Speaker: Roy Tennant
Why?
more content is better
more access is better
can help provide personalized service
Kete
kete.net.nz – not heard about this. Looks like a web app for housing digitized stuff, that’s more social than the usual. EX – some people can create ads on the site…
Descriptive Contributions
ex – allowing customers to add content to old photos (ie., who are the people in the photo?)
WorldCat
Customer reviews seen on both worldcat and worldcat local
Library of Congress Flickr feed – getting good tag additions and comments
they got more than 10,000 unique tags our of 55,000 total!
also got more than 11,000 friends/contacts
more than 3,500 comments posted by more than 1,400 users
Even cooler – LoC is using Flickr community content to add into to the LoC records in their catalog. Nice.
What has LoC accomplished?
– higher profile of its collections
– community engagement – in this case, their “community” is the world…
– some corrections and additions to metadata
– sparked discussions and elicited personal histories related to photos – started conversation
– Higher visibility for the LoC Blog
Boston Public Library – doing a similar thing
Exploiting the knowledge of the Masses
– many eyes increases likelihood of getting things right
– library staff are often distant from localized knowledge of items in tehir collection
– web can provide a feedback loop
Contributions to discovery
– bookspace – Hennepin’s thing. They do a good job at connecting people and content
Tags:
user terminology – people using what works for them
LibraryThing – tagmash – powerful tag mashup search in LibraryThing
Third Party Providers
LibGuides
LibMarks
(both from SpringShare)
LibraryThing for Libraries (put the pig in a dress!!!)
ChiliFresh.com a review engine for your library
What to Know
Our idea of content may not be theirs
Going to be messy (and that’s ok – it falls to the bottom)
Issues to consider:
– what are your goals?
– are you set up appropriately to meet those goals? Human and back-end tech stuff?
– can you maximize benefits? ie statistical evaluations of tags?
– will you need to moderate?
– how to distinguish between user and library content?
– is the potential impact worth the investment?
where to from here?
– user engagement is a good thing
– need to get up to speed on how to foster engagement in our systems
– need to get savvy about how to use things like tags most effectively?