Using RSS feeds: Library 2.0 Activity #15

I've subscribed to e-newsletters for years, or frequented sites which I know are updated on Mondays, Thursdays or Fridays, or the first part of the month. I've heard about RSS feeds for years, and thought that would be too much to read. But I spend a lot of time checking news sites during the day, which is a big time sink every time I load the page. It's a waste of time if there are no updates to peruse. Plus, I may just want to know if certain kinds of news is updated. And some sites don't update on schedule. So, using RSS is a time-saver in the long run. One can also visit many sites on related topics, expanding one's interests, and tell by quick glances which are worthwhile and which ones aren't. I may be braver and get more feeds from particular blogs after I've had more experience. I just wish I could get notifications when there is an update to the staff email, since I'm not logged in to it when I'm away from the library.

Great shot of hall from Seattle Library: Library 2.0 Activity #13

With all the glowing comments about the Salt Lake Library, it's good to see what others have done. While I love the use of light and glass at our location, the bold use of color seen in this shot at http://www.flickr.com/photos/theta444/16800827/ demonstrates other aesthetic possibilities. Plus, I like the color red. I should have attended the U. Visiting the Flickr site reminded me of the power of photography in this day and age, and the many, many talented people using it as a form of social communication. I took some art classes years ago, with the vain aspiration to be a graphic designer. Along the way, I lost my nerve and decided that wasn't my forte. However, with the evolution in graphics software and image sharing sites, I realize that I, with limited knowledge and expertise, can have a shot at it, too. Plus, this is an easier way to share documents of daily life with family. I know that many people have old family photographs with no names, places or dates to identify them. Posted on social networking sites, many people have been able to identify their pictures through the input of distant relatives and local historians, people whom they wouldn't have otherwise known or met, who happened to visit the sites.

Library Thing: Library 2.0 Activity #12

What a fun site! I first heard about this some years ago, and it has really grown. What better way to connect with like-minded people than through their reading interests (especially since other sites emphasize music, movies, games, pictures). The practice of copy-cataloging and union cataloging survives into the 21st century, in a style much simpler than MARC. I wondered years ago what benefit the Net was without general access to utilities like RLIN and OCLC. Before WorldCat, you took a step back by having to search each library's website individually. I've had a large library of books and recordings for years, with no easy access to it beyond my personal memory (which is getting faultier each year I get older). Now, with LibraryThing, I can actually inventory everything and perhaps interest people in my obscurata.

Working with Technorati Library 2.0 Activity #11

I read about Technorati and blogs years ago, but didn't know if I wanted to spend the time on it. Now, since I realize that I get to say whatever I want to here, as much as I want, I can do this for therapeutic purposes. Browsing through the website, I realized that the number of hits varies, depending whether one searches blog postings or just the tags. I looked up "biowarfare" and got the most hits when I typed it in as a general keyword search term (160). I got much fewer hits just under "blogs" and "tags" (about 32). When I looked under the tag "bioterrorism" under popular tags, I got different hits, but it was also a smaller number than with "biowarfare" the first time. I also realized that this site can be very addicting. No wonder people are abandoning the conventional news media, or that reporters are adding blog content to websites sponsored by news syndicates. The drawback of blogging, of course, is that facts can be easily misrepresented, since there is no editorial control. Andrew Keen has pointed out that journalists in the traditional media seemed to get sued all the time, and are even jailed, for what is said on the air or printed. Bloggers haven't quite achieved that level of notoriety yet.
SLCPL2.0

