Tagmash on LibraryThing – Baby Steps Toward More User-Friendly Subject Headings?

LibraryThing has just introduced a feature called “tagmash” that is, as David Weinberger puts it, “creating subject headings from the bottom up.”

I don’t know that I would go so far as to call them subject headings…the experiment is still too new to know how this will all shake out.  However, these tagmashes have a great deal of potential, when enough have been generated, to provide a far more useful search tool than (in my opinion) LCSH does. Tagmashing is a chance to combine a lot of what makes tagging great (user-friendly, current language, allowing for multiple perspectives, users decide what is meaningful/interesting) with what makes subject searching great (potential for less ambiguity, combining frequently searched/related terms).   

How it works:

When users search for two or more tags, LibraryThing creates a persistent URL for that “tagmash” (for example, this page of the tagmash for ‘France’ and ‘WWII’). This is a bit different from Flickr’s clusters, which are (at least from what I understand) fully automated, as these are the aggregated results of user searches.

Why it’s not not a silver bullet (yet):

One of the commenters on Weinberger’s blog post made an excellent point: at the moment, at least, this process has the potential to even increase ambiguity, depending on the subject: “philosophy, history” can be about the philosophy of history (historiography, etc.), “older” philosphy (Plato’s ‘The Republic’), or a history of the discipline of philosophy.

How I think this would (ideally) impact the archival world:

This is an especially interesting development to me, as my first thought after reading about tagmashing was of Elizabeth Yakel (and co-authors’) D-Lib article “Creating The Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids” was how wonderful it would be if the next-generation finding aids that Yakel discusses could incorporate this feature.* Having created EAD finding aids, I found myself wondering about what other possibilities these types of finding aids had for users, especially in terms of subject headings (the finding aids I created used LCSH) that, as far as I could tell, were not often a good fit for very regionally or subject-specific collections, especially those with creators who were not well-known.

One problem I can see right off the bat is that these types of collections tend to be (relative to the types of materials on LibraryThing) low-usage, and so the statistically less useful user-generated tags (“my aunt Alice and her brother”) would not necessarily be knocked out of place by the potentially more-useful tags/tagmashes.

The way I choose to believe that problem would be solved, should archival tagmashing actually arise, is that one would just market the heck out of your collection and make it the “it” place to be online.

*Yakel points out multiple other possibilities for online finding aids in the article…which is fantastic and thought-provoking, and the Polar Bear Digital Collections project, on which the article is based, are fascinating. Read the article and visit the collections now, if not sooner.

 

Gamers, Gaming, and Libraries

I’ve been mentally marinating on this whole “Gaming and Libraries” movement (or whatever you want to call it) for awhile now, and when I saw the “Inside Higher Ed” article “When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library” posted on Techmeme this evening, I decided that, even though I don’t feel as if I’ve fully sorted everything out yet, it’s an important topic, and one that seems to be popping up everywhere. Also, as this blog is as much an iterative conversation with myself (which generally leads to this kind of rambling) as it is with whoever comes across it, I figured I’d roll with it and see where it took me.

First of all, full disclosure, every guy I’ve ever dated has been a moderate to hard-core PC gamer: Wolfenstein, Diablo, Diablo II, CounterStrike, WarCraft, World of Warcraft….you name it, if it was an RPG/MMORPG, they played it. So, when I first heard that librarians were going gung-ho for gaming (say that three times fast), I was a little puzzled. I didn’t see the connection between what my geeked out boyfriends were (and still are) doing and what I viewed as the standard “library mission,” (assist/provide environment in which patrons can seek wanted/needed information). And in a lot of ways, I’m still pretty skeptical.

