Readings for 11-29 - 12-3

Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries
Simply speaking, a weblog (or blog) is a Web site that resembles a personal journal and is updated with entries and postings.  What is really nice about blogs is that the entries/postings are dated, and sometimes are assigned category headings and keywords.  Essentially, a blog is an online equivalent to a paper diary, reading list, newspaper, and address book all in one.  One of the best things about blogging software is the ability to archive entries, which can be searched, browsed, and reviewed at any time in the future.  The very first weblog was created by Tim Berners-Lee when he was working for CERN.  Rebecca Blood laid the foundation for what blogs would become in 1993 by providing links to new Web sites.  The term was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 on his site, Robot Wisdom.  Eventually, the "blogosphere" arose which describes the large community of webloggers that now number in the millions.  Blogs are closely related to social software, which adhere to three key principles: support for interaction between individuals or groups, support for social feedbacl, and support for social networks.

Using a Wiki to Manage Library Instruction Program
A wiki is a multi-author, collaborative software program that helps people self-publish and share information.  Libraries should strongly consider using this technology in order to create better information sharing, facilitate collaboration in the creation of resources, and divide the worklaods among librarians.  The two chief uses for library instruction wikis include: sharing knowledge and the ability to cooperate in creating resources like guidelines and handouts.  Libraries could create wikis and allow users to participate in the creation of them.  However, libraries should be aware of the risk involved with lettinf users contribute to information.  One way to get around this could be to assign a password in order to get into the wiki.  Nevertheless, the benefits are numerous.  Libraries could create wikis on various professors that include what those professors expect and want in their classes, guidelines on specific assigmnemts within various professors' classes, and updated changes to professors' assignments.  The uses for wikis in libraries could be endless and should definitely be considered.

Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy
Social tagging is a new, but growing, phenomenon that allows individuals to create bookmarks (also known as tags) for Web sites and save them online.  These tags include subject keywords chosen by the user and often a brief description of the site.  Libraries could increase their use by allowing such practices to be included in their institutions.  This could help students, professors, and researchers look for better information when doing various academic tasks.  One of the great advantages of tagging is bringin "gray literature" into play.  A lot of valuable information created by experts and scholars cannot be found easily if students are not connected to the associations or scholarly networks that share this literature.  Tags that are created by curators who have access to this information would allow students to dive into these rich resources that they would have otherwise not been able to access.  On the contrary, one of the great risks of tagging is "spagging," or spam tagging.  Users could create tags to websites that are unsuitable for their own profit or just to cause havoc.  Another problem is the variety of keywords chosen for tags, which could cause much confusion.  Finally, allowing users to contribute to this process would significantly diminish the "gatekeeping" role of librarians.  Are we willing to do this in order to bring more users into play, which would increase the use of the library?

Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia
I found this talk to be very interesting.  I never knew the exact organizational qualities of Wikipedia.  Jimmy Wales did a nice job of explaining the history of the website, and how it is managed.  I found it interesting that Wikipedia is much more factual than many people have said.  When I was in undergraduate school, I was constantly being told how never to use Wikipedia because anybody can edit it and there are thousands of mistakes.  Wales pointed out that only about 18% of editing is done by anonymous users, and even if editing is done, it has to go through a process of determining if the information is correct.  Naturally, with the size of the community Wlaes refers to, there are always going to be problems with certain pages.  The talk about voting for the deletion of pages is an ingenious idea I think.  People can vote whether or not to have certain pages deleted, and based upon new information, pages that are deemed certain for deletion may still have a chance to survive because of this new information.  Wales mentioned many times about the policy of neutrality and Wikipedia.  I appreciate his ardent ideals about being neutral when presenting information, but there is no possible way that any human being can be completely neutral about anything.  Therefore, I see this as one of the downsides to the Wikipedia experiment.  However, this is not Wikipedia's fault, it is just a fact of human nature.