Back on the free-tagging thing. One downside which is getting some play lately. It’s one thing to use offensive or hurtful language when you are tagging your own content, but what about when those tags are shared in a large nebulous community of people with widely disparate political and personal beliefs? Rebecca Blood talks about some of those issues. [jjg]
Category: blogz
where’s the swag at ALA?
Please see TangognaT’s schwag wrap-up, this is the sort of thing I love reading blogs for.
learn this word: folksonomy
What do you call a classification system where everyone gets to be a creator? Metadata by community? Grassroots free tagging? A folksonomy, of course. Systems like this are being used at places like Flickr and Del.icio.us and unalog. I’ve seen this term hitting the blogosphere but not really getting a foothold on the library blogs yet so here are some links for further reading. Can you say “user oriented”? I bet you can.
– peterme from Adaptive Path [who coined the term weblog] waxes folksonomically
– slashdot, naturally
– a neat little bullet-pointed list
perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users. In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present (Buckland, 1999). These could include that of the user of the system, the designer of the system, the author of the material, the creators of the classification scheme; translating between these vocabularies is often a difficult and defining issue in information systems. As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.
Twelve Techie Things for Librarians 2005
List maniac Michael Stephens has a good list of tech things good for librarians to know about. It’s a great big hyperlinked list of tech terms and descriptions and worthwhile no matter what your tech level of knowledge is.
can I get things done @ my library?
I don’t know if you’re at all familiar with the GTD [getting things done] organizing craze sweeping the blogosphere. Merlin — a non-librarian with a great blog — asks the lazyweb “Can I get an RSS feed of my library books?” Discussion ensues. [thanks bill]