The points on which the “Gaming in Libraries” proponents and I do see eye to eye on are as follows:

• You shouldn’t have to “RTFM” to use the system. Or, in slightly less blunt terms, systems should have “lowered consequences of failure,” as James Paul Gee puts it.
• Reward exploration. Games do. Wikipedia does. Library systems should.
• Make it fun! See: Wikipedia.  When was the last time you went to your library’s OPAC and thought, “YAY! I get to look for literary criticism of A Moveable Feast!” Granted, Wikipedia is intended to serve as a jumping-off point, but still…get my point? FUN.
• Patrons want to self-serve, for many reasons. I have a library degree, and I still get a little intimidated going to the reference desk. Part of that is my innate pig-headedness in not wanting to ask for help, but a lot of that is my instinctual response of not wanting to admit that I don’t know…whatever it is that I don’t know, and I know I’m not alone in that. Additionally, I’m very rarely in the physical library when I have a reference question. I’m not saying IM reference is a silver bullet, but it helps create another avenue for patrons to request assistance, and is one that gamers and just straight-up “digital natives” (like myself) are very familiar with.

I know that I’m not saying anything here that many, many other library bloggers haven’t also said many, many times about library systems. And I do agree with the “Gaming in Libraries” proponents that, for some people, until you have a visceral, physical, kinesthetic (thanks, SLIM, for that word) experience with some forms of technology (gaming being one of those), you’ll probably not ever fully understand the mentality of a lot of those moderate-to-hardcore gamer patrons. That being said, I think that it’s very possible to glean a lot of these “why people like games better than OPACs” points without actually becoming fully proficient at Halo 2.

My two cents. For an interesting look at the geek perspective on this article, take a look at some of these (surprisingly library-positive, given Slashdot’s usual tone) comments on this article.

 

Prometeus – The Media Revolution

Prometeus – The Media Revolution

In the grand tradition of EPIC 2014 and 2015, meet Prometeus, which I discovered courtesy the ACRLog.

It’s an interesting video, although the implication that Lessig is completely against copyright is a bit much.

Other than that, though, I’m still mulling.

 

Open Source Software for Online Education/Distance Learning

I blogged (and ranted) a bit earlier about my personal experiences with online education tools like WebCT and Blackboard, and, inspired by Meredith Farkas’ post on DrupalEd, talked about how some of the functionality that she discussed could potentially lead to more of a sense of online community than I experienced with either WebCT or Blackboard.

Well, I checked my feeds this morning, and saw that Michelle Boule had written a similarly-themed post on ALA TechSource’s blog, entitled “Unsucking Online Education, Part Two,” (Part One can be found here).

If you’ve had any experiences with either WebCT or Blackboard, I dare you to not dive into the article after this teaser:

WebCT and Blackboard are archaic structures that resemble how students learn in face-to-face environments. Continuing to build online education in ways that resemble the face-to-face environment harms our students and reflects poorly on us as educators. We should know better than to create a hostile learning environment. WebCT and Blackboard are still the norm in instructional design, but there is hope.

Amen. From your keyboard to library school administrators’ ears.

 

Facebook Welcomes Third-Party Developers (Are You Listening, OCLC?)

Ever since Facebook has opened itself up to all users, not just those of us with .edu e-mail addresses, they’ve made themselves equally open to third-party developers of applications.

Tech dilletante that I am, I saw that one of my friends had added the”Books” application (not to be confused with Amazon’s “Book Reviews” application) and decided to take it out for a spin.

 As you can (mostly) see in the screenshot above, you can:

• Utilize Amazon’s database to search for and display your current reading (even by ISBN!), to-be-read, and finished books
• Rate the books from 1-5 stars
• Reivew the books, using as many words as you want
• See what books your friends are reading
• Presentation is clean, minimal, and succinct
• Similar application for CDs and DVDs coming soon.

So far, I’m not seeing anything to complain about.

What would be really cool, though, is if one of the folks at OCLC came up with a similar application that browsed WorldCat or your local online catalog and linked to the items at your local library. Just a thought.

 

Zombies + Libraries = Awesome!

Several of my friends are serious zombie movie fans, so, when I saw that John Blyberg had posted this hilarious send-up by the good people at the Allen County Public Library on his blog…well, I just had to post it too.

Enjoy!

 

Everything is Miscellaneous…Metacrap?

No, everything isn’t miscellaneous metacrap.

My title is a mash-up (look at me, using trendy tech terms!) of works by Cory Doctorow (author of “Metacrap“) and David Weinberger, (author of “Everything is Miscellaneous“) respectively. 

I mashed them up because Weinberger is doing a series of interviews, co-sponsored by Wired News and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society (of which Weinberger is a Research Fellow), and the first interview (which is also available as a podcast), features Doctorow and is pretty thought-provoking.

