Speaking of folksonomies, I would like to mention that the very first time I came across this group tagging phenomenon, it was not at del.icio.us or flickr, it was at the Gimp Savvy Copyright-Free Photo Archive where they have selections of unindexed images and invite users of the site to help classify them. Just by looking at their list of tags, which they call master keys, you can see how this works and does not work. In specific, see this example.
Category: ‘puters
what I was talking about
Jenny chimes in on what the library overlap is or could be with the social bookmarking services we’ve been seeing get so popular lately. She’s doing a tech summit to tell librarians about it which I’ll be sorry to miss.
When someone gets used to retrieving items using the words they think of, not the words we think of, do you think they’ll still be willing to type “LastName, FirstName” to find an author? Will they understand a title search that accepts exact phrases only? (Those are rhetorical questions and the correct answers are “no” and “no,” even if you offer keyword searching hidden elsewhere on your catalog.)
radref tooklkit, fair use with cut-and-paste restricted pdfs
Some non-ALA stuff. Sethf has reposted a worth-reading post that’s a bit of a DIY “how to” on how to exercise your fair use rights with PDFs that have cut and paste functionality removed. Why might you need this? He also has a post addressing that.
not that kind of weblog, analyzing your server logs
Having a library web site is just the beginning of reaching your patrons. You can analyze your web server logs and learn what they’re looking at, and not looking at, to learn to serve them more effectively.
The most surprising of these is a page that lists the library’s periodical holdings. The heavy use of this page has emphasized the importance of creating complete holdings for our journals in the Web catalog. Additionally, users prefer the alphabetical listing of the library’s database to a list of full-text databases or a list of databases by subject.
wikipedia disliked by librarians because it operates without privilege?
A quick nod to librarians in a longer article about Wikipedia. What do you think of this quote?
Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don’t like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.