Beth worked with Ranganathan’s five principles to frame her talk (which provided great context, but I only got notes on four of them! Bad, bad conblogger). She also worked in some examples of work that’s being done on the Oakville Public Library’s website redesign (which is not live yet, although we saw a couple of teaser shots and it looks excellent!) and results of surveys and interviews done with OPL’s patrons. The survey and interview questions peppered throughout the notes below refer to this.

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Two questions:
- is there room for user-created content in OPACs?
- is it worth the risk (the risk of both doing it and not doing it)?

1. Books are for use.
- patrons depend on browsing for serendipity
- one interview question was: while in the library how do you usually discover new materials? Browsing was #1, looking at stuff on the return cart was #3, asking the librarian was #7. People are already collaborating in a way — it’s the notion that if someone else checked this out, it must be worthwhile! (Ed note: we saw a screenshot of OPL’s new site that is going to capture this in the web environment, but I won’t give anything away! Trust me, it’s cool!)
- the opac the way it exists now is like closed stacks – you have to know the author or title you’re looking for!

Interview question: if you could provide one piece of advice for your library, what would it be?
- improve the website. A patron noted that they start their search in amazon, see what people like, and then go to the OPAC!

Interview question: do you ever read reviews ratings and recommendations from other users?
- almost 75% said yes

Consider: what do patron’s library collections look like?
- library thing
- delicious monster
- bookcrossing
- building community around collections

2.Every reader his book.
- how do we find the right book for the right person at the right time?
- the democratic principle, every citizen his/her opinion
- how do we allow and make connections between different voices? Libraries have an interest in stewarding this where commercial providers don’t.
- amazon.com’s listmania: peer sharing of opinions
- it’s really about trying to find ways to allow those individual voices to connect.

3. every book its reader
- an idea of exposing the collection, ensuring that everything gets read.
- it’s not about taste elevation or being cultural gatekeepers.
- if we give them possibilities, they will choose possibilities.
- serving the long tail – but the long tail might concentrate demand through less and less choices.
- too many choices? We need “curators”. That’s what amazon.com does so well.
- interviews at OPL – searching a topic in the OPAC got way less than an amazon.com search, and the survey participants liked that. They felt that the library was curating for them.
- Cyber-balkanization: how do we think about this tradeoff vs. community?
- the Netflix business model is very much like libraries – ways of presenting people with choices and options.
- bestseller trap – reinforcing and perpetuating the cycle. We’re not changing it in any way.
- “the modern librarian is only happy when his readers make his shelves constantly empty”
- discovery: cross-referencing and showcasing – not just new, but old treasures too.
- building connections: per Ranganathan, it was all about subject classification. Maybe that doesn’t really work anymore.

Interview question: showed survey participants amazon.com tags and 50% of them thought tagging a book in amazon.com meant adding it to your wish list or shopping cart. If you look at the tags, they really aren’t meaningful. E.g.: harry potter is tagged with “harry potter”. Is this meaningful?
- it’s still early days for tags, we need to explore this in the long term. Tags need to be:
- evaluative: numeric, semantic
- descriptive: aboutness, offness
- associative: also recommended

4. Save the time of the reader.
- Jakob Nielsen (usability guru) says users spend most of their time not on your site, but on other sites. So figure out how to make your site like others!
- radical trust and smart system design go together.
- if you build it will they come?

Wrap-up:
- the only way it would work (i.e.: user-created content in OPACs) would be for library systems to work on it together. The only way to get critical mass, especially on books and resources that aren’t mainstream bestsellers, is if you get lots of users creating that content (user-reviews, etc.).
- user-created content management systems are far less forgiving of the need for constant ‘redesign”.
- bottom line? We all need to do this together!