Exploring Folksonomies before midnight October 25, 2006

It’s a race to the finish!  See how far I make it through the readings before midnight!

The Kroski article is a good summary of the Pros and Cons of folksonomies, but the most important message, I feel, is that “resistance is futile”! The web is so large and ever-changing that paying professionals to classify it all is just impossible - folksonomies are “better-than-nothing” so we’d better get used to it and stay on top of this technology.

The Wikipedia article seems to me like a good place to start when convincing a company/organization to take up the practice of tagging. In a special library environment tagging would be very useful since the corporation/organization would consist of specialized professionals who would share similar vocabularies and interests. If you want to classify all of the organization’s documents for database retrieval you could therefore depend on the creators to tag their items (and future readers to fix the tags), towards what this article calls an “emergent enterprise taxonomy”.  The Quintarelli article was an excellent choice for me to read next since it explains the best way to supplement enterprise tagging:  “In the direction of facing the intrinsic precision loss of folksonomies, Jess McMullin proposes to complement social classification with other classification approaches: «automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed [see Google Suggest and Ajax technology], mapping ad-hoc tags to structured facets, and top-down classification oversight by information professionals».”  Great idea!

The Kome study finds that hierarchical relationships exist in folksonomies.  Perhaps I am tired, or perhaps my brain is full, but either way this librarian-speak isn’t getting through to me right now.  Could anyone help me out and let me know what the bottom line is for libraries and folksonomies?  My impression so far is that the fact that hierarchical relationships exist means good things for tagging… I am sure I am missing something deep here.

Oh no!  my phone rang.  I will have to continue this later…

Comparison Shopping October 18, 2006

I really like the looks of my new BlinkList account but I wish I could import my del.icio.us account! I know I should be able to but my passwords don’t seem to work for their export to xml del.icio.us page. I love looking at my colourful cloud, the images of the webpages next to the links, and being a ipod user I love that I can rate the sites with stars. That would be very useful for a library when social bookmarking because the users could let you know how much they appreciate your links.

I tried CiteULike out once before and magically remembered my account password! Miracle! But just looking at it again made me cringe because I remember how much typing I had to do to insert one reference.  I believe it only automatically populates the bibliographic information from one database.

I was watching for Zotero to come out!!! I can’t believe how techie I sound right now, what a fluke. It promised to do a way better job than CiteULike and it has a cooler Web2.0 name…  And check this out: “Zotero may also automatically grab LC subject headings (for books) and keywords for articles” when tagging!  That’s great news for librarians!  Now all I want to know is, how can I import my del.icio.us bookmarks???

Don’t hide your social bookmarks! October 18, 2006

I can’t find the links to Lansing Public Library’s del.icio.us bookmarks on their home page, but it looks like they have some well-monitored and defined categories (black_history). LaGrange Park Public Library’s del.icio.us account is a little sparse in comparison and no large theme jumps out at me. I think a library’s del.icio.us account would best serve the patrons if it had a clear purpose, or at least a theme every few months, for example ‘library month’ could be a theme for a while and then ‘black history month’ and so on.

MCC library’s homepage is clean, pretty and has some very interesting content. I think it’s great how they’re displaying the newest links from their del.icio.us account on the homepage, and even though the links don’t appear to have any theme (as I requested above) I think it works since it just looks so good there (love the graphics). One issue I can see is that some of their link titles don’t give me a good idea of the item’s content, and while this is the fault of how the pages are titled, they can change the titles in their del.icio.us account to include a further description. Another issue is that I have no indication that I will navigate away from their website by selecting any of the bulleted del.icio.us links. I think it’s always good webdesign practice to let people know if they are navigating away from your content. It is now taken for granted that people know ’suggested links’ means you will be navigating away, but since many patrons will not know what del.icio.us is they will not know where they are going when they select a del.icio.us link. It would help further if they added a ‘what is del.icio.us’ page and stuck a link to it right beside ‘we’re using del.icio.us’.

The University of Pennsylvania’s PennTags is a very interesting idea and one which I imagine many librarys will not have the resources (time, money, expertise!) to duplicate - but it is fascinating to see a University launching their own del.icio.us. I imagine they have gained the autonomy of page design and a some marketing ground by creating this themselves, but I think that the good news for smaller (or more broke) libraries is that the biggest benefits of social bookmarking can still be had through a simple del.icio.us account. I also see that users wouldn’t get lost in the general del.icio.us community with no way back, either. Let me know what other benefits you see!

