World Cat Local

WorldCat Local Task Force Report to LAMP

By Michael Brock, Faye Chadwell, & Terry Reese

Wow so many acronyms so fast and without explanation. This article took me a while to read to get up to speed. I had to guess on OSU and thought maybe Oregon State University. That becomes somewhat evident on p. 3 when the authors referred to “Oregon Explorer natural resources…” I am still not sure about LAMP. I know it could be googled but I want to see if it is ever spelled out!

So many concerns and so many trade-offs for the different configurations. I say only look at what the users want and forget about what the software team has developed and doesn’t want to give up. If the users don’t want it, the software team needs to get over (even if they labored over it for months and months) and give users what they want.

This is a big software project for a large university with many options for configuration of a system. It  has the search capabilities users want along (along with propriety search system LibraryFind) with information about where the item is located (local or outside of the university), how to find related items and how to integrate tagging, book jackets, and user review. I think though that WCL is an important part of OSU’s future because it allows users to be able to immediately find locally what they need not in OSU’s collection.

I don’t think I ever learned was LAMP stood for. I will immediately google for it as soon as I post this.

21st Century Library Catalog

Toward a Twenty-First Century Library Catalog

By Kristin Antelman, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace

The authors state first and second generation library catalogs were difficult for patrons to search by subject. For a longtime they were the only electronic way to search for information and had a total hold in that domain until the internet came along and full-blown search engines began to emerge like AltaVista, Yahoo, and Google. Library catalogs had to catch up!

Today, there are still not many library catalogs around that can rival what a search engine does. Library catalogs are behind the times when it comes to searchability and the capability to add user generated content. Libraries only choice is to get up to speed with software quickly.

North Carolina State University Libraries decided something must be done so they acquired an industry standard software package used by major retailers and began modification for library catalog functionality to users. By making their own system modifications they ended up with a catalog with “relevance-ranked results, new browse capabilities, and improved subject access.”  Query driven searches are now the most important for library patrons. So much so that the software developers actively create algorithms for the best retrieval matches moving away from the old Boolean type searches.  NCSU has custom designed the sort ordered results of the queries from what they consider to be most relevant to least. This software appears to be a work in progress with NCSU Libraries releases updates to the software on a planned and controlled basis.

NCSU Libraries software package includes a browsing feature important to many library users who like to be able to browse collections not by any particular criteria. This allows for “guided navigation” enabling a user to “browse the entire collection without entering a search term.” However, they do not appear to use any controlled vocabulary in the process of searching. The Dewey Decimal system controlled vocabulary and expanding its contents seems to be a way to enhance subject heading searching for patrons. The system does not take advantage of Library of Congress Subject headings except as a display for information purposes only on the retrieval page. It is a good idea  to use LC since it is an already established system regularly maintained and updated and used by 100s of thousands of computer systems worldwide.

 One doesn’t hear much about LCSH (some research is being done) these days but I think this is an area rich and deep in information to help users find what they are looking for or could be exploited for tagging social content.

The NCSU system is designed to run with MARC record data loaded into the system. New items are added nightly in automated process. Technically, these updates allow NCSU libraries to re-index the entire database nightly.

NCSU Libraries have worked very hard on the user interface design and have made search and navigation workable for patrons. Users have many options for sorting the retrieval page results and results in a flexible way to display information which allows the user to select the one which is most important to his or her needs.

Much testing and tracking of system use is ongoing and analysis shows where NCSU Library developers can make room for improvement and enhancing features that have become popular. This allows further development of the system and release of software updates.

The NCSU Libraries catalog has made many improvements for users in searching, collocating of related materials and navigating but still does not incorporate Web 2.0 user content create technologies. This capability is yet to be an enhancement for the NSCU libraries. How NCSU will allow “outside data sources to enhance bibliographic records,” (ie user generated content) is a future area of study for this project.

