Week 6 #13, #14, #15

Hi,

# 13 I enjoyed learning about folksonomies and playing around on the del.icio.us site. The tutorial was very helpful. I opened an account and transferred all the bookmarks from this computer over. Creating tags was an interesting exercise, as was doing some bundling. I found it an excellent way to mark and organize bookmarks, especially helpful when I'm working at home and the bookmarks I want are on my computer at school. And I can see how students could use it to tag sites for a research project. In a library, I could see tagging resources used by specific classes for projects and/or research or quickly tagging a favorites list.

#14 I had played with Technorati earlier, created an account, and claimed my blog. This time I did the suggested search for School Library Learning 2.0 and found 364 blog posts, 1, 157 tags, and 12 blogs using the blog directory. Clearly, tags are the way to insure hits on your blog! Looking at the home page, it's the cloud of tags that catches your eye. There seem to be many blogs about performers and personalities, though in exploring the popular blog searches, Kos's political blog and the official Google blog are right up there.
Tagging is quick and easy to learn and do and you can even see how others have tagged a site, but there is no uniformity. I noticed even as I was tagging I had to check to see whether I had used the singular form of a word (blog) or the plural (blogs). I can also see how as I bookmark and tag more and more it would take longer to scroll through my tags to find just what I'm looking for.On the other hand, outdated or hard to remember subject headings are no problem. It's comparable to keyword searches on an OPAC, which our students far prefer to subject searches. I found an interesting blog on the use of tags, The Hive Mind, by Ellyssa Kroski, in which she discusses the relative merits of taxonomies and folksonomies. http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/

#15 Reading the recommended articles was interesting, but they seemed to reiterate things I've been hearing and reading for years. Find new ways to bring services to our patrons, make our holdings as accessible as possible, keep up with new trends, but make sure we meet users' needs. What was new was the discussion of technology as not just a means to access information, but a means of collaborating to create and disseminate it, too. I liked Michael Stephen's comment that "Perpetual beta works well for a library's Web presence." I also enjoyed Dr. Wendy Schultz's comparison, using the economic "chain of meaning". If we can offer a special experience, be a "knowledge spa", then we will survive and prosper.

So, what does Library 2.0 mean to me and to school libraries? More and more, I see that it means learning as part of a larger community, not just in a vacuum. It means building upon and adapting others' ideas, not just being exposed to them. It means being interactive, not passive. It means trying new technologies and determining how we can use them to make learning come alive-for ourselves, our staffs, and our students. Now if only we had endless time to play...