LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Fall 2010)

Organization:

A small (read: struggling) non-profit visual arts organization in Los Angeles.

Staff:

President, Vice President, Accountant/Webmaster, volunteers

Dilemma:

Oh, this was painful! The longest five minutes of my life. I won't be offended if you get bored or sleepy.

http://www.screencast.com/t/dcBqxBD3

Unfortunately I missed last week's Elluminate, but I viewed Meredith's slides "The Library in Your Pocket".

As future LIS professionals, I chuckled during Meredith's lecture when she said that librarians cannot possibly know *everything*.  This is where the subject "experts" come in.  A subject expert can be another librarian or the teenager that plays video games all the time.  With digitized content, librarians cannot possibly add all the pertinent metadata to objects.  This is where the user (average joe/jane) plays an important role.  User generated content encourages participation from patrons but it can also lead to confusion.  Like the examples illustrated in the lecture, one tagger might

While this exercise was exhausting I understood its purpose (at least I think I did).  Discovering new or similar research interests within delicious is a huge leap forward in my opinion, but it’s not quite perfect.  One person’s “perfect tag” is another’s “what the heck?”.

The Role of Technology

So this week was all about wikis and their versatility in and out of libraries.  Like others have mentioned before, just the word "wiki" is fun to say and they're just as fun to create.  At least that's the impression I got when I viewed the examples.  Building an online community that encourages particpation contributes to the learning experience regardless of physical location and time zone. I got flashbacks when I viewed the Durham County Strategic Plan wiki.  My LIBR204 group created a PB Works wiki for our strategic plan and it worked out very well.

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I was amused by the MySpace pages for Brooklyn College Library and Ann Arbor District Library.  Yikes.  The layouts, graphics and colors were painful to look at.  I'm also not interested to know what their zodiac signs are (BCL is a Pisces, AADL is a Libra!).  I'm glad libraries have moved on to Facebook.  The format is more pleasing  and more coherent.  When fans post, there are no cheesy graphics to scroll through.  It appears the blogs for BCL and AADL have not been up