Nex-gen Catalogs

New Generation of catalogues for the new generation of users: a comparison of six library catalogs by Tanja Mercun and Maja Zumer.

This article compares the features and functionality of six different public library catalogs in the United States. It breaks down what features these catalogs have and what Web 2.0 functionality the libraries themselves have adopted into their catalog and library website. Most interesting of all, it compares the library catalog features to one of the market place’s largest online retail bookseller, Amazon.com. It must be hard for library nonprofits to compete against market driven entities (for-profits) and at the same time for a library to be able to offer all the same bells and whistles of an Amazon.

The article seeks to determine if public libraries have updated their catalogs and improved upon first generation library catalogs driven by automation. These second-generation catalogs are examined for their ability to search and navigate and ability to allow users to generate their own comments and content and add this information to the libraries’ catalogs.

Most second-generation catalogs have either improved upon searching and navigation capabilities but not the ability for library users to generate and add their own comments about the content of the item in the library’s catalog. For public libraries, it is difficult to be able to do both even though it might seem effortless for an online giant like Amazon to be able to do it with its vast amounts of unlimited resources. These features are important to Amazon to be able to draw the largest audience it can to its website and online market place. Public libraries just can’t compete with that.

Library catalogs have not caught up to the way internet search engines works and library patrons’ expectations about how the library catalog should work are resulting in a declining usability of the catalogs. Patrons do not find what they want when they use broad search terms as if they do on the internet. Catalogs need to improve search features so items are identified and retrieved from the collection, meeting a user’s information needs.  

Libraries are also facing the challenge of new Web 2.0 tools. Internet users are used to the social aspect of the internet where collaboration and interaction are the new normal. Users can work online with others, upload content, create and label content. Library users now expect a similar process or interaction with their libraries. Many libraries online internet and catalog functions do not allow this ability. Libraries are behind the wave of Web 2.0 tools.

In the article, it appears that some libraries are able to upgrade their catalogs to be better at searching and navigating. This makes it more useful to an individual using the catalog. However, these same libraries are not able (probably a resource issue) to provide the Web 2.0 functionality that they expect when online using a website like Amazon.com. It is difficult for libraries to be able to do both at the same like. The corollary, that other libraries, have added the Web 2.0 functionality to their websites/catalogs but their catalogs remain or lag far behind in “searchability” for items as compared to  the internet. These libraries give users the chance to create or comment on content that is if they can find it within the catalog. Having all the Web 2.0 tools functionality in a library catalog will matter little though if there is no improvement in the catalogs usability or navigating.

For creating the next generation of library catalogs, the article suggests that there is “common consensus in the library community that improving the core functionality of the catalogue and as well as introducing the some Web 2.0 trends.” Libraries will need to look at this direction to keep and attract patrons in the future.

The advantage and disadvantage that libraries face in this challenge is that at the same time they have a much smaller number of users compared with an entity like Amazon. They don’t have enough users to be able to use the collective patron ratings and content creation which may or may not have the impact you can get with Web 2.0 technologies. However, the library has the advantage of knowing its patrons in a much more personal way. Libraries should exploit that advantage to the hilt. A library that has a small enough patron base can get to know them much better than an Amazon can. Libraries will need to follow the trend and improve their catalogs search and retrieval functions to be make their collections available to patrons. If a patron can’t find something because it doesn’t know the correct search term, then the library’s collection could sit unused or worse be reduced in size due to lack of use. Libraries will also need to follow Amazon’s lead and provide a way to leave user generated content and feedback for items in its collection for other users to discover and follow. Other user content creation or ratings could help a library improve its circulation and usabilit

Facebook Discussion for Next Week

I know we have a big week coming up next week on Facebook. I came across this video last semester. I have been holding off on posting it but thought I would get it done now since next week is vaca for me. I know another classmate talked about The Onion in a previous blog so you should all know this is tongue-in-cheek but seems so real!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0

Or, if you want it from the onion site: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/

So as not to confuse anyone, I will be eventually following this post with a REAL story about the government’s use of Facebook as soon as I can find the time! I must get real classwork done first. Ugh!

