Social tagging vs. professional cataloging and classification
One reason why we still haven’t incorporated more social networking features into the library is because there are people who are still highly suspicious and/or dismissive of them. What comes to mind is also the articles before the 2011 Oscar broadcast which predicted that (not my words) the King’s Speech would win over The Social Network for Best Picture simply because the voting panel represented an older generation that a deep-seated mistrust of social networking sites [paraphrase]. Also, take this comment written last month by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell:
“Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. There are a thousand important things that can be said about their origins and implications…But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years…”
I can see where Gladwell’s pessimism is coming from, but I think what might be lacking from his analysis is the astonishing speed in which these protests gained momentum. What may have taken months in the case of East Germany took a matter of days in Egypt.
To tie that into libraries, social networking functionalities integrated into a library catalog or a commercial scholarly database can offer users the ability to instantaneously provide more recent, popular terms missing from its controlled vocabulary. Just the other day in LIS 663, we noticed that ERIC (an education database) lacked a CV term for cyberbullying, a term which has been around for a few years. Updates to CV can take a very long time, and requires consensus.
What the social tagging approach could learn from the traditional cataloging approach however, is the importance of standards. A specific example from the reading is the case of Gracenote in the Duguid article. When I read it, I thought to myself, now this is exactly why librarians have controlled vocabulary.
Where the worlds of controlled vocabulary and social networking meet are places like OCLC Connexion and listservs like AutoCat. What’s terrific about AutoCat in particular is that it allows for fact-checking and feedback amongst peers, when the instruction manuals aren’t enough.
Library item record “wikis” vs. the traditional unmarked item record
Allowing digital items to be openly annotated by users is a pretty neat idea. I certainly benefit from reading annotations from previous print book owners, and after reading Gazan’s article it makes me feel less guilty about selling/giving away the books that I have extensively marked. I thought it was little humorous when someone in the article pointed out that even a stained page gives clues to a page’s past usefulness. I couldn’t help but think of the time as an undergraduate when I got a paper back with a coffee mug stain on it. Annotating it with an apology would have made it worse. Could you imagine if your professor/TA had circled the stain, drawn an arrow to it and wrote “Sorry!!!”? But in all seriousness, it would be awesome to revive the medieval tradition of annotations and illustrations in printed matter, and try to reproduce that in digital collections.
The one problem I can foresee with this open digital annotation model is that it might give rise to a sort of schism in the community of users. I can imagine a type of elitism/snobbishness forming around more highbrow literature, from those not wanting to see it “vandalized” with remarks that seem to come from the “less educated” in that topic. As Lerman reports, before Digg modified its algorithm to prevent multiple “digging” by the same group of users, a kind of fan club mentality formed around the most well-connected users and they stories they submitted/dug. A similar kind of mechanism could be used in this situation to keep one group’s collective opinion from overwhelming and dominating others’.
Random final remarks
One reason why we still haven’t incorporated more social networking features into the library is because there are people who are still highly suspicious and/or dismissive of them. What comes to mind is also the articles before the 2011 Oscar broadcast which predicted that (not my words) the King’s Speech would win over The Social Network for Best Picture simply because the voting panel represented an older generation that a deep-seated mistrust of social networking sites [paraphrase]. Also, take this comment written last month by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell:
“Right now there are protests in Egypt that look like they might bring down the government. There are a thousand important things that can be said about their origins and implications…But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along. Barely anyone in East Germany in the nineteen-eighties had a phone—and they ended up with hundreds of thousands of people in central Leipzig and brought down a regime that we all thought would last another hundred years…”
I can see where Gladwell’s pessimism is coming from, but I think what might be lacking from his analysis is the astonishing speed in which these protests gained momentum. What may have taken months in the case of East Germany took a matter of days in Egypt.
