(week 6) just like an old non-energy efficient lightbulb...

...I'm Flickring.


Collage by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

I tried creating a librarian trading card in both IE and FF with no luck - I seem to remember the last round of 2.0ers having the same trouble - any tips folks? I get to the end of the process and all I get is a message saying "Using your previously selected photo: uploads/67f49a89239586101629de3d60324251"?

(week 5) collabularies

To quote a well known author (me!), from my article 'Folksonomies and collabularies' in Digital Digest #8:

'[Tag searches work best as] ‘fuzzy’ searches (1). An initial, manageable set of search results will provide a starting point from which searchers navigate out to other items of interest. Therefore, one of the most valuable outcomes of social tagging is the way in which it helps reintroduce users to the joys of serendipitous discovery. It facilitates browsing; a valuable search technique which many online information collections fail to support. Encouraging this exploration is important, as ‘the question people ask often does not relate exactly to what they need to know. By facilitating the discovery process, folksonomies may help one find out what they need to know, rather than just what they asked for’(2).

(1) Richard Giles, “Top Ten Tech Trends,” (plenary session at VALA2006, Melbourne, 9 February 2006).

(2) Kroski, “The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging”, Infotangle (7 December 2005).

Come to think of it, when I was researching the above article I found many useful websites by looking for links other people had tagged on del.icio.us. Which could be called laziness...but I like to think of it as collaborative learning.

I have to admit that, much as I love the idea of del.icio.us I'm constantly forgetting to make use of the handy buttons that I've added to my Firefox toolbar. I find myself having to go back and transfer links from my bookmarks folder to my del.icio.us account. Which is probably a good thing, as I'm an inveterate bookmark hoarder, and I'd hate to think what my account would look like if my bookmarking trigger finger had free range there! (Scuse the mixed metaphor)

As far as the application of tags to our catalogue goes, I have mixed feelings. I do know that many useful resources are buried under layers of formal/longwinded nomenclature that make them almost impossible to locate (eg if you want to view a copy of someone's will from Victoria prior to the 90s, you must consult the Probate Index Victoria 1841-1992 - an interesting task for the beginner or indeed anyone using our catalogue, as the entry for this index does not mention the word "will" anywhere). By allowing catalogue users to apply their own descriptive language to such entries (in addition to the traditional catloguing taxonomy) we may enable our users to better find the resources they're after. Our users may also illuminate hidden sources (eg a book on a broad topic may included a detailed study of a particular topic or an in-depth statistical appendix, which would not be obvious to those reading the catalogue entry, but which users of the book could tag).

But...would tagging actually work that way? Would we have enough people tagging regularly for the process to endure and remain relevant? We are not a local library with a dedicated clientèle clamouring to share their thoughts like they would with the local book group.

What would be the cost of moderating such a system to ensure that offensive tags weren't being posted? In a study of del.icio.us HP labs found that ‘a stable tag pattern emerges after the first one hundred bookmarks are placed for a particular website’, with inappropriate tags hidden by the sheer volume of frequently used tags and useful tags. I seriously doubt that we would experience anywhere near that volume of use...

Hmmmm.

(week 4) so...RSS...we meet again

I understand in principle how RSS can be a useful tool but every time I want to do something with it it doesn't seem to really...work. Not in a technical sense, but more in the sense of it just not seeming to be very efficient, or flexible. For example, a colleague recently asked me to help them set up a feed to inform them of newly repealed Acts. This would apparently save them days of work needed to track down these Acts, to keep our looseleaf versions up to date. But none of the legislation websites seem to offer feeds and I can't set up a feed using a Bloglines or even a Google search as the information is just too granular. Grrrr. Am I missing something obvious?

Other sites that I think "hmm, it would be useful to be able to read a brief summary of what they're posting on" inevitably send the full text of articles to my account - to which I say, "what's the point? I may as well visit the blog! It'd be just as efficient for me to keep a folder of bookmarks to visit periodically" (Because I'm congenitally contrary I signed up with Bloglines instead of Google Reader, but from what I've seen of the Google version it's not a difference in quality between the two which is causing me problems).

There just seems to be a major disconjunction (is that a word?) between my brain and RSS. I think I'm suddenly feeling what other people feel when faced with new technologies - a strange and unfamiliar sensation for one so used to picking up everything technological with relative ease...

