round up them bees

Harvesting the Hive, social networking and libraries — Sunday, June 25, 10:30am.

Speakers: Matthew Lejeune, Digital Reference Services Coordinator, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN; Farkas, Distance Learning Librarian, Norwich University, Northfield, VT; Tim Spalding, Founder and Developer, LibraryThing, Portland, ME

Matthew Lejeune – Recommended reading: Malene Charlotte Larsen, 25 perspectives on Social Networking (eg. social, learning, consumber, genre, bullying, surveillance, body and sex, predator, democratic, etc. )

Wikis in libraries – (info will publish in some journal that i didn’t hear clearly – in September, maybe?)

4 ways of wikis  – collaboration between libraries, collaboration betw. library staff, collaboration betw. staff and users, collaboration betw. users. [These categories can be applied to other areas of social networking and participatory software as well]

examples – subject guide wiki from SJCPL, USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville library (CMS implementation), OCLC wiki worldcat, biz whiz from Ohio University, ref wiki at Butler University.

4 questions…why aren’t there more wikis in 3 and 4? why aren’t we collaborating with users? How might we enable users to build/modify information?

obstacles to this – we are a risk-averse profession who quite enjoy the idea of control. [although, when polled, almost everyone in the audience says their library is using a wiki for some purpose (generally internally)].

Matthew’s presentation is at librarywikis.pbwiki.com
password: lwcontrib – He requests that attendees post their libraries’ wikis to the wiki to be used as examples of implementation.

Farkas – Knowledge Management – how to organize info. so that it can be used/shared most effectively. Applications of Knowledge Management using social software in libraries:

example of the aadl SOPAC: recommended books, tagging- discusses the conventional excuse of privacy issues. we can strip personal information from this data and make it useful to provide a useful service that our users expect. Tagging supplements the descriptors.

Hennepin County BookSpace.

Rochester transportation rocwiki

Wiki as intranet – good for sharing procedure and policies, share basic info, Share reference resource information (trials, passwords, evalutions and assessment, etc.), — remember that this implementation can take time to establish knowledge management behavior into the organizational workflow. patience and persistence.

slides from talk and other things: meredithfarkas.wetpaint.com

Tim Spalding, LibraryThing.com

librarything is sort of like myspace for books and book lovers… sort of. myspace is about friends, librarything is about shared book collections that create connections.

15 million books have been cataloged in LibraryThing so far – we call this social cataloging… a bit of a new take. Cataloging by conversation opens avenues of discovery that are not available from traditional cataloging.

LibraryThing provides good information, much the same way that wikipedia provides good information. They’re not supposed to work, yet they do.

examples of the value of social cataloging – cooking (vs. cookery), chick lit or cyber punk (vs. nonexistent).