To tie that into libraries, social networking functionalities integrated into a library catalog or a commercial scholarly database can offer users the ability to instantaneously provide more recent, popular terms missing from its controlled vocabulary. Just the other day in LIS 663, we noticed that ERIC (an education database) lacked a CV term for cyberbullying, a term which has been around for a few years. Updates to CV can take a very long time, and requires consensus.
What the social tagging approach could learn from the traditional cataloging approach however, is the importance of standards. A specific example from the reading is the case of Gracenote in the Duguid article. When I read it, I thought to myself, now this is exactly why librarians have controlled vocabulary.
Where the worlds of controlled vocabulary and social networking meet are places like OCLC Connexion and listservs like AutoCat. What’s terrific about AutoCat in particular is that it allows for fact-checking and feedback amongst peers, when the instruction manuals aren’t enough.
Library item record “wikis” vs. the traditional unmarked item record
Allowing digital items to be openly annotated by users is a pretty neat idea. I certainly benefit from reading annotations from previous print book owners, and after reading Gazan’s article it makes me feel less guilty about selling/giving away the books that I have extensively marked. I thought it was little humorous when someone in the article pointed out that even a stained page gives clues to a page’s past usefulness. I couldn’t help but think of the time as an undergraduate when I got a paper back with a coffee mug stain on it. Annotating it with an apology would have made it worse. Could you imagine if your professor/TA had circled the stain, drawn an arrow to it and wrote “Sorry!!!”? But in all seriousness, it would be awesome to revive the medieval tradition of annotations and illustrations in printed matter, and try to reproduce that in digital collections.
The one problem I can foresee with this open digital annotation model is that it might give rise to a sort of schism in the community of users. I can imagine a type of elitism/snobbishness forming around more highbrow literature, from those not wanting to see it “vandalized” with remarks that seem to come from the “less educated” in that topic. As Lerman reports, before Digg modified its algorithm to prevent multiple “digging” by the same group of users, a kind of fan club mentality formed around the most well-connected users and they stories they submitted/dug. A similar kind of mechanism could be used in this situation to keep one group’s collective opinion from overwhelming and dominating others’.
Random final remarks
- As far as what might motivate people to participate in open source programming (Haythornewaite) is the chance to list these experiences on their resume. Even in lightweight participatory situations, the programmer gets to walk away with a set of refined skills that can be used in the next project.
- Did Leibenluft pin down exactly what made Yahoo Answers more successful than Google Answers? It was pretty clear why YA beat out wikis though. Since GA no longer exists, I couldn’t do a comparison.
- One major theme throughout the readings is the democratization of information. Many libraries have always prided themselves on this tenet, if you look at the Library Bill of Rights. But now with the information from recent research we can bring this tenet into the digital arena.
Your blog gives me some thoughts that deserve to be looked into. The use of social networking speeds the sprawling of an event, such as the Egypt example you mentioned. Because of the speed, people are able to get the latest information without waiting for the updates in the traditional, authoritative information database, such as encyclopedia and libraries. For instance, Taiwan went through a hard time of economic depression. Many factories did not get the order for months, so to cut the cost, these factories forced their employees to take a leave without being paid. Therefore, a term to describe the situation was coined—unpaid leave.I tried to find the term in Cambridge Dictionary Online but it turned out to be no such a term in the database (It only shows “unpaid”).I usually have a problem with using an online dictionary, like Cambridge Dictionary Online, to find a newly coined term. However, if I turned to Wikipedia, I could find the definition of unpaid leave.Even though the definition of unpaid leave in Wikipedia does not fit into the situation taking place in Taiwan, at least we can know what the term means in the context of USA. Furthermore, the [edit] sitting in the upper right corner allows people to elaborate on the term based on different contexts. I think this method is more flexible than the traditional dictionary because the meaning of the term can be updated and modified at any time. In addition, the strength of crowdsourcing can be seen in social media. The authoritative institutions can save time and money which is used to pay for the experts to define the meaning of a newly coined term.
