~~~~~

Go to this URL and input every word you can think of that describes what this object is:

COQAA.org/Tags http://tagcrowd.com

http://tagcloud.oclc.org/tagcloud/TagCloudDemo

http://www.coqaa.org/cgi-bin/tags.cgi

From the tag cloud, we can see that an object can mean different things to different people.

…. the days of physical location are over.

Look at the tag cloud – if you had a general store, where would you put this thing? It can be shelved in electronics, phones, office supplies, cameras, ….

So how do you find it in a store?

How do you find it online?

How can we apply this idea to libraries?

I have identified four areas where social tools have impact on information and knowledge…

• •Reach
• •Depth
• •Economics
• •Sharing

There may be others. As we look at these tools, try to think about which of these are impacted or if there are other major areas of impact.

How do you find information?

Where does Dewey say you’ll find a book on the style of home you live in?

What if that book also contains recipes from the era and style represented by the architecture? How do you classify it?

So – when you know what you want, a physical location is helpful. But when you’re searching, physical location can cause a problem.

The Library of Congress Flickr site – an experiment in how people use tagging and discussion boards to learn and to contribute.

Fixing incorrect info, making history more accessible, saves the LOC time in identifying, labeling, categorizing the photos.

NPR Story on LOC/Flickr

Thinking beyond the physical media …

How can a wide range of viewpoints contribute to sharing information?

• •What was the cause of the American Civil War?
• •Is offshoring manufacturing a good thing or a bad thing for our country?

… So there are many perspectives on major events (and minor events too) – and if someone learns new information or assembles old information in a new way, maybe we’ll learn that the Civil War was caused by aliens…

Which brings us to Wikipedia ….

Wikipedia – I say it’s this, you say it’s that, he says it’s something else .. as a community, we can vet the truth … right?

Example:

• •Early entry on Hydrino Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hydrino_theory&oldid=18850817
• •Current entry:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrino_theory

(The debated content is shown right in the article.)

This vetting works when people contribute – but what about more obscure entries? If the community of so-called experts isn’t large enough to represent other points of view, can it be trusted?

And that’s where the librarian comes in…

Questions:

Kitty Kelley is known for controversial biographies containing questionable facts. Is all of the content in this book reliable? How is that different from a Wikipedia article?

Who granted Kitty Kelley expert status?

How can a librarian start with authoritative content and have a community of experts or casual enthusiasts contribute and stay authoritative?

I see the librarian’s role as important, and twofold:

1. 1.Source good information to start with – Information is out there – some of it is good and some of it is weak. The reference librarian’s role is to know the difference, find the good and at least put disclaimers around the bad.
2. 2.Assemble that information in a way that is useful. We’ll return to this idea later.

• •Web2.0 people are contributing more than they are consuming
• •
• •Data is the new commodity

Data –> Information –> Knowledge

 

.. it’s pretty obvious where a librarian gets involved: FIND the right DATA and package it as INFORMATION

 

First, let’s look again at the idea of democratized knowledge.

Q: Do we want Joe Average to contribute his ideas about something he knows only a little about?

A: Depends!

Maybe Joe Average’s grandfather was a physics professor at Ohio State and had Edward Teller over for dinner one night. And maybe he passed some of those stories on to Joe. So is Joe Average an expert on the Manhattan Project? Of course not – but maybe someone who is interested in it would also be interested in Joe’s stories.

Abby Normal is looking through the LOC photos on flickr and correctly identifies an old Ferguson Dough Extruder in the picture. This is an obscure item that very few people would have been familiar with, let alone have recognized. …

..Which brings us to the next reference: The Long Tail – Chris Anderson. This is where much of the value of social media comes in.

Again – where does the librarian fit in?

• •Knowing where to find this information.
• •Helping to assemble it
• •Pointing out the information’s credibility – whether it is high or low
• •Citations – is there a standard for citing user-contributed web content?

Let’s talk about what tools are out there and how libraries are using them.

• •Facebook – Groups, Communities of Practice, Viral

Hennepin County Library Catalog, Worldcat.org, Ask a librarian

• •Twitter (SMS – short message service) – microblogging

Ada Library – Boise – events (

http://twitter.com/adalib)

Nebraska Library Commission – Ask a librarian (

http://twitter.com/NLC_Reference)

• •YouTube

• •Flickr – Library of Congress
• •Blogs – tons of them
• •WebJunction.org – online community of/for librarians to share ideas, get training, discuss issues.
• •Worldcat.org lists
• •De.licio.us – Weekly Tags about a given subject – this is a good example of how a librarian can use social tools to find good information and then assemble it for users of that information – Combine tagging with RSS.

Library Clips

Demonstrate mashed up library – Help me research “Semantic Web’

• •Youtube – tagged as ‘library’ & ‘reference’ (or as ‘semantic web’, etc)
• •Twitter – new book feed from library (or ‘watch semantic web’)
• •Delicious tags
• •Bloglines
• •Flickr tags

•… Assemble RSS into Tumblr.

•

All of this data can be clipped & reassembled multiple times, in various ways – but the original source of the data remains the content and RSS syndicates it to other places, other contexts.