I confess, I haven’t read “Everything is Miscellaneous” yet, but, as soon as I get done with “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” I am on it.

 I confess, I’m still having some difficulty with Doctorow’s uses of the phrases “explicit metadata” and “implicit metadata.” Additionally, I’ve noticed, after seeing it brought up in “Information Architecture” that proponents of folksonomies as the new classification panacea tend to utilize the same two examples (Flickr and del.icio.us) over and over, and this article is no exception.

 However, there is one example that I can think of off the top of my head that marries folksonomies to the structured taxonomies prevalent in the library world: PennTags. Turns out, Weinberger has blogged about this too, and I share his view that:

Integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy) instantaneously provides the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

Is this a case of being able to have our librarian-cake (bibliographic control) and eating it too (letting the users tag at will)?

Something else to ponder. Great, like I needed one more thing.

 

Excellent point about open-source

I’ve been enthusiastically (and probably very naively) posting about open source for awhile now; however, I came across an article on linux.com that brought me down off of my fluffy little conceptual cloud, and I thought it was important to add Bob Metcalfe’s point to my stream of inexerienced positivity:

Metcalfe hasn’t swallowed the full glass of open source Kool-Aid. “It’s the sustainability long-term of the open source model that I worry about. Who will take care of the software after the novelty wears off and the volunteers lose interest and get real jobs?”

Something to ground me. For a bit, anyway.

 

The Problem with Wikipedia

A

Comic from xkcd.com. Permalink.

A good problem to have.

I’d like to see this become a “problem” with OPACs (preferably, starting with a better, less jargon-y name for them).

As Michelle Boule said in her post about Roy Tennant’s Computers in Libraries 2007 presentation, we need some “funability” in our systems.

 

DrupalEd – Open Source for the Educational *cough*Library School*cough* Community

Meredith Farkas recently posted about DrupalEd, and from what I have gleaned from her post and from the DrupalEd website, I have learned enough to become very curious.

One of the main issues with my library school is that, though it serves a twelve-state area, providing (very affordable and weekend-intensive) classes, the software that serves as the school’s connective tissue, Blackboard, does little to foster a sense of online community…something that a school that revolves around distance education should, in my opinion, have as one of its primary focuses.

If I had not been lucky enough to take some face-to-face classes with several people who I made friends with and have maintained contact with (largely through other online applications, such as Gmail), I believe that I would have gone through the program feeling alienated, isolated, and alone.

I’m hesitant to expand on the issue much further, as I don’t have the technological wherewithal or the student affairs background to pull out each individual issue and explain how I believe DrupalEd would succeed where Blackboard (or WebCT, or other less flexible software packages) have failed. Additionally, I was just about the opposite of a whistle-blower on this issue during my time in library school, and I believe that, in order for my complaint to be fully legitimate, I would have had to attempt to affect change. I can fall back on the “I didn’t have time to” excuse (I worked full time throughout most of my grad school career).

However, looking back, I wish I’d spoken up and tried to offer a solution…a solution that I believe DrupalEd could someday be. The features just about speak for themselves:

• a personal workspace;
• a group workspace;
• the ability for site members to create informal working groups;
• the ability to create formal class spaces;
• a podcasting platform;
• a WYSIWYG text editor;
• wiki functionality;
• personal and class blogs;
• rss feeds for the entire site, individual courses, individual terms, and individual users;
• personal image galleries;
• personal file repositories;
• the ability to create private, invitation-only groups;
• social bookmarking, with searching within bookmark descriptions;
• spam protection;
• assignment calendars by course;
• event calendars for site-wide events;
• configurable user profiles with searchable text descriptions;
• the ability to create lists of “friends” among site members;
• the ability to find the missing sock in the dryer.

Everything I’m seeing here (especially the part about finding your missing socks…how awesome is that?) could translate into an incredibly personalized-to-your-institution, welcoming, vibrant online community.

I hope that someday I’ll be able to either gain sufficient knowledge to be able to come back and assist my (hopefully very welcoming) library school in implementing DrupalEd or something close to it, or be able to watch as others take on the implementation.