OLA: Connections, not Categories: Applying Social Networking Concepts to Information Organization
OLA Super Conference
Presenter: M.J. D’Elia, University of Guelph
Session focus:
- to provide a broader pic of information organization
- what’s going on in the non-library world & what we can appropriate for our own uses
- where we need to go in the future
- blogs, wikis, etc. and libraries – fad or future?
- three main ways to understand a network: centrality, betweeness, closeness
- Gladwell & The Tipping Point – how information travels across a network to become a fad. Three main concepts:
- Connectors: people who have connections
- Mavens: aren’t passive collectors of info, proactive finders and sharers
- Salespeople: communicators, sellers
- Gladwell’s small world phenomenon: study done in 1967 (published in Psych Today, Milgram) to prove that not everyone is connected to everyone through 6 steps; rather that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else through a few steps.
- The corporate ladder: this is one of our networks; artificial network to get work done
- LCSH: another network, this one of subjects; hierarchy of UF, BT, NT; sometimes putting ideas into containers they don’t always fit in.
- The Internet as network: no real hierarchy, hyperlinks, distributed network, a whole lotta see also references
- Social software: wikipedia, for example. Fascinating to looks up the history of a term and watch its transformation (especially new concepts). Why does it work? It’s self-correcting.
- In libraries? What if we allowed our users to edit our subject guides through wikis? Decentralizing the library’s authority & building community.
- theyrule.net – investigating major corporations, mostly in the US. Search for any major company and find connections between them. Brings social networking concepts to find linkages between corporations
- CSA’s Scholars Universe – similar idea, using social network concepts to investigate scholars and their various connections
- Photo tagging: using tags and RSS to build those social connections; also, adding notes – anecdotal bits of information added by people.
- Flickr tags: an organic folksonomy (tag clusters, etc.) No hierarchy, as in LCSH; no BT, NT, etc. no vocabulary control or authority, but Flickr users don’t care.
- Visual Tag Browsing – taking Flickr tags to the next level. Type in a keyword or tag and see just the image results (querying the Flickr database). Zoom out from the images and see the other tags. Allows you to zero in on what you’re looking fo; rotate your network and find exactly what you’re looking for.
- In libraries? How about institutional repositories? Oral histories? Community histories?
- For these specific collections, you could create your own thesaurus, or your could employ tags.
- Using a technology like flickr notes: art history classes, medical classes (medical drawings, etc.)
- Social bookmarking: del.icio.us to tag sites rather than images. The aggregation is what makes it powerful – my tags + your tags = helping each other find information. Benefiting from where other people have been before – as opposed to general search engine searching (nothing social about that… yet)
- Tag clouds: a snapshot of what people are finding and saving.
- Shadows: takes del.icio.us one step further. Tags and comments. Create communities around interests.
- MOG – millions of games. Gaming. Combination or reviews, tags, advice.
- Connotea – in the academic world. Tag academic references. More scientific emphasis. CiteULike too. Store and share academic resources.
- User Commentary: amazon.com reviews, for example. Good example for libraries. What do reviewers gain from adding their reviews to the catalogue? Sharing, mostly. If you love a book, you want to tell people about it; same if you hate a book! Great for the fringe stuff that doesn’t make it into major review journals. Also, amazon.com’s recommendation engine. It’s business, yes, but it works. Why can’t we do this in our OPACs?
- Epinions: same, user commentary. Community building and interaction.
- Ebay has taken this to a whole other level.
- Gmail: search, don’t sort. No folders, use the search engine instead.
- challenge: we’re experts in the information field. Are we willing to give up this control? How about collaboration? Can LCSH live harmoniously beside tags?
Audience Questions:
- these concepts are great, especially for services. But when we start using these tools, we’re opening marketplaces. And marketplaces are only as good as the activity. There are blogs and wikis out there that are failures because there’s no activity. How do we ensure the marketplaces we create actually work?
- Make it attractive
- Make it meaningful for people
- Make it cool!
- Make sure people get something out of it – coming to the marketplace and getting involved
- What if you’re not a code jockey? How can we incorporate these tools into our OPACs?
- Talk to our vendors!
- Share our successes!
- Learn from each other