Tag Gardening for Folksonomy Enrichment and Maintenance

This is a blog about the article Tag Gardening for Folksonomy Enrichment and Maintenance by Isabella Peters & Katrin Weller

Tagging is a free-form activity which allows a tagger to use words of his own choosing to describe the tagger’s relationship with the content. The user’s tag can be any kind of word, description, based on one’s own choosing.  Users are free to select a tag that fits for them. Words chosen or written can be misspelled, intentionally misspelled or even made-up.  Tagging began as an individual activity. It was a way for an individual to mark or tag items of interest to him personally. A tag can be described as a token for the relationship between an individual and the content of interest to an individual. The act of tagging is for an individual to express his or her relationship to the content.

I believe the tagging process is not about the tags but is about the individual who performs the tagging act:

A person  =======>tags (describes his relationship or feeling about)=====>content.

That is a person tags content and in doing so displays his relationship to the content.  Thus, tags are really about the individual not about the tags themselves. The fact that an individual chose a tag means he is self-tagging himself to this particular content. On the individual level the value of tagging was personal, only of use to the individual and meant something just to that one person.

Tagging has evolved to groups where people have come together in an effort to share each other’s tags and find similarities between tags and make social connections. Tagging as an individual act is now applied to a community or group model or setting.  This changes the dynamic dramatically. Applying or characterizing an individual’s relationship to content on a group level changes the scale and scope of what one is trying to accomplish. The value of the tag in a community or group is also greatly enhanced because of the aggregation of information across the community.

The article by Peters & Weller discusses activities associated with tag gardening.   The article advocates for tag weeding, the removal of “bad tags” or those tags with “spelling mistakes.” Weeding can take places on a personal level for a personomy of tags an individual has created or it can take place collectively for a community that shares tags.  An individual’s own taxonomy probably would not weed out his own chosen words for his tags misspelled, intentional or not, or made-up words or otherwise. However, for weeding on a platform, community level, individuals who use tags may find those tags weeded and removed with suggested tags for them to use in their place.  This gets back to a more formal way of classifying material and a more orderly approach to using tags among individuals and sometimes across platforms, but really misses the point of social tagging.

Another activity that has developed from the use of tags are tag clouds. Peters & Weller discuss how tag clouds are formed based on the frequency each individual tag is used or appears. Tags with the highest frequency are more prominently featured in the graphic design of the cloud of words. These words stand out, are bold or otherwise embellished to show their importance.  Using a cloud to search for content based on the highest frequency use of tags leads to “ending up in enormously large hits.” Their recommendation is to develop new tags by looking at the low frequency tag count and creating an inverse cloud showing the more unique tags used to describe content. The authors contend that doing so allows “new seedlings” to develop in the garden metaphor which leads to “additional access point(s)” to finding what you are looking for in the content.  This sounds very much like cataloging to me where the purpose of cataloging is to be able to find material based on title, author, subject, performer, date of publication, etc.

For Community Tag Gardening to survive, it will eventually lead to a controlled vocabulary, thesauri, and rules to allow all users to understand the meaning of the tags for that particular community.  Again, this misses the whole point of social media tagging which is to tap into the collective understanding of the masses without having to retrain them.

At an aggregate level, tagging content really becomes about what a group’s tag or relationship is with the content the group shares. This information is aggregated based on the characteristics of the individuals who make up the group and is used to provide value to marketers.  This is valuable information that can be used by the publishers who sponsor a website to see who/what their target audience is for their product. Now at the group level  tagging becomes  valuable for the website owner to be able to sell advertising. Developing a common folksonomy for all group members to communicate loses some of its potency because it is more uniform and choices in tags are pre-determined. It must fit into a certain word with certain context and certain spellings. Individuals who participate must subscribe to the requirements and their information is harvested and sold to businesses who want to reach more eyeballs or customers.