Social bookmarking: Library 2.0 Activity #10

I remember the trouble I had trying to create a reference collection for a book conservator. There were so many photocopies, so many possible access points, to file, along with books, journals, and supplier catalogs. When I created my wiki for the intranet at my other work, I found all sorts of websites, assigned to various subject headings, with brief annotations. I've wondered how to get more visibility. I find so many interesting sites on the Net, but have wondered how to keep track of them. I've used a free service called Backflip.com occasionally for posting my favorites online, but don't use it often. Tagging services like de.licio.us are a godsend, by comparison. There is so much information that seems so intractable, so miscellaneous, under old, hierarchical systems of classification. I've noticed that the name of S. R. Ranganathan gets invoked more and more these days. He was glossed over in my library school course on classification systems, but his faceted approach now seems prophetic. The biggest problem remains authority control. There are so many different ways to describe graphic images and three-dimensional objects. I remember Benjamin Whorf's anthropological study, where one group of children sorted beads by shape, another group by color. Many remember Rashomon, as well as the many plots it has inspired, including the current film, Vantage Point. How do you corroborate witnesses' testimony? How do you build consensus when there are so many synonyms, so many different aspects to look at? The trouble is, most people can't see the value of using subject descriptors, since the World Wide Web isn't cataloged. I wonder whether the "Invisible Web" may be growing faster than the rest of it, simply because of inadequate tagging and searching. In spite of "The Long Tail", people are still researching using the distribution models of Zipf and Bradford. Google's rankings remind me of how the scientific and scholarly community used the Institute of Scientific Information's citation indexes to determine who had the most influence in their professions. With an uncataloged World Wide Web out there, deli.cio.us and other such bookmarking sites are the best approach we're going to get, for now. I've always liked promoting lesser-known writers and musicians. Now I know how to reach more people more quickly, without being a spammer, huckster or peddler.

On MySpace and Libraries: Library 2.0 Activity #7

I often resent it when people consider libraries to be archaic remnants of the Luddite revolt. Libraries, to me, represent the ideal of knowledge for all. Libraries championed the machine-readable catalog clear back in 1967. But that was then. Like the publishing industry, with which libraries have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for over a century, we have to find ways to reach out to consumers who have found numerous ways to communicate outside of the bibliographic world. Social networks like MySpace have made the telephone, CDs, DVDs and email seem antiquated in terms of their limited functionality and interactivity. While my stepdaughters have email accounts, they much prefer texting and chatting via MySpace or other IM utilities. Its the multimedia capabilities and expansiveness that intrigues them, I believe. They started using MySpace 4 years ago, and haven't looked back. My wife, rather than belittling it or issuing cautionary edicts, has her own site, and is probably keeps more current with what's happening with her kids and their circle of friends than she ever did before. With one daughter in the UK and the other about an hour's drive away, MySpace is an intimate way of staying in contact. It certainly has its negatives. I, like many, am concerned about pedophiles, stalkers, identity thieves, malicious hackers and other social deviants using MySpace to victimize others. One of our hard drives was ruined by viral infection, which we believe came via a "friend." While youth have always faced risks (remember the "Personals" ads?), sites like MySpace pose additional risks. Patrolling the floor, I don't catch as many people looking at porn sites as I used to. Singles dating and MySpace-type sites, although not pornographic, come across as tantalizingly risque enough to satisfy libidinal urges in public settings. I certainly wouldn't want my kids to meet up with most of the patrons I see frequenting them. It's sad to think that it wasn't so long ago that MySpace started out with just a young adult audience in mind. It wasn't that long before it was getting more hits than Google, and NewsCorp came wooing. Its framework is still set up for young singles, rather than institutions, which I find a bit artificial. While social networks generate a lot of traffic, I am not convinced that they produce that much revenue for their investors. Youngsters, I believe, find the "long tail" shopping experience satisfying enough, without the added baggage of purchased goods to weigh them down on their homeward journey. The intangible value of goodwill seems greater than that of exchanging gifts. Free downloads and samples, where there is almost infinite variety, also seem to do the trick. I worry about long-term preservation of digital content, but is all of it worth archiving? If I were younger, I would have a hard time forming long-term attachments to any particular digital content, since there will always be much, much more where that came from. I have the illusion of ownership in cyberspace; with so much plenitude, ephemerality seems more like a blessing than a curse. With so many bands online, for example, how does one rise above the heap and build a large following? How can one expect to still sell albums, when 30 second samplers seem too long to listen to? Staying power becomes an issue when there are so many sirens calling from so many different shores, luring surfers to delight or doom. In the final analysis, I like the concept of social networking. They bring together people of like interests from all over the world. In library school, we talked about social networking among scholars and scientists. Journal publications were a distant shadow of all the informal communication which preceded it. But scholars and scientists had to do a lot of letter writing, expensive conference calls and junketing to accomplish this. MySpace, Facebook and other networks bring folks together cheaply and instantaneously. They are the latest wave of the future. Libraries might as well follow the traffic, for now, or face futher stigmatization, however unfair, as being "irrelevant".