2007 ALA Annual Conference Session
Meredith Farkas: Capture what you and your patrons know!
Ms. Farkas is the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University library in Northfield, Vermont. Her remarks focused on using technology to capture and manage knowledge and information. Her full presentation is available at Meredithfarkas.wetpaint.com
She stressed the importance of knowledge management and the need to leverage the knowledge, expertise and interests of your staff and patrons. How do organizations capture and share information? One-on-one? Email? IM? Twitter? On scraps of paper? How do libraries collect information from patrons? Do libraries engage their patrons by allowing them to add content to their catalogs? Tagging? Recommendations? Rankings?
She recommended a number of libraries and projects networks to consider:
- Hennepin County Library's Bookspace, a patron-driven reader's advisory service. Patrons are able to login and create personal book lists with annotations as well as add comments to items in the catalog.
- AADL Catalog of the Ann Arbor District Library for its innovations.
- World Cat, which is introducing the ability to create lists by patrons and build a national social network of readers.
- See the Rochester Community Wiki, BIZ wiki, and
- PennTags at the University of Pennsylvania, that allow students to create and tag working bibliographies.
- Rochester Wiki: The People's Guide to Rochester, a community developed wiki.
- BIZ wiki, a collection of business information resources available through Ohio University Libraries.
Matthew Bejune: Which libraries are using wikis and for what?
Digital Reference Services Coordinator at Purdue University, Indiana, Mr. Bejune shared his research on library development and use of wikis. The results of his research are published on LibraryWikis, a site Mr. Bejune hopes will be used by the library community in collaboration to track and support the use of wikis. (Password: lwcontrib)
Mr. Bejune research included a literature review of LIS as well as library blogs. He identified 35 wikis that fell into four categories:
- Inter-library collaboration: 16 wikis
- Collaboration of library staff: 11 wikis
- Staff and patron collaboration: 5 wikis
- Library-provided wikis used by patrons: 3 wikis
He speculated that the distribution of wikis in these four categories reflects the distribution of other types of social networking applications being used by libraries. Why are there significantly fewer wikis that have the patron as the primary contributor? Are libraries risk averse? Do libraries fear losing control?
Mr. Bejune suggested "25 perspectives on social networking," a post by Marlene Charlotte Larsen's on her doctoral dissertation blog, for a succinct list of perspectives on social networking.
Tim Spaulding: LibraryThing innovations.
Tim Spalding reviewed the social networking underpinnings of LibraryThing.com, which he is founder and developer.
LibraryThing facilitates conversations between readers and is a social approach to the cataloging of books.
It is also partnering with libraries and provides a number of useful services. LibrarythingISBN may aid libraries to FRBRize their records. APIs are also available to pull tags into a library's catalog and to build lists of what other readers are reading. Tags are pulled into the catalog for the titles in a library's collection only. Tags that have been used at least 10 times and by a minimum of 10 people are included. These tags are also screened for useless tags.
Mr. Spalding also discussed the advantages of free tagging over Library of Congress and Sears subject headings, providing such examples as cooking rather than cookery, chick lit as opposed to men and women relationships, academic, legal, medical or cozy mysteries as opposed to mystery. Tags provide perspective and context that subject headings used by catalogers do not provide.
He was also open about some of the problems and challenges of using tags. LibraryThing has learned that there's a need to filter tags. Filtering is especially important when too many tags and tags that are too idiosyncratic are used, such as the tags used for The Diary of Anne Frank, which has received 5,000 tags. Also, a critical number of tags needs to be reached for tags to be useful. Small numbers of tags can result in skewed subject access to collections.
LibraryThing will soon introduce the ability to mash up tags. The "tagmashup" will allow combinations such as "magic -fiction" and "chicklit Greece." LibraryThing may introduce articles soon and possibly other media.
When the question of extending the radical level of trust that allows anyone to join using an alias and contribute to LibraryThing to libraries, Tim questioned whether really knowing someone's name is superior to knowing the content of their thoughts, their choices in books, etc. LibraryThing is self-policing when it there is off-the-chart harassment and content.
