Of course, once I started noodling around my category archives, I started thinking about how I really should be doing some tagging around here, so off I went in search of a tag plugin and found & installed Ultimate Tag Warrior. And now I am resisting the urge to spend the rest of the day adding tags to all the archived posts. If I didn’t have this enticing book at my elbow, I’d probably do it.

Later: shame that the upgrade to WP 2.0.1 changes your feed URL entirely. I’ve set up the redirect and I’m monitoring Bloglines to make sure all goes well. And, look! A tag cloud! I installed the runPHP plugin to make the magic happen.

Right. Now, back to that book.

Later still: it looks like the RSS feed is redirecting as it should. Good. You don’t have to update your subscription, but FYI, the new feed is at http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/?feed=rss2.

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!

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