I'm taking a holiday from blogging this week to visit my family. But I can see that it is important to keep up frequent blog posts to maintain readership interest. So I may not be able to remain totally silent! Happy tagging!

Tag, Browse, and Discover

Most case studies this week were of the use of del.icio.us to save bookmarks of interest—this gives patrons easy access to resources above and beyond the library’s collection.

The tag clouds show how extensive the tagging of each library is so far—La Grange Public Library’s cloud was quite restricted but I did notice that “LocalHistory” retrieved interesting links. The links were well tagged on the whole. The Sedovia Library’s tags demonstrated the difficulties of trying to restrict the tag to only one word. They ended up using tags such as “for.public” and “computer.use” as well as tags from words strung together “internetsafety”. Because tags were created by staff (it seems this way but the persons doing the tagging are not identified), tagging was consistent. This would not be the case if tagging were open to patrons as well.

The route to the del.icio.us pages was only clear in the case of Maui Community College Library website, where there is a del.cio.us link on the “About” page. The tagging subjects on the community college cloud impressed me as they are more serious and academic.

PennTags is different—and the richness of this site is incredible! I found I was not just retrieving catalogue material from Pennsylvania University, but also retrieving web pages, video tutorials, lectures, projects…. In fact, when you click on a link, you are not quite sure what media is going to appear! PennTags acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits of the Penn community. Anyone in the community can add resources and tags. PennTags describes itself accurately as a “discovery tool”, and is an exciting resource. It's appearance is so much more interesting than the bland presentation of a del.icio.us screen.

A Pile of Tags

So much information is being produced. More than human beings have ever experienced before. Cataloguing sytems such as the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress Classifications Libraries are not actually that old—born in the late 1800s. They were able to handle information in libraries before the advent of the Web. But now, librarians could not possibly hope to categorize the huge amounts of information.

Enter bookmarking (Hammond et al.). In the absence of an imposed structure on the Web, individuals organized according to their individual needs, first of all saving links as bookmarks or favourites onto their computers. Now social bookmarking adds a sharing element to this individual activity. Tags are not being chosen by professional cataloguers—they are being chosen be people from all walks of life. The result is, in David Weinburger’s words (quoted by Rainie), “The Power of Digital Disorder”. Tag language, or folksonomy as it has been coined, has many limitations because of inconsistencies in use, and lack of control. However, “self-interested use leads to a collective abundance” (Udell). and it seems tags are here to stay.

More focused uses for them are being developed, such as through CitULike. I think that the many suggestions proposed for guidance in tagging--such as having hierarchies (a step backwards?!) suggested, having tags used by others suggested, having Boolean searches of tags made possible (Hollenback)—must not lead to too many restrictions because creators and users will be less committed to tagging.

Feed 2JS and OPML in Libaries

I asked myself when I finally understood how Feed 2JS and OPML work of what use these tools are to a library. RSS feeds are for content that is frequently updated. A simple hyperlink to a more static source such as a website would be sufficient. So, that begs the question, what do libraries need frequent updates about?

I can see the reference desk in a public library, and patrons using the library website, appreciating feeds that update them on current events, local, national, and international. The staff of the library would appreciate a feed from a good quality professional blog that updated them on issues related to libraries—new technologies, etc. A reader’s advisory service could be enhanced with feeds from various sources, such as a blog to which staff and patrons contributed. Feeds could just enhance the website with general information, such as local weather, or employment opportunities from an employment centre. The use of Feed2JS makes the process of syndicating this feed very simple for staff members.

OPML seems to serve the purpose of convenience for moving groups of links to sites instead of placing them one by one in an aggregator. For example, library staff could find sites for music, for radio stations, for local history, for groups affiliated with the library such as reading clubs, and add these in an OPML package easily for patron use.

Library Wikis --Examples

I included in the group-assignment wiki a number of wikis showing the many different ways in which libraries can use the wiki format. I thought the BizWiki and the USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library wiki in particular were very professionally done. I will focus in this blog post on the ones I did not mention in the group wiki.