 

Three Website Blogs Shelfari, Library Thing, & CiteULike

Shelfari

After hearing about how a classmate uses Shelfari on Facebook yesterday, I thought I would see what the website was like. I wanted to see for myself that if you self-tag a book in your collection, that the tag would end up having value or meaning to someone else. I am concerned that when one makes up one’s own “personomy” and ties it to an item, it only has meaning to that person and no one else. Trying to hijack and take a person’s tag to make more uniform (as in gardening) changes the tag and it loses its value to the person who tagged it. It depends on the reason or motivation for the tagging. If the person is tagging for his or her own personal use, then it should not be modified via gardening. If the person is not tagging just for personal use, and the person wants others to find his or her relationship to the content via the tag he or she chose, then the tag should be changed for access by a wider audience and not necessarily the single audience of the one person who wrote the tag.

I tried this out for myself and searched on the tags. What I found was that the tag for young adult literature, could be called either “Young Adult Literature” or “ya lit.” I may be oversimplifying but in this example, I will assume either tag meant the same thing. However, either tag without any context, to another person, might possibly mean different things. For example, if you search for books tagged “Young Adult Literature” you get many textbooks about the subject or study of Young Adult Literature but no books in the genre as young adult literature. If you try this in reverse and search tag “ya lit” you get a bit of both returned in your search along with some extraneous items that do not seem relevant.  Your results become imprecise, inaccurate and not exactly, what you wanted. A bit of a waste of time if you are looking for information.

This is exactly what Peters & Weller (2008) describe in their article from this week Tag Gardening for Folksonomy Enrichment and Maintenance.

            “The results of the few former studies show that tag manipulation activities support users during indexing and searching and that structured folksonomies are able to enhance recall but fail in enhancing the precision of search results. This is primarily due to the lack of linguistic processing of the tags which has to be performed in advance of the semantic disambiguation of tags. “

In other words, if you don’t know the tagger’s context of the tag, you can’t always be sure you are going to find what you wanted. The level of “findability” (Wichowski 2009) of an item will lead to its “survival” either its existence or demise.

Library Thing

I know many people love this website but what is the value of the information here?  I did not want to create yet another account and only used its search feature not as a member. I was able to search on Young Adult Literature and had 150 hits returned. When I searched on ya lit, I had one hit returned. I ended up looking in the groups tab and found a link to explore by tags. This was just a huge tag cloud, in a computer generated sort order, that I had to wade through all the way to the bottom to young adult which looked like this:

young adult (45)

I clicked on it and it brought me to a list of member groups that identify themselves in some way with young adult literature. Looking at some of them, most tag themselves as “ya” yet Library Thing must have a thesaurus to translate that to young adult to aggregate all if they tag as ya or tag as young adult.

As a librarian, I could see the usefulness of this website. It might be helpful in doing my job if I wanted to see what people were talking about in different genres, etc. But as an individual, looking for the an item which would provide me with a potentially high entertainment value, I could not see myself devoting the time to the website to become a participant and learn the language needed to find what I wanted. I think I would have simpler ways of finding the same or similar items without the necessity of becoming a community participant.

CiteULike

First I read the FAQ for CiteULike. I immediately realized when I read the word “organise” near the top, this must be an English (UK) internet site! Sure enough when I kept reading, it was.

Everything was going great until I read… “the obvious idea was that if I use a web browser to read articles, the most convenient way of storing them is by using a web browser too. This becomes even more interesting when you consider the process of jointly authoring a paper. There is a point where all the authors need to get together and get all the articles they wish to cite into the one place. If you do this process collaboratively on a web site, then it’s easier.”

