• Loose Cannon Librarian » printed with permission…

  About Danbury and LibraryThing for Libraries, from the post – “I wrote a sidebar to John Blyberg’s must-read article on open APIs (go, now, read it)… I asked for and received permission to post the unedited version here:”

  (tags: librarything danbury opacs OPAC tagging Folksonomies library2.0)

• user-interface – Microformats – Social Network Portability
  Section on useing XFN, hCard, etc. to create a portable social network. I wrote about this idea over a year ago after a discussion we had at BarCampRDU 2006.
  (tags: barcamp barcamprdu microformats xfn openid social_networks SocialSoftware)
• VuFind: Home
  “July 18, 2007 – Villanova University announces VuFind, a next generation library catalog, is now freely available as Open Source software.” Looks very cool. I need to spend more time with it though. Update: I just checked out the demo. This is really nice. It employs excellent faceted search with a clean interface and incorporates first stages of some social tools.(tags: opensource OPAC library2.0 faceted facets)
• Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats at LIS :: Michael Habib
  
  
  The earlier post discussing portable social networks. (Second half of the post) Two equations were discussed:
  XFN + OpenID = portable network
  XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks(tags: openid microformats socialnetworking social_networks SocialSoftware barcamp barcamprdu)

The new WorldCat.org is a significant step forward. I am especially impressed with the efficient permanent urls (isbn/isbnnumber and oclc/oclcnumber) and the faceted browsing offered on the left of the results screen. Additionally, I like the breadcrumb trail that accompanies the faceted browsing. I am also impressed with the search speed and the simplicity of the interface. They have also describe a number of ways to integrate WorldCat into one’s browsing habits and websites. I look forward to seeing results appearing in search engine results. Overall, it seems like a significant step forward, but I need to look at it more carefully later.

This is a multipart section, so I will only be responding to individual ideas that struck me.

1. Rick Anderson was the first commentator. In his piece he argues:

But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed — not our patrons. One-button commands, such as Flickr’s “Blog This”, and easy-to-use programs like Google Page Creator, offer promising models for this kind of user-centric service.

While I whole-heartedly agree that our web services need to be functionally intuitive, in its entirety this section of Rick’s argument seems to bash user education. As I have argued before, I think that education is even more important in a Web 2.0 world. I believe we need to teach users to think critically about how to evaluate and contribute to Web 2.0 conversations and resources. I do agree with Anderson that libraries are ill-equipped to educate all of our users in the classroom. I see this as a call to build new online resources and services that help our patrons learn the skills needed to survive in a Web 2.0 information landscape.

2. In the second section, Michael Stephens’s discusses core attributes of Librarian 2.0. In contrast to Anderson, he states:

Users will create their own mash ups, remixes and original expressions and should be able to do so at the library or via the library’s resources. This librarian will help users become their own programming director for all of the content available to them.

If not through education, how will librarians guide their patrons in this process of discovery and creation?

3. In the third section Chip Nilges discusses how OCLC is building off the principles of Web 2.0. He states the following:

O’Reilly’s notion of  harnessing collective intelligence, for instance, is at the heart of OCLC’s cataloging cooperative, resource sharing network, and virtual reference cooperative.

He later explains,

Services under consideration include including tagging, list creation and sharing, citation management, personal cataloging, and the like.

I see the move from the first of these stages to the second as the true transition to Web 2.0. It shows a move to recognizing library patrons as the true end users of our services and collections. Furthermore, it represents a more explicit trust in the collective intelligence of our users.

4. I love some of the practical suggestions posed by John Riemer. I will highlight my favorites, but will refrain from discussing them in great detail because I am already exploring them in my Master’s paper. A couple of ideas are the following:

Relevance ranking techniques should be driven by much more than the mere prevalence of keywords in the bibliographic record and be fed by a wider range of metadata, such as circulation activity, placement of materials on class reserve lists, sales data, and clicks to download, print, and capture citations.

User-initiated services like renewal, recalls, and interlibrary loan requests should be complemented by views into the campus bookstore’s inventory, options to purchase from an online bookseller, displays of availability in any geographically proximate library, opportunities to see and select terms for expedited delivery, etc.

If you want to learn more about how I envision the above services, or why they fall into core Web 2.0 values, please check back to read my Master’s paper.

5. The final commentator, Dr. Wendy Shultz is a futurist. In her section, she attempts to describe both current and distant trends. In fact she makes it all the way through Library 4.0. I am going to wait a little before I start worrying this far into the future.