Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

John Blyberg argues that Library 2.0 has been debased by (some) librarians and by vendors looking for a quick technology fix. This is really one of the best posts (and comments threads) that I’ve read in a long time. Really. Go read.

John’s post has sparked some intelligent reactions across the biblioblogosphere, which I’ll be noting in this and a few subsequent posts. I want to break my response up, because I think John makes a number of excellent points.

Firstly, I think John deserves enormous credit for the following:

How and where we interface with our users is where the rubber meets the road and should merit a little more thought then simply thrusting a MySpace page in their face or building a new library in Second Life–a service our users overwhelmingly do not use and, which seems to me, like a creepy post-apocalyptic wasteland. I’ll even turn the tables on myself and admit that I was wrong about local tagging in the OPAC. SOPAC was by-and-large a success, but its use of user-contributed tags is a failure.

How many of us are willing to admit, publicly, that a widely-lauded initiative that we introduced, is “a failure” (even partially)? Not many, I’d imagine. Well said, John.

I’d like to suggest that John hasn’t really failed though - what he’s done is found a method that hasn’t worked (or hasn’t worked yet, or didn’t work in his particular case). That’s a good thing! Now he (and we) know that we need to try something different. The original idea was good (IMHO), but the execution failed, because (John suggests) a small group of taggers, with an interest in one particular area (manga) contributed most of the tags. There weren’t enough tags contributed by readers with other interests.

OK, how can we react to this? One way might be to increase the number of people providing tags. How can we do that? Easy - aggregate data from LibraryThing or WorldCat or Amazon, all of which contain user contributed tags (though not always good ones - the first example shows tags used to make a political point, the second that some of the most frequently-used tags on the last Harry Potter were things like “Harry Potter” and “Deathly Hollows”).

Thanks to John, we’ve discovered that a single library system might not have enough users who care about tagging to build a meaningful collection of tags. Now we know that, we can try a different approach.

I’m somewhat late here, but these are worth reading if you missed them…

Meredith Farkas links to a couple of interesting posts on libraries in social networks, by Kate Sheehan and Andrea Mercado: both argue that librarians often don’t understand the cultural context of social networks, even if they understand the technology.

Librarian in Black’s Top Tech Trends for 2008 (the presentation from ALA also blogged by Lauren Pressley).

Also via Librarian In Black, Trailfire, basically a tool for people to create pathfinders to websites on a particular topic.

The Library of Congress is now making its images available via Flickr, enabling users to contribute additional information about the images (The Shifted Librarian; librarian.net).

Michaels Casey and Stephens on how a transparent library should cope with anonymous online criticism.

Micheal Stephens links to a Read/Write Web article on 10 common objections to social media - with answers.

The Google Generation may not be so good at Googling, after all (via LibraryStuff). Some food for thought here for libraries (the article discusses a report (PDF) sponsored by the British Library and JISC).

David Lee King has a great post about adding MeeboMe to the library catalogue, so that when users do a search and receive no hits, a MeeboMe widget pops up and they have the option to chat to a librarian. This is perfect; it’s obvious from looking at search logs  that many failed searches could be improved relatively easily, if only the user could talk to a librarian who understands the idiosyncrasies of the catalogue.

Sarah Houghton-Jan and Michael Stephens comment. Micheal’s post led me back to an earlier article of his from TechSource which is worth a look.

The blogosphere has been buzzing (well, a low hum maybe) about Slate’s article criticizing Yahoo Answers. Tim Lee at Techdirt agrees, while Jessamyn West is more critical of the Slate piece. I responded on librarian.net, so will just point you to my answer there.

Students 2.0: “we are students… but now we have a voice”. Interesting idea (though of course students have long had voices; one could easily argue that students recently have been much less interested in using them than their predecessors from the 1960s-80s.) This looks like an attempt to reverse that process, and is to be welcomed, especially by those of us in academic libraries. I’ve only glanced through the site, but the posts look to be interesting and well-written. Subscribed. (Via Michael Stephens).

Danah Boyd on information access in a networked world. I was going to write something in response to this, but I’m running out of time and it’s kinda old now. But go read.

Jenny Levine on gaming in the library - for senior citizens.

Citizen journalism site sued over user-posted content (Techdirt). An issue for libraries, especially now that more libraries are (rightly) offering users the chance to interact with their content via blogs or the OPAC?

Writing for the web presentation (Courtney Johnston, National Library) (just the slides; some good stuff here).

Meredith Farkas on the health of organisations. Encouragement of workers by management, and an interest in staff professional development, seem to be key.

Michael Stephens reports a student sit-in, filmed on YouTube, against poor library opening hours. Both sad (that the students needed to protest) and inspiring (that they cared enough to do so). A comment on TameTheWeb notes that the library has listened to the protesters.

Sarah Houghton-Jan on the black market in holds. Sarah makes a fair point - only some users know about holds, and they have a huge advantage over the others when it comesto accessing popular materials. Further, it means the most popular books are almost never on the shelves. Like Sarah, I’m not sure what the answer is, though.

Code4Lib now has an open access library science journal.

From the blog of my new(ish) colleague, Timothy Greig:

[quote]I encouraged the students to stop by and visit me in the library, and handed out my business card with links to the 50 Books list, my LibraryThing catalog (which is very DMDN heavy), and my contact details.[/quote]

I love the link to the LibraryThing catalogue.