LibraryThing

LibraryThing is an interesting concept and has certainly generated alot of discussion in Cam23 things. Without wanting to upset the creator, I'm not sure about it myself.  I can see that it has potential for those library minded people who want share there own personal libraries and book passions with each other and create an online community, but can't for the life of me think why they would want catalogue records for the items, unless they have a secret librarian streak!

John Wenzler's article on LibraryThing and the library catalogue has some interesting points about its use in conjunction with library catalogues, but I'm not sure why you would want a library catalogue that "could point users to recommended titles in the collection based on the reading habits and descriptions of their fellow patrons".  I realise it gives people choice and for some it may be useful, but I find it annoying that something wants to second guess what I like. Amazon also does this when you purchase items and assumes that just because you bought something, you may want the same thing as other people. 

I have looked at some of the libraries listed using LibraryThing and to be honest can't really say it enhances the library catalogue in any way. The review feature, I can see being useful in a personal sense and maybe for public libraries, if customers want to know what a particular work of fiction is like before taking it out.  But in an academic library I can't see that one student saying "this book was boring" is going to help others if its a set text.  After all we're all different, how objective are people going to be about a bad review? Read it anyway or not? 

The other aspects which may be useful are the tags and book cover images, which allows a more visual method of retrieving books. However, don't we already have a similar features in our library catalogues, as we already have subject descriptors, keywords and book cover images. 

I did try searching LibraryThing to see what it did and was interested to see that upon searching the topic "war", it brought up a tag cloud including "Lord of the rings" and "Harry Potter" as well as holocaust, World war II and civil war.

For small libraries who can't afford a proper library management system it probably does have a valueable use. However I can't see it being useful to our students.

Delicious

I was extremely sceptical about Delicious, when I started exploring it.  How different was it to bookmarks and links that you put on your library page?  Initially I thought it wasn't that user friendly in its searching ability and wasn't keen on the layout.  However I did like being able to access websites easily.

After viewing the Green Library Delicious page at Stanford University, I also had different views to LibrarianGoddess and couldn't understand her excitement about it; this was initially due to the security warning message, because clicking on yes brought up the page to the right. Here you were unable to click on the tags or search bookmarks, so I was completely confused....

....that is until manic clicking produced a tag cloud (pictured left), which I couldn't return to, after choosing one of the options! From then on my views changed.  The Green Library Delicious tag cloud, is user friendly, if a little overwhelming, with all the words.  I liked the visual searching aspect, which allowed for easy access to information.

As LibrarianGoddess says, the main advantage of Delicious, is being able to access bookmarks anywhere, which is especially useful if you need to login to the library or university website first to see the library links and have forgotten your password or the web site is down! So I love this remote access aspect of retrieving useful websites, which a lot of students may struggle with, for many reasons.

In conclusion, I liked being able to search for bookmarks via keywords, sorry tags! and thought that once you had got used to how it worked, it was definitely better than searching google, as you could add new tags into your search to narrow down results.  If used through the library, it does allow you to have a certain control aspect over choosing suitable sites to bookmark, as well as providing a tag list to bundle similar sites together.

Tagging, classifcation with another name?

After reading Clay Shirky's article on "Ontology is overrated", I feel slightly bemused by his discussion and ideas. On the one hand, he's right that we can't fit everything into the perfect system, because new information and ideas appear all the time, which then need adding into our system.  I'm the first to admit that Dewey is in desperate need of updating.  If we classified the world now, we would have a completely different system and hierarichal structure. However I'm none the wiser about his reasons for deciding that classification is wrong, because he seems to advocate tagging.

So, the first point to my mind is... tagging versus classification - aren't they the same thing? Maybe that is a very "Librarian" thing to say, but surely the idea is to enable people to find the items they want, and whatever helps them do that, is good.  Whether the information concerned is online or on a bookshelf.

If you are tagging a blog post or a web page, surely you're allowing other people to search and find it under a specific term, similar to classification, even if its not from a pre-defined hierarchy and is seen to be "free-form labelling".  Okay these labels may not be specific subject headings like Library of Congress or Dewey, but they are words refering to objects/items, even if the words are different depending on the person. 

To me tags and tag clouds are just another way of accessing online information, but far more visual. Using keywords and classification hasn't died, its just been modernised.