Presentations: The "Social" Public Library Catalogue, Social Discovery Sytems, and User Interaction
What follows are three presentations from a session at the Canadian Library Association Conference (CLA 2010) that took place earlier this month in Edmonton, Alberta.
These topics will likely be of interest to many of you. By the time you've reviewed the slides you'll have a solid foundation about what social library catalogues and info discovery systems are all about, what they do and do not offer, a look at how a social catalogue is being used at a Canadian public library, and much more.
Bottom Line: If you're not up to speed on social catalogues, some great intro material. If you're already a social catalogue expert, we still pick up a few facts and ideas.
A) Merger of two library worlds: practical and theoretical
B) Today's catalogue competing against powerful alternatives for info discovery
C) The need to evaluate the usefulness of social catalogues
D) AquaBrowser and Bibliocommons leading discovery tools in Canada
E) How do users access, interact, and use social catalogues?
F) Mapping User Contributed Tags to LCSH
A) Slides include comments from users and now the library responded
B) A graph that shows a steady climb UP with users adding more tags, comments, lists, and messages.
See: Bibliocommons, the catalogue being used at the Edmonton Public Library (EPL).
You'll see that Bibliocommons also handles article searching from databases accessible to EPL card holders.
A Couple of Thoughts
"All things social" continue to explode and many experts say, this is only the beginning. Will social catalogues become a tool that are used by the masses or just a selected groups of users? Will this make a library catalogue in "popular" topics and less so in other areas? What does this mean over the long term for metadata associated with each record (it could potentially mean more, could it be better)? Can social catalogues be manipulated by users to promote items? Finally, can social data and traditional data that's provided by many sources co-exist peacefully?
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