I can’t find the RSS feed for the Thomas Ford Memorial Library’s delicious account on their homepage, but I think what is special about their account is that they have a link to themselves up top next to the del.icio.us/thomasford/. Looking back, Lansing Public Library is the only other one that has this. Such a simple marketing/navigation tool to bring patrons back to your site.

SocialSocial October 18, 2006

Well, after all this time using del.icio.us we’ve finally made it to social bookmarking! Great! One theme that appears again and again through this week’s readings is Hammond’s concept of ’selfish’ vs. ‘altruistic’ tagging; Udell’s ’self-interested personal information management’ vs. a ’social’ system; and Porter’s ‘personal value’ vs. ‘network value’. What they are all talking about is the dual nature of social bookmarking: first and foremost people who use del.icio.us are saving bookmarks to use at a later date, but they are also (perhaps not intentionally) tagging web pages for other del.icio.us users to find. This commentary has made me aware of the uselessness of some of my tags to anyone who is not me (lis757_required) and the usefulness of others (SocialBookmarking).

For me, these (random) points also stood out from this weeks readings:

• tagging does not use the hierarchical structures of formal classification systems, it is flat (Hammond)
• a disadvantage of tags is that they are often ambiguous becaues people use them in different ways, for example I may tag restaurant reviews ‘food’ while someone else may tag recipes ‘food’ (Mathes)
• Flickr lets you have spaces in tags while del.icio.us doesn’t (Mathes)
• I have the del.icio.us extension for firefox and use it all the time, but I didn’t notice the sidebar feature (Hollenback)

Finally, thanks to these readings I can see how tagging would help patrons better retrieve items from library catalogues (as a supplemental method to teaching them traditional keyword and subject searching) and next I will explore the case studies to see how libraries are responding to this need…

Wiki time October 11, 2006

Let’s get right to it… So you want to build a wiki? is a fantastic starting point for thinking about Wikis in the context of libraries. I agree that it is crucial to give your Wiki a theme and purpose and to start it off in order to encourage participation. The other article by the same author, Using Wikis to Create Online Communities, provides concrete library wiki ideas: subject guides, annotating the catalogue (patrons add book reviews), community wikis and staff wikis. A specific idea of a library staff wiki comes from Angela Kille, and that idea is for librarians to set up a wiki to share common reference questions. What a great idea! I can’t think of any reason why a library wouldn’t do this!

Oooh, and I can’t belive anyone can start such a clean article by saying the author “grooves on tools that are fast, cheap, and out of control.” But they did, and the article contains content, too. The WhyWiki section holds very practical examples of how some UBC groups are using wikis, which lead me to think that most groups could find a great use for a wiki. But to temper my enthusiasm, the article titled On uses for wikis and gardening states: “The key is to use wikis to fill a need, not to find a need for a wiki because you want to use a wiki.” Good advice.

On a personal note, I’ve been working with myLIS570 group on Google’s Writely to build our presentation. Writely markets itself as “Free web word processor which lets you share and collaborate your work online.” It is pretty much like word crossed with a wiki - it allows for you to see who has updated the documents, the various versions, and to revert to any version, much like a wiki does. It is working really well for us and saves a lot of emailing back and forth.

I’ve been playing with the Wiki group project’s PBwiki and have created my own page: Heather’s Page. It is pretty boring because I was just playing with a template and not adding any real content, but there is one good link in there if you can find it I’ve used this tool before but I was pleasantly surprised to see some new templates in there, especially the group project template which I think is a helpful starting structure.

Taking a look at this week’s case studies, the first thing that struck me was that some of them look really bland. The two best-looking sites are: USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library powered by PMwiki and Bull Run Library powered by PBwiki. But some of the other PBwiki sites look too boring and wiki-ish, so I would consider using PMwiki, so far. I like the simple idea of running a book club on a wiki, like Princeton Public Library did, but I can see it having more ’staying’ power if it includes recommendations from someone really well-known like Nancy Pearl, on her sort-of Wiki WetPaint site. What could libraries do for this? Perhaps the Mayor, the University President, or another quasi-famous person could be talked into contributing a few book recommendations, and of course your local librarians! Maybe you could also include NYT book reviews, but I admit I am not certain on the legality of this. I also like the creative idea of the Wyoming Authors Wiki idea, because I think you would automatically earn the participation of the authors and of some local educators.

