighted tags look familiar to someone like me who is outside their campus community ("copyright", "animation", "medieval_studies"), but some are clearly for personal use ("scholarship_is_changing", "to_read"); it's like how Hesham Allam described some tags as altruistic ("easy retrieval by anyone using that system") and others as selfish ("users tag their own contents for their own easy retrieval").
In their "About" section, PennTags is described as a "social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources." From this description, it's apparant that the service is being "sold" to the Penn community in much the same way as a commercial service like Delicious ("Have you ever bookmarked a web page and then cant find it again in your mass of bookmarks? The beauty of PennTags is that it allows you to organize your bookmarks/resources exactly the way you want and it lets you share them with others. It's both personal and portable"); by portraying the service as something that the students would be familiar with, it makes it that much easier for those patrons to accept the service and adopt it into their usual online routine.
To highlight the popularity of PennTags within the community, the site provides a very robust list of tags already employed by the students, as well as a list of "owners" who are contributing to the social-tagging aspect of the site ... It certainly seems as though the PennTags concept has really caught on with the community, and that the patrons are making good use of its services.
Services like PennTags are a great way to "socialize" the library's online catalog, without completely discarding that system as "obsolete" ... As I've mentioned before, it's a way for social-tagging and controlled vocabularies to work in tandem, in order to better help patrons locate and retrieve the information that they are looking for.
I've been meaning to create an account with LibraryThing for awhile now ... as a member of our library's Technical Services staff, I'm immediately drawn to any service that promotes itself with the ability to "catalog your books online"!
As of this writing, the site boasts 1,360,184 members with 63,542,867 books cataloged (6,173,071 of those are described as "unique works"); also, there have been 76,978,503 tags added to the site - wow, that's a lot of social participation! - and 1,433,245 reviews ... Very impressive stats all around!
I clicked on the "tour" link in order to get a better idea of how the site worked ... First off, it's apparent that the creators of the site want people to know that LibraryThing emphasizes a community experience (the sentence "LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for book lovers" is repeated twice on the first page); users are encouraged to "contribute tags" and share "common knowledge" (i.e. facts about a book or author), as well as "participate in member forums or join the Early Reviewers program."
It is also a great resource for gathering information about the books that one has in their personal collection; LibraryThing draws its cataloging information from Amazon (which non-library users will easily recognize), but also "over 700 libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress."
Of course, the main drawing point is the ability to create one's own descriptive terms via social tagging (here called "LibraryThing concepts"); on this page, the author - I assume it's Tim Spalding but it doesn't actually say - talks about the necessity for a system to organize collections of books, but that "for most personal libraries ... subject classifications [such as Library of Congress subject headings] aren't much use" (sad but true). The author goes on to compare the admittedly cumbersome subject heading "Bible. N.T. Romans I, 18-32 -- Criticism, interpretation, etc. -- History -- Early church, ca. 30-600" (which a lot of patrons won't make heads or tails out of) against the more straightforward concepts of "early church" and "homosexuality". In this case, I would agree that simplicity is sometimes for the better!
All in all, this site is a great resource for book lovers, not only in keeping track of their own collections, but - as the site puts it - "providing some of the best recommendations on the web" through "social information" such as "which members have the book and what they think about it - tags, reviews and even links to conversations about the book."
CiteULike (citeulike.org)
I've come across a few scholarly journals linked through CiteULike via Google, but never actually took the opportunity to explore the site more fully ... Clicking the "Frequently Asked Questions" link found at the top of the very sparse frontpage, I found that the site promises to "store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading." It emphasizes simplicity ("When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library ... CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself") as well as the social aspects of the service ("You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource").
I tried searching for "librarianship" and came up with over 800 results ... Aside from a list of the articles tagged with the term "libraranship", the search also included a list of groups interested in that term (like "librarian" and "Semantic-Social-Networks"), and it produced a tag cloud of other users interested in the term "librarianship" (with users like Joachim Schopfel and David Bibb in bold text for emphasis). This is a great example of the social power of CiteULike, as I can now see what other articles are being used/cited by people within the library profession, thereby discovering sources of information that I might have otherwise missed out on.
PennTags (tags.library.upenn.edu)
The University of Pennsylvania's social-tagging project seems to be one of the first (and most successful) endeavors by the profession to integrate the controlled vocabularies of "traditional" catalogs with the simplicity of user-generated tags ... Of course, since I'm not a student at the university, I can't create my own tags, but the system still allows "outsiders" to browse and see what others have come up with.
