LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

Phil Bradley blogged about some interesting topics lately and I wanted to share with everyone.

1) Grab All is a search engine that allows you to compare results from different engines side-by-side. 

2) An article about using del.icio.us to monitor site activity with screenshots. I thought this might be useful for our metrics discussion.

I went to SCELC today at Loyola and sat through presentations from OCLC and Ebsco.  Since I have been enjoying the class so much my mind was focused on the applicability of these issues to these two tools which I spend so much time with.

OCLC discussed a new OPAC they are rolling out that can be combined with whatever system the library is currently using.  This OPAC will have hard links and tags for delicious built in as well as promises for tagging etc.

University of Washington was the library used to display it.

This week I want to address the topic of user-generated content.  I think it's a great tool, and can (and will) prove essential in the progress of library technology over the next several years.  However, I have one major problem with putting such a large emphasis on user-generated content: the internet computers at our library have a one-hour time limit.  And unfortunately, most of the people that come in to use the internet in our libraries do so because they don't have access at home, and need to take care of business online.  Are they going to worry about commenting

I went over to a friend's house to print out an article for another class I'm in, and my friend and his housemates got curious about what I was studying.  We started talking about how much I hate Blackboard...

Delicious has definitely made my life easier. In my previous position, I worked in almost every aspect of the library from reference to children’s to circulation. It was very frustrating to be caught at the circ desk with a reference question when all my best resources were at another desk. Then I discovered delicious. This not only allowed me to access my bookmarks from any computer but now I could share these resources with my co-workers.

I think user-generated content can certainly have a place in libraries and on library websites.  One huge reason I see for doing this is the issue of accessibility and useability.  Library OPACs are looking and feeling increasingly dated.  They are clunky, uninviting, and often not very forgiving.  For example, if someone types in an author's name in the firstname-lastname format, they will not get any results in my library's catalog.  People are used to searching Google, the ultimate forgiving search, that corrects spelling and truncates for you.  A misspelled

In public libraries, we use the dewey decimal system to keep books in some sort of order and to keep like items near each other, and for the most part it works out quite well. Here at home, I don't keep my books arranged by dewey decimal. It's a shelving-by-feel system--recently read books are together, novels and poetry mingle together, art books are all together, (mostly because they are all large and only fit on a few shelves,) my Complete Peanuts books are prominently displayed because they look so nice, and so on and so on.

This week I examined the following social bookmarking sites: Connotea, Furl, and del.icio.us. All are free and similar in that they allow the user to mark a site for future reference, annotate the bookmark, and share it with others. The user chooses which word(s) to use to describe the page they are marking. On Furl bookmarking is called adding a topic. The user can decide whether to share this topic, making it public or not share it, and keep it private. Furl users are also guaranteed that pages they mark are theirs for eternity.

Del.icio.us, Furl, and StumbleUpon are all different kinds of social bookmarking sites.  All three sites enable their users to save and tag links to various websites.  Each site allows their users to share these "bookmarks" with other users or friends through email or RSS feeds.

I was already fairly familiar with Digg and Technorati, so for this exercise, I decided to take a close look at the sites I did not know about--Mahalo, Sproose, and Swiki.