Uh… Is anyone else frustrated by the Butler WikiRef - what is it for? I mean, I’ve read the introductory paragraph, but I don’t really see how it serves reference users (at least not in a user-friendly way). I clicked on a few of the links in the ‘directory’ and the ‘complete list’ from the homepage, the only pages I could find useful links to click on, and I was dissapointed by the meagre content. It made me wonder if it was a new resource, or just unpopular, but I couldn’t find a ‘last modified’ date anywhere and therefore left feeling even more frustrated.

I want to share! October 4, 2006

Great, having built a library intranet at my last co-op, I can appreciate how easily Feed2JS & RSS2HTML would add dynamic content to any webpage - you get fresh content on your website with no further effort required! I played around with them and previewed the results, but I’m pretty sure WordPress doesn’t allow you to insert this code (please correct me if I am wrong), to add a RSS feed you simply go to your ‘Sidebar Widgets’ editing page, drag and drop a ‘RSS 1′ box, hit the ‘configure box’ in the right hand corner of your new ‘RSS’ 1 widget, insert the link, title and choose the number of items to display. Simple!

The OPML generator appeared to work for me… I made an OPML of 5 different library job sites, three of which I created using FeedYes, so be warned they may not display perfectly. I included ‘The most recent Information Management and Librarianship jobs from www.jobs.ac.uk‘, OLA’s Graduate jobs, USA Combined Library Job Postings, U of T’s FIS jobs, and UWO’s LIS Canadian jobs.  If you have any ideas of sites I should add, please send them my way and I’ll fix up my OPML!

This week’s case studies are all great examples of the feeds McKiernan was calling for in 2004, TOC’s of current journal articles from publishers, or in this case, database providers. I thought ProQuest’sDissertations & Theses RSS feed, a service that notifies you each time a theses or dissertation in a select subject area is added to their database, is so necessary in the academic environment. I’m actually really hoping for the chance to share this service with someone who may need it!

Week 5: Reading more on RSS October 4, 2006

Although it seems a few of these library RSS feeds have since died, I still appreciated Gerry McKiernan 2004 article’s compilation of library RSS links. The Ohio University ‘Business Blog’ especially intrigued me because it is done in WordPress and has a great survey up on the Sept 25, 2006 post. I suppose this is a privately hosted WordPress version?
I am glad of the Weblogs and RSS in information work article for this statement: “Libraries should be guiding users to appropriate weblogs, as they do for websites or discussion lists, though identifying those of value is more difficult since the proportion of ‘serious’ ones is lower.” And for demonstrating that another difficulty is keeping the links up-to-date, since a few on this article aren’t functioning - nor are some links on the pages linked to by this article functioning, like Library Weblogs featuring a dead link to our prof Amanda’s former blog, Bibliolatry. Too bad I can’t snoop any further! But returning to the point, I think it would be valuable for librarians to recommend blogs on particular subjects, just like the author of one of the blogs I ‘reviewed’ for this week’s paper has done with law library blogs on her site Novalawcity.

From the article Success Story: RSS Moves into the Mainstream at the University of Alberta Libraries, we learn how the feeds at U of A work: “The RSS feeds for New Books by Subject include second level LC classifications, allowing the user to subscribe to the feeds for TJ – Mechanical Engineering, and Machinery and TP – Chemical Technology, for example. A subscription to the relevant RSS feeds ensures that users will not miss any new books announcements, such as when they are away at a meeting or on vacation.” I had assumed for some silly reason that the feeds were linked to keyword searches so I’m glad I have been corrected. I am very excited about the obvious great uses of this service! At my co-op jobs I distributed table of contents services and CCOD’s, both of which took a lot of effort and felt quite robotic - RSS could help librarians get around these nasty mechanical duties & make libraries into impressive hubs of efficiency.

In regards to the Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable article, I’ve enjoyed getting my classmates del.icio.us tags in Bloglines for the past month. But can anyone tell me why you would want to use the service Philip mentions in his last paragraph, Pasta?