For the past year, a 21-member RLG PartnerSocial Metadata Working Group from five countries has been reviewing social metadata sites, analyzing the results of a survey sent to social metadata site managers, and discussing the factors that contribute to successful—and not so successful—social metadata sites of most relevance to libraries, archives and museums. Open Context is an example of a discipline-based site inviting archeologists to share and comment on excavation site discoveries.
The working group reviewed 73 sites with social metadata features. [Our emphasis] Social metadata takes many forms: tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc. Success depends on the site’s objective. Increasing traffic is not necessarily the prime driver. Some sites are looking to connect with a new audience, while others want to gather user contributions. A number of cultural heritage organizations have successfully used the Flickr community to identify “mystery photos” or the source of illuminated manuscript pages. The National Library of Australia’s Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954, is an example of harnessing the passion of genealogists. Within its first year, with no publicity, enthusiasts edited more than five million lines of OCRd text.
See Also: Leveraging Social Media (PDF; 23 slides)
by Karen Smith-Yoshimura, Program Officer, OCLC Research
Presented at OCLC Digital Forum West 2009 on September 17, 2009
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