So I kept reading and discovered that they are storing the links to these articles that are stored in the University databases with which members are affiliated. It looks like in order to access these articles, you need to give them your login id and password to your University’s library databases! Is this true? [Clarified by CiteULike below, your university library login id and password are not required.] I am not sure I would want to do that. It would mean it would automatically log you in and direct you to the article. For now, I am not comfortable with allowing a website to login to my University’s database for me due to security concerns.

By making the cite site social and allowing individual members to tag articles, you are letting others know you either know about it or have read it and somehow you have self-selected an association with it via the tag you create.

After looking over the Terms of Use policy, it all seemed pretty normal to me. Then I began looking at the entire site itself. It has advertising at the top of the page (University of Phoenix), and ad for Questia online, a full-text research journal database for obtaining articles (probably at a cost). On the left side, half way down, more ads appeared. I saw streetauthority.com (I guess people in academics need to invest their money), Leica Dental Microscopes, High Beam research, another journal article database for articles at a price, another company selling microscopes (do you think they have a lot of doctors who use CiteULike?), and ClassesUSA.com. They sound like an entity to get people to enroll in for-profit colleges, universities, etc.

Quietly, the aim here is to get people to use CiteULike and then generate ad revenue just like most other internet websites. CiteULike must be using the social tagging by individuals to article content in aggregate to determine information useful for marketing their website. Again, here is the internet using your information to exploit it for the internet website’s own use or gain.

I decided not to join CiteULike because I do not want to keep widening my ever maddening number of internet affiliations. I am getting concerned there will be a new phenomenon that people who have become what is known in Facebook terms as “socially promiscuous.” If you have more than 300 friends or so, you are considered socially promiscuous. It sounds ridiculous but it shows the lack of security people on Facebook have because as the friends number gets higher and higher, it is easier to friend that person and get his or her information. Will we all be “internet promiscuous” by joining site after site after, giving out all our information just for the sake of a business model which will sell the data for advertising? It is all the more annoying that that these websites all want your information for a profit-driven enterprise. While this is a common business practice, there are still probably some benefits to the users in this type of relationship.

These websites are primarily an avenue of entertainment for people to spend their time. It takes a lot of time and effort if you want to be a member/participant. If you do, that is fine. It just means you are interested in devoting your time to that particular community. It becomes a way to find fun, entertainment in things you are interested. Your entertainment becomes your hobby.

Of all these sites, I think the real purpose behind them is to build a community of individuals and a practiced way of communicating with certain terms, and then exploiting that information to perform targeted marketing to support the platform. If you are not part of the community, you won’t necessarily be able to participate until you learn how it operates (rules for interacting) and how to communicate with it (what tags to use and what not to use). If you become a participant, the context of the tag becomes more readily apparent and useful to you. As an outsider, looking in, you may or may not always be able to understand what it is this community is trying to do and what it means.

Social Tagging as a Knowledge Organization and Resource Discovery Tool

This blog is reviewing Social Tagging as a Knowledge Organization and Resource Discovery Tool By Hesham Allam.

This article proposes that social tagging is a better way for internet users to locate their content or information online with which they use, create or find useful on the internet. In order to locate this information in the future, an individual creates a label or a tag of their own naming which helps him or her locate this item in the future. The author states social tagging “can be performed by anyone by freely attaching keywords or tags to describe the content of a Webpage.” He offers in his article reasons why an individual would tag internet content. Tagging can be done solely for the individual’s purpose or it can be done collectively in an online environment or platform. Those who do it individually do so primarily for their own purposes while those who do it in a group do it for the attention they can get. Users who perceive they have a social presence “tend to increase their tag when perceiving that others are seeing them.”

He also looks at the tagging literature and some have suggested that the motivators for tagging are to express an opinion, “performance,” using tags as a show-off technique to others, and activism to broadcast a group view.

He also notes that other studies have found many reasons why people tag media items. The list is long but most of it seems to me to be for amusement, entertainment,  a “way to pass the time,” or a way to be social.