The frontpage immediately greets visitors with a tag cloud of the most popular terms ("tags used at least 110 times"). Many of these highlighted tags look familiar to someone like me who is outside their campus community ("copyright", "animation", "medieval_studies"), but some are clearly for personal use ("scholarship_is_changing", "to_read"); it's like how Hesham Allam described some tags as altruistic ("easy retrieval by anyone using that system") and others as selfish ("users tag their own contents for their own easy retrieval").
In their "About" section, PennTags is described as a "social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources." From this description, it's apparant that the service is being "sold" to the Penn community in much the same way as a commercial service like Delicious ("Have you ever bookmarked a web page and then cant find it again in your mass of bookmarks? The beauty of PennTags is that it allows you to organize your bookmarks/resources exactly the way you want and it lets you share them with others. It's both personal and portable"); by portraying the service as something that the students would be familiar with, it makes it that much easier for those patrons to accept the service and adopt it into their usual online routine.
To highlight the popularity of PennTags within the community, the site provides a very robust list of tags already employed by the students, as well as a list of "owners" who are contributing to the social-tagging aspect of the site ... It certainly seems as though the PennTags concept has really caught on with the community, and that the patrons are making good use of its services.
Services like PennTags are a great way to "socialize" the library's online catalog, without completely discarding that system as "obsolete" ... As I've mentioned before, it's a way for social-tagging and controlled vocabularies to work in tandem, in order to better help patrons locate and retrieve the information that they are looking for.
Monday, June 20, 2011
"Social tagging as a knowledge organization and resource discovery tool" by Hesham Allam
In his article, Allam defines social tagging as a process which "can be performed by anyone by freely attaching keywords or tags to describe the content of a Webpage [emphasis mine]." He further goes on to state that this is unlike traditional indexing, where "experts are needed to catalogue and create metadata to describe search terms for efficient retrieval."
Now, I don't want to continuously harp on this subject (and come off as "elitist"), but there is a reason why the "experts" are "needed" in certain cases, and that is to get the job done right.
Of course, it is impossible to "catalog" the entire Internet, but relying on amateur content organizers (as Wichowski described them) will always introduce its own set of problems (misidentification, spelling errors, spam etc.) ... That is why, in terms of the library profession, social tagging should be seen - at least in its current form - as a supplementary extension of the process of acquiring information for patrons.
There's been a lot of successful cases of the implementation of social tagging within the library field (this site has some good information on the subject), but the point should not be to totally supplant the "traditional" methods ... Again, to tackle the entire internet via those traditional methods is not an option, but there is room for both systems - folksonomies and controlled vocabularies - to exist within the burgeoning information environment that we now find ourselves in.
Now, I don't want to continuously harp on this subject (and come off as "elitist"), but there is a reason why the "experts" are "needed" in certain cases, and that is to get the job done right.
Of course, it is impossible to "catalog" the entire Internet, but relying on amateur content organizers (as Wichowski described them) will always introduce its own set of problems (misidentification, spelling errors, spam etc.) ... That is why, in terms of the library profession, social tagging should be seen - at least in its current form - as a supplementary extension of the process of acquiring information for patrons.
There's been a lot of successful cases of the implementation of social tagging within the library field (this site has some good information on the subject), but the point should not be to totally supplant the "traditional" methods ... Again, to tackle the entire internet via those traditional methods is not an option, but there is room for both systems - folksonomies and controlled vocabularies - to exist within the burgeoning information environment that we now find ourselves in.
"Tag gardening for folksonomy enrichment and maintenance" by Isabella Peters and Katrin Weller
In the other article for this week's readings, Wichowski mentioned ways to "standardize" social tagging, for the betterment of all users; she brought up terms like "tag training" and "educating users about tag literacy", as well as "linking folksonomies with ontologies," which all sounds well and good ... unless you're like me and think that "regular" users (i.e. amateur content organizers) will never expend the time or effort to partake in such things, at least not in the numbers necessary to make such an endeavor worthwhile.
Not to be cynical, but I've always felt that regular users are going to tag their pictures/bookmarks/videos with whatever keywords suit their needs - even if those tags are factually incorrect or too specific to be useful to the general population - regardless of how other people may use them. Really, in my mind, I see no scenario in which the everday internet user is going to exert the energy required to "train" themselves in the "correct" forms and standards; if they wanted to go to all that trouble, they would've already been enrolled in library school :)
Therefore, I could have never bought into the idea of the typical internet user taking part in the type of "standardization" described by Wichowski, and thus simply wrote off such initiatives as a pipe dream ... However, after reading Peters and Weller's thoughts on the subject of "tag gardening", I may be coming around to their way of thinking.
If there was a dedicated group of people who would take the time to "optimize tags in a folksonomy data set" after the fact (i.e. evalute the tags created by others for accuracy and correct/re-write them accordingly), then this opens up the possibility for a whole new industry devoted to "tag gardening," which could take up residence in the new information environment and "clean up" those errors that would usually permeate a community's particular folksonomy.