The Wyoming Authors Wiki, affiliated with Wyoming State Library, impressed me. It clearly states on the main page that it invites contributions. I like the fact that this wiki clearly states its purpose as “a clearinghouse for information on book authors who've lived in Wyoming or who write about Wyoming” and also clearly states how to use it, and that in order to contribute, you have to register, and that in doing so, you are joining the book community. This should keep away any malicious contributions and spam. The wiki presents a useful, rich, and easily accessible source of information on authors, organized by author, county and genre..

The Princeton Public Library Booklovers Wiki was created for the 2006 Summer Reading Club. I would have expected it to be powered up for the 2007 club by now. It also receives contributions—book reviews—by not only library staff but also wiki members—in this case, probably book club members. It is well linked to the Library’s website and catalogue. It is a nice idea, with a specific purpose and I hope it continues.

Bull Run Library Wiki, by contrast, looks very amateurish. Its purpose is not clear. It has a personal blog attached to it, and states that it is a one-person project (not receiving contributions from anyone else), with a disclaimer separating it from the Prince William County Library System website--interesting! Perhaps including a larger community in the creation of the wiki would make the wiki a more worthwhile source. The wiki has links to external sources for book ideas (not related to the library collection), a link to a staff wiki, and to a personal blog, probably written by the wiki creator. The wiki has not been visited very frequently, and I don’t think it contains enough information to be of great value.

Will your Wiki Work?

The readings for this week were very informative about all aspects surrounding the wiki—its history, the various softwares supporting wikis, the options for a wiki hosted on the Web or one that is installed and customized, the many applications of wikis in the library, and the best contexts in which a wiki will work. The authors were full of practial tips and advice that made a lot of sense to me. The wiki has been through a period of experimentation, and the contexts in which a wiki will and will not work are much clearer.

Wikipedia is not a good example to follow for wiki developers, especially not for those in libraries. I read with fascination Schiff’s article about the development of Wikipedia from a utopian online community devoted to the common good who could work collaboratively and produce an encyclopedia of unprecedented range, and led to increased regulations being necessary as a result of increasing problems, with more and more effort being spent on deleting and adding changes, dealing with vandalism, abuse, and pettiness of changes back and forth, so that so that the proportion of articles is decreasing. Although extensive, and easy to use and to edit, Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate. This is not a goal for libraries to aspire to either. Many of Wikipedia’s problems stem from its scale. I am interested that the somewhat disillusioned founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, concluded that “things work well when a group of people know each other”.

From what I have read and observed, I can see Fichter’s comment is very relevant: “Wikis work best in organizational cultures in which there is a high level of trust and control can be delegated to the users of the system.” In other words, wikis are not going to succeed in a vast context, where they fall victim to the abuses of Wikipedia, but rather in a stable context where people know and respect each other. Wikis are a tool with many advantages, but should not, as Farkas discusses, be used just because you want to have the experience of using one, but rather to serve a need. Kille describes wikis as a centralized repository of knowledge, with the hyperlinks connecting relevant pages and linking to related external sources as well. What a wiki should do for you can be achieved under controlled circumstances:

• allow collaboration beyond the barriers of time and place.

• improve efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of information

• facilitate rapid transfer of information

Used under controlled circumstances, wikis have many used for knowledge management, with many applications for libraries: they can enhance the planning stages of meetings and projects, can be a source of information for a group (e.g., intranet, email lists), can organize information for easy retrievability in the context of reference services, and can be records of stages in the development of a project (through the editing history).

Despite what many authors say about wikis being quick and easy, in order for them to be accurate, they must be carefully done. For example, for the development of a significant repository of information for use in reference services, many staff hours, by one or many people, will be needed. Is it realistic to think that libraries have the extra staff time to prepare these wikis? In this context, I think wikis are another example of an effort-saving tool actually producing more work and higher expectations.

Wikis

Here is the link to the Wonderful World of Wikis group presentation by myself, Monika, Jane, and Daka.

OPML Feed2JS and RSS -- Foggy

My understanding of these is very foggy and will blog about these when I can understand them properly.