How does this all pertain to libraries? Libraries can use social tagging to encourage its patrons to tag items of interest on libraries’ websites or facebook pages. It can be a way to take what the library is doing or how it is interacting with patrons and allow patrons to self-associate with the item of interest by tagging it.

I’m glad the author did look at a study about “that social tagging tools may cause users to give up some of their privacy by publishing their bookmarks and interests.” It seems this aspect of social tagging is rarely mentioned or acknowledged. It is, as he points out, sort of the price you pay for tagging and is really an opportunity cost. What is the cost of not tagging? The fear of not being able to find something. So in exchange for divulging personal information, you get to tag stuff!

Allam points out that in the long run, users are tagging in order to build and organize the internet. I think what they are really doing is only looking at part of the internet that they find entertaining or engaging but there is not much depth to that information. These types of users will eventually find it more difficult to use the “old” internet with its classical taxonomies and in-depth information that will focus on just one topic. He argues that social tagging allows you to free associate from one concept to another and “surf” among different websites. He does mention a concern with distraction that maybe this is not the best way to find information.  What he does not realize or does not acknowledge is that these users are not looking for an academic lesson but a distraction in the form of passive entertainment which is not real research.

Survival of the Fittest Tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization

Survival of the Fittest Tag (Alexis Wichowski).

I believe this article is a foreshadowing of what is going to happen if proponents of social tagging are allowed to continue this path of allowing user content creation to be tagged and shared either individually or en masse. This will result in a second digital divide of the internet. The word folksonomy originates from german word “folk,” also described as common people or a host of warriors. “Taxonomy” is from the classical world of taxonomy, a scientific method of describing and classifying our world. Putting them together you have common folk or a host of warriors describing and classifying our world in a new way, shunning old categorizing systems. Socially tagged content will be used by those who are drawn into online communities and subscribe to the new lexicon of folksonomies to define what they see, how they feel about, what they want the world to know their relationship is with it, and ultimately what they know to be the creation of new knowledge contributed to the world correct or incorrect. These users will be the ones who shun academics, databases, content indexed search engines in favor of socially approved & tagged data that is familiar to their communities.

Arising next to the use of social folksonomies, will be the “old” internet, with its OCLC, OPACS, academic journals, search engines like google, and elite academic users. I don’t intend at all for this to sound elitist. However, I don’t see the people who don’t subscribe to the hobby of tagging or defining their relationship with content on an group level using the socially created new knowledge now described by folksonomies. These people with stick with what has worked, including technology which has made things easier or faster, like indexed search engines, but will not delve into the folksonomy unless for academic research purposes only.

Podcasting

I am looking at how I am going to do a podcast. I have never done one before. I have poked around a bit on the internet. I have listened to some of Nancy Kean’s booktalks to get a sense of what a podcast for a book review sounds like (ok so they’re for middle school). So far I have a computer, an old microphone, a Sony MP3 voice recorder, but no software yet. I need to find some “intro” and “outro” music.  I have considered the possibility of using one of my phone’s ringtones for the music. Last night I found one I liked as an mp3 file online and downloaded it to my laptop. Once I have some software, I will be able to blend the intro music with the podcast and then blend in the outro. I am considering using the Audacity freeware. At least this is what I seem to know so far about putting this together. If anyone has any other suggestions or directions for me to go in, please let me know! Thanks.

Always On: Libraries in a World of Permanent Connectivity

It seems like in a world of perpetual connectivity people will expect all services from libraries to be available 24×7. I find that a bit disconcerting but if you wanted to expand library services to include world-wide libraries, then you would get ’round the clock services. They would just be in a different time zone, and foreign country to you. Better brush up on your Chinese.

This relates to his comments  about libraries and sourcing. He talks about “where will alternative sources emerge” in the context of how much networking academic libraries need to build (for students or academics) and whether or not they can rely on third parties or “create collaborative services.” If students think they need connectivity with their devices anytime, anywhere, I can see where libraries could form partnerships with each other and form networks of online services to meet this demand.