For the moment I'm going to press on to the other activities and come back to this when I've calmed down a bit!

EDIT: Okay, a few deep breaths later and I'm back, facing up to my foe. Still not convinced that RSS is for me but I can see it having applications in libraries *if* the feeds provided are customisable and/or thoughtfully created - e.g. a feed of all new acquisitions by SLV is probably not of much interest to our patrons, but a feed of new acquisitions for specific collections like LaTrobe/Genealogy etc may be.

I concede that RSS will be useful for keeping track of those work-related blogs that I make New Years resolution-esque promises to return to but which can easily be forgotten. I still won't be using it visit my favourite music blogs though - those bloggers spend way to much time making their work visually scrumptious for me to strip all that formating away by using an RSS reader.

I've experimented with the EBSCO feeds (created one for the subject headings genealogy and family history) and while my feed wasn't particularly successful (as EBSCO doesn't include many genie-specific mags, so the articles it retrieved were too general to be of interest) I can see that this would be very handy for students and researchers.

And just to conclude my litany of complaints, I find having to log in to yet another account to view my feeds endlessly tedious. I would much prefer a feed reader that integrated with Firefox but those that I tested earlier on in the program barely functioned or were hard for a little ole beginner like me to get a handle on. Come on programmers - how hard is to make things user-friendly!

(week 3) wiki-tastic, dude

Genealogical Records for Non-English Speaking Countries

A work in progress, as with everything else in my "to do" list! UPDATE: I've linked to this on the SLV Desk Wiki.

I find Zoho fairly clunky to use. It seems to have terrible trouble applying the font sizes I select - I can rarely get my changes to "stick". And I don't like that, when you "create a subpage", you're not given a chance to choose where the page will fit into the wiki's structure - it's just automatically shoved in wherever you are in the structure, and you have to go back to the site map to move it to where you want (which isn't made clear in any of their help pages).

Also, in the last round of Learning 2.0 experimentation, Zoe invited me to contribute to the desk wiki and we discovered that even though she'd given me "full" editing rights, as the creator of the wiki she had more rights than me (e.g. she could reorganise the structure of the wiki, but the drag and drop reorganisation feature on the site map was disabled at my end).

I'll catch up with RSSing when I get back from my hols...

EDIT: Didn't get a chance to finish this post due to the inevitable pre-holiday rush. What I've been wanting to do add is some comments about the usefulness of wikis in the library sphere. Of course they have obvious drawbacks - their inherent changeability leads to questions around the authority and reliability of their content, and as Gumleaf notes, they are heavily reliant on having a large and/or active community involved for them to remain accurate and up-to-date - but overall I'd much rather have them than not!

Like Oscar, the number of times I use Wikipedia to get me started on AskNow (to find useful links or to get a quick refresher on an obscure topic) more than justifies its usefulness.

I also quite like the idea of YourArchives, The National Archives' (UK) wiki "where people can share their knowledge of archival sources held by The National Archives and by other archives throughout the UK". The combined advice of those experienced with using these complex collections will be incredibly valuable. I also suspect that the level of technical and historical knowledge required to contribute discourages frivolous entries, cutting down the number of errors included. Once again, if I was researching Oscar Wilde and was unable to find anything in the TNA's excellent online research guides about him, I would much rather have a wiki entry (with potentially some errors in it) than nothing at all to start with...

flotsam & jetsom

Yes, after sitting unused in the tide of effluvium that is the Internet for 2 weeks now, my blog finally makes its (not so) long awaited debut. At the very least I hope that it "makes sport for my neighbours"...

I have to admit that I've secretly been looking forward to Learning 2.0. I say secretly as round SLV I'm expected to be a bit of a boffin with new technologies - but there are actually quite a few Things on our list that I only know about in a theoretical sense, and have never got around to experimenting with (hello RSS).

That said, I can't claim total ignorance of Things 2.0, especially as this is the third blog that I've created with Blogger. It's interesting to come to back to the interface after my last forays - especially to see how how difficult it now is to locate the privacy settings, and how I can no longer quickly opt out of having my blog available to search engines, as was the case before Blogger was bought out by Google!