RSS Alert Services - Case Studies

Continuing on the subject I had broached in my previous blog, alerts of new material are very useful for researchers, and very handy for avid readers. Researchers have very specialized needs. On my co-op I am witnessing and am training to try, narrowing down a search for an alert service so that nearly all the incoming articles will be very relevant. I kept this in mind as I examined the vendors options. It seems that Ebsco does allow the RSS feed alert to be customized to the exact search string developed by the researcher (or librarian). I found by going to the Engineering Village 2 website that it seems very similar to the one offered by Ebsco. In the words of Engineering Village 2, the RSS feed provides “weekly updates of your search queries’ results”. Engineering Village 2 also offers an interesting “Blog This” option, translating the citation/abstract into HTML code that the researcher can copy and paste to his/her blog to share with colleagues [interestingly, “within the same institution” is stated—I wonder how the post is stopped from going outside the institution]. Proquest’s website did not explain whether they offered a similar service; it was promoting feeds for predetermined subjects. Although the topic areas listed in the “Curriculum Match Factor” were broken down (e.g., Engineering – Chemical), they still seem far too wide to be of use in bringing in really relevant material—perhaps good enough at a earlier level of education, but not good enough for postsecondary levels (perhaps this is their intention). ProQuest has set predetermined subject terms to match curriculum textbooks, in an attempt to make the feeds relevant. To me, a feed of a customized search query seems far more satisfactory and useful.

I went to the Seattle Public Library’s catalogue to have a good look at the RSS option. The XML button at the bottom of a screen showing search results will set up alerts for new material with the same search query. The “What’s this?” link explains the service. I think it would have been better to include a simple introduction to the service should be stated on the search page itself (e.g., “Want to be notified automatically of new titles on this topic? Click here to discover more”). I wonder how many public library patrons would take advantage of this service? I can imagine that the avid readers of bestsellers or patrons with a hobby (e.g., quilting) would be thrilled.

RSS and all that

I found the readings this week straightforward. I picked up a few interesting tidbits. For example, Bloglines includes the option of creating an email subscription as a way of managing your mailing lists and other sites that have no RSS feeds, while keeping the information out of your regular email inbox (Reichart).

I was interested in the U. of Alberta libraries’ plans to target grad students and faculty with current awareness feeds. In my summer co-op position I witness a taste of reality that bars taking advantage of RSS feeds. It’s called restricted bandwidth. Although there are feeds available from many periodicals that would be of interest to the researchers serviced by the library, the researchers are not allowed to access these feeds at work. Instead, the library staff provide a current awareness service by scanning the periodicals and emailing the researchers any URLs for articles relevant to their fields. The library also sets up an automatically emailed current awareness service for researchers, using various databases—with searches are set up to be very closely tailored to the researcher’s needs. I was also interested in the U. of A.’s suggestion of RSS feeds for collection development and cataloguing. I can only speculate that these feeds would be for library staff use—perhaps incoming announcements from publishers about new titles; copy cataloguing information from other libraries?

It is interesting to wonder whether students will pay attention to feeds about library instruction. Would these feeds deliver small pieces of information broken down into disconnected pieces, or would they deliver complete lessons?

RSS feeds are great for alerts; but do they quickly become too busy so that the receiver no longers pays attention to them much the problem with an overcrowded inbox on the email account?

Hollenback’s description of how the use of networking aspects of Friendster and Orkut along with Flickr will show you your contacts’ photos as they post them (e.g., from a cameraphone) frankly makes me cringe. I suppose a public library could use this feature for a teen blog. Yes, it is wonderful technology, but I it makes me want to go into a quiet place, away from all this cyber-crowding, just so that I can talk to a person face to face. I feel all this incoming information is crowding out our time, our cyberspace, our lives. I think we need to use these resources with a lot more care—use them to improve the quality of what we do, but not just to jump on a new bandwagon. I like Winship’s comment that identifying blogs of value is hard because the proportion of serious ones is low! I haven’t got time to wade through all the junk. Am I suffering from information overload?