Peter Morville at findability.org has just posted "Finding the Common Good." It's a piece about the Library of Congress Flickr Pilot Project. Here's the full report to which he links.
Morville adds:
The statistics are impressive, and the analysis of tagging behavior is interesting. And, when you finish reading, you can wander The Commons, an unexpected public good that resulted from this collaboration between Flickr and the Library.
Very interesting.
Mike
Since Samhain (aka Hallowe'en), things have been way too busy to keep up with blogging, what with the election, the imminent rollout of an expanded Ask a Librarian live chat reference service for Jacksonville Public library—not to mention the annual it's-November-and-all-the-overlapping-multitasking-library-projects-are-coming-due-at-the-same-time-stress-induced throat and chest cold...hackhackhack....
So...here's a mushed together list of very interesting blog posts, not in any particular order, but worth checking out.
How's that for a post full of info and links...and NO original material? (Unless you count the it's-November...etc....)
Mike
Here's an interesting article by Williams Hicks of Digital Web Magazine which could be read as a counterargument to Rick Anderson's Away from the “icebergs”.
I found the article linked from "Why use a library?" on Tame the Web.
What first caught my eye was this blurb:
It says succinctly what I've been blathering about for several posts now.
Hicks is addressing a readership of Web professionals, and he catches his readers' attention in this way:
So I want to talk about libraries. No, not the JavaScript kind, the old ones—bricks, mortar, and books.
Chances are that when you need design inspiration, help with some code, or almost anything related to the business of web design you hit Google, Flickr, and in quick succession a dozen or more sites that you’ve found consistent and relevant to your needs over the years.
You’ll probably harass your friends over the favored social network of the hour, and usually the results from all of the above will be immediate and relatively decent.
However, if you find yourself on page six of a result set, spending much of your hard earned cash on tech books, needing more art inspiration, or if you’re just looking for one of those “old” things that will probably never make it onto the web, I’d like to offer some suggestions.
He then give a beautifully detailed and nuanced guide to the materials and services which physical libraries have to offer, ranging from archives of non-digitized information and images, to Interlibrary Loan services, to information architecture.
On a lighter note, the article mentions that if
you are a developer who hangs out at a coffee shop then you might be surprised to know that in an attempt to draw more students in, many academic libraries have built small coffee shops into their floor plans, and that many larger institutions will offer free Wi-Fi throughout the buildings.
Further, you’ll find that their floor-plans often offer both low and high traffic/noise areas in which to work, and either might work for you, depending on your tastes.
He concludes as follows:
I hope I have demonstrated that libraries may be worth returning to if they don’t currently receive any of your attention. Many large institutions have nothing but their patron’s, and often society’s, best interests at heart.
While you may not get instant gratification from a library, and few if any are really cutting-edge when it comes to their use of web technologies, there is something to be said for the diversity and quality of information they provide you in your daily development tasks.
An excellent piece of writing!
Mike
I've been using del.icio.us for almost two years, ever since I learned about it in the "Social Software in Libraries" course I mentioned in "#8: RSS and Bloglines."
Since I'm often browsing away from home and/or away from my own workstation, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly bookmark a website or web page in my del.icio.us account.
I don't always use the bookmarks. Often I don't even go back to look at them.
But the great thing is I don't have to remember where I saw such-and-such online. I have my own tag cloud and tag bundles, and these let me browse again later.
Now there's a catch to using deli.cio.us: the default for bookmarks is that they are public, unless you save them as private.
I didn't know this when I started using deli.cio.us, so all of my 120+ bookmarks are public. Though there's nothing I particularly want to hide, I'd rather not have all of them public. I just haven't had the time to go back and edit 120+ bookmarks.
>:-[
So...I'm not going to give out my deli.cio.us username here. Sorry. Maybe after I edit. (I also won't do a Network Badge till I've edited.)
Anyway, I looked at PLCMCL2's Bookmarks, and found this one: Welcome to the Blogging Libraries Wiki. Looks like a handy resource.
A neat Web 2.0 tool!
Footnote: I'm ambivalent about the whole tagging phenomenon, partly because I probably was an "old fashioned librarian" the moment I was born.
I've spend fiftysome years creating and using hierarchical classification methods: both paper and email filing systems, library classification and cataloging, etc. It's how my mind has learned to work.
I'm also used the searching value of "controlled vocabulary."
This means that the newer approach of non-hierarchical tagging sometimes feels too amorphous and slippery to me.
My mental style of managing information is usually by visualizing it in spatial relationships. Until I can imagine such a spatial display, it's hard to wrap my mind around what I'm learning or using. It's still more difficult for me to do this with non-hierarchical systems...even though they, too, can be displayed visually (witness the tag clouds).
On the other hand, to me the real potential in tagging appoaches is that we get to see how "real people," not only professional catalogers, sort and label things in order to find them again.
That's the key: findability (check out this blog by Peter Morville).
A very interesting new challenge for all of us.