ReplyDeleteNana you and I came to similar ideas concerning social filtering and annotations. Honestly, I have no idea how social documenting works and where that information is stored. But annotations can, and should, work the same way social filtering does. Priority can be given to those closest to us (our friends) those similar to us (users with shared experiences) and then the general public. These can work as layers on top of texts and preciseness and preference can be given to the layers.
ReplyDeleteI can only see a benefit if the discussions I have had on Facebook concerning a book/article happened directly on top of the text. As the popularity of a work is increased layers of annotations could be taken away allowing for a more manageable conversation.
Libraries are slow to change their CV and I believe that part of that is because of money. It is also difficult to find strength in social filtering as most people look at books at the book level and not the collection level when they tag them.
Great post and great ideas!
I highly support your idea about the value of annotation. I must admit that while I am reading a book, either a printed book (p-book) or a electronic book (e-book), I always want to annotate texts which consider importance. In these annotation, I added my ideas, comments, and also agree or disagree with what authors write. These annotation lend me a hand when I have to write based on the reading. I also found that annotating an e-book is not difficult. For text with PDF format, PDF X-Change Viewer can be used as a software which could enable me to annotated texts on electronic articles/books.
ReplyDeleteBesides that, in my experience, when students want feedbacks of what they write, they prefer to have me as a teacher to annotated their works rather than just given them a general comment. My students told me that annotation on their works/writing will help them on revising.
I also have the same concern about a group of "elitist" community of users forming. This could be very destructive to the integrity of the system and oppose the value of having users annotate the digital content. Wikipedia has dealt with this issue and it seems like they have come up with a system that generally works to ensure that the information is of a certain level of quality. In order for this to be effective, a system which encourages and allows experts to make their annotations worth more than an average user may be put in place
ReplyDeleteI HEART annotations!!!
ReplyDeleteThis year I was lucky enough to inherit my Real Property book from a total smartie, who inherited it from the supreme Ms. Smartie-pants, top 10% of the her class the year before. The annotations have saved me.
It is like having an intelligent conversation about the holdings of cases and a private tutor taking my hand and walking me through the black-letter law.
This will sound familiar from a recent Curriculum Committee meeting we attended, but one way to promote the adoption of terms people are actually using is to use tag cloud software on recent items and see if any terms not represented in the controlled vocabulary are being used either in the text itself or applied as tags. It's one way to keep up with the evolution of the language, and make access points to physical and digital objects more relevant for modern users.
ReplyDeleteYou and the other folks commenting have done a good job of discussing the social annotation aspects of your post, but I'd like to comment on the larger issue you brought up about resistance to social computing tools; it's definitely real. The library community and information industry, broadly defined, have been completely overwhelmed by the rise and popularity of these tools, and in some cases I've noticed more than a few within the LIS community falling back on the idea that precisely because these tools are so widespread now, we should work to limit their incursion into our work, to better distinguish the value libraries bring.
And I can remember two courses I took as an undergrad where I'm sure I would have done worse had it not been for the scribbled/highlighted help of the previous owner of my textbook...
Bug: Wow, I'm just amazed that these sources don't have a definition of "unpaid leave." It just makes you wonder if social computing has the potential to create this upheaval of established traditions once people start leaving them for the more current resources.
ReplyDeletePhilip: Yes, that's a good point that I didn't take into consideration in my blog post, that the lag in CV updates may be due in part to budget shortfall.
HansomeAvatar: Yeah, I like being able to make comments on my PDFs although I have to admit that sometimes it makes the documents look a little cluttered when you can just place the sticky notes anywhere. My favorite way of e-annonation might be Google Docs's because they enforce a more cleaner style of putting them on the side, but that's just me. :P
Anthony: Hm, well, I guess my concern would be that what if the designated experts are the elitists as well?
Mernie: Hahah, yeah it's almost like having a real life conversation, eh?
Dr. Gazan: Ah yes, that's a good point I hadn't thought of, about libraries wanting to distinguish their software and databases by excluding Web 2.0 features.
I agree about using tag cloud software, because we're all visual learners, at least to some extent.