In fact, this could be the new role that future librarians play in helping to organize the online information landscape; instead of simply creating subject headings for books, they could be re-organizing and re-cataloging tags found on sites like Flickr and Delicious!
After all, librarians have the knowledge and training necessary to identify tags beyond the level of simple keywords; while the authors aren't referring to librarians specifically, they seem to be describing our profession when they talk of users who can "manipulate, revise and edit folksonomy tags" to better reflect that information so that it can be useful to the community at large.
For example, they cite a study which found that "users can be influenced by the tags which are already assigned to a resource," and recommended that "a new tagging system might be seeded by its designers with a large set of tags of the preferred type" [emphasis mine] to better guide users on the best tags to adopt ... Maybe it's just me, but librarians sound like the perfect people to step in and use their training to produce these "tags of the preferred type" (in essence, a controlled vocabulary for tagging).
However, it's not enough for librarians to act as "outside observers" of these social-tagging communities, remaining distant and separate from their users ... The authors talk about the process of removing "bad tags" (i.e. the "weeding" aspect of tag gardening) to help improve folksonomies for the purposes of consistency, and that this process of elimination/evaluation should be "handed over to the users themselves."
With this seemingly innocent statement, the authors (unwittingly) touch upon the idea of social capital as it pertains to the librarian-patron relationship, which we have been discussing in class thus far ... In other words, it's not enough for librarians to simply help the users, but they must become the users!
Librarians must familiarize themselves with tools like Flickr and Delicious; they must experiment and manipulate and participate, until they are just as much a part of the community that they are serving as the patrons themselves. In this way, handing the responsibility of optimizing tags in a folksonomy data set over to a librarian ("Their processing should be handed over to the users themselves") will be no different than handing them over to an amateur content organizer; the two become one and the same!
Not to be cynical, but I've always felt that regular users are going to tag their pictures/bookmarks/videos with whatever keywords suit their needs - even if those tags are factually incorrect or too specific to be useful to the general population - regardless of how other people may use them. Really, in my mind, I see no scenario in which the everday internet user is going to exert the energy required to "train" themselves in the "correct" forms and standards; if they wanted to go to all that trouble, they would've already been enrolled in library school :)
Therefore, I could have never bought into the idea of the typical internet user taking part in the type of "standardization" described by Wichowski, and thus simply wrote off such initiatives as a pipe dream ... However, after reading Peters and Weller's thoughts on the subject of "tag gardening", I may be coming around to their way of thinking.
If there was a dedicated group of people who would take the time to "optimize tags in a folksonomy data set" after the fact (i.e. evalute the tags created by others for accuracy and correct/re-write them accordingly), then this opens up the possibility for a whole new industry devoted to "tag gardening," which could take up residence in the new information environment and "clean up" those errors that would usually permeate a community's particular folksonomy.
In fact, this could be the new role that future librarians play in helping to organize the online information landscape; instead of simply creating subject headings for books, they could be re-organizing and re-cataloging tags found on sites like Flickr and Delicious!
After all, librarians have the knowledge and training necessary to identify tags beyond the level of simple keywords; while the authors aren't referring to librarians specifically, they seem to be describing our profession when they talk of users who can "manipulate, revise and edit folksonomy tags" to better reflect that information so that it can be useful to the community at large.
For example, they cite a study which found that "users can be influenced by the tags which are already assigned to a resource," and recommended that "a new tagging system might be seeded by its designers with a large set of tags of the preferred type" [emphasis mine] to better guide users on the best tags to adopt ... Maybe it's just me, but librarians sound like the perfect people to step in and use their training to produce these "tags of the preferred type" (in essence, a controlled vocabulary for tagging).
However, it's not enough for librarians to act as "outside observers" of these social-tagging communities, remaining distant and separate from their users ... The authors talk about the process of removing "bad tags" (i.e. the "weeding" aspect of tag gardening) to help improve folksonomies for the purposes of consistency, and that this process of elimination/evaluation should be "handed over to the users themselves."
With this seemingly innocent statement, the authors (unwittingly) touch upon the idea of social capital as it pertains to the librarian-patron relationship, which we have been discussing in class thus far ... In other words, it's not enough for librarians to simply help the users, but they must become the users!
Librarians must familiarize themselves with tools like Flickr and Delicious; they must experiment and manipulate and participate, until they are just as much a part of the community that they are serving as the patrons themselves. In this way, handing the responsibility of optimizing tags in a folksonomy data set over to a librarian ("Their processing should be handed over to the users themselves") will be no different than handing them over to an amateur content organizer; the two become one and the same!
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