As I was reading this sessions articles I could not help but be reminded of a one-act play I was in during college. The play is called Words, Words, Words by David Ives. In this performance I played a monkey named Milton whose character was loosely based on the personality and writings of John Milton. The other two monkeys were (Jonathan) Swift and (Franz) Kafka. The plot is structured around the infinite monkey theorem which suggests that, “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” (Quoted from Wikipedia)
The Wikipedia experiment nearly asks the same question but instead shifts the action onto the user. Wikipedia has an advantage as their “monkeys” have access to source material while the monkeys in the theory above are just randomly pushing buttons. The problem with both experiments is if close enough is sufficient.
Several of our readings addressed this “close enough” question. Leibenluft’s A Librarian’s Worst Nightmare article directly exposes Yahoo! Answers inaccuracy. Duguid’s article Limits of Self-Organization exposes inaccuracies in Gracenote, Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia. And Gazan’s article Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections exposed the trend for users of a FAQ website to submit more social answers as opposed to strictly factual answers.
Now before I go any further with this post I must stop and honestly ask if the general public would be more likely to read/buy The Complete Works of William Shakespeare if they knew it was produced by a monkey sitting at a typewriter or (and I honestly intend for this to be a completely separate question) would we be more likely to read/use a FAQ website or an online encyclopedia if we knew it was being written/created by our peers?
This session’s topic is the exact reason I chose to take this course and I found this session’s readings to be fascinating when I think about them through the lens of librarianship. I am tempted to write individual posts about all four of our prompts but will restrain myself and focus only on: Social Tagging vs. Professional Cataloging and Classification.
I first began thinking about Web 2.0 and Librarianship early last fall. I was curious about my current online practices and how these practices could be useful for OPACs. Around this same time I received an e-mail from the Seattle Public Library (SPL) announcing the release of their new catalog that would be full of Library 2.0 tools (social tagging, history tracking, following users, user generated lists, comments …). Specifically for this post I will focus on the use of social tagging in their OPAC and compare it to their traditional cataloging system.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of Library 2.0 tools is the fact that the user becomes engaged and an active participant in information retrieval (IR). What this means is that a portion of the catalog is reserved for those who have actually read or interacted with the resource. Catalogers, if we are honest with ourselves, do not read all the books they catalog but patrons do. This makes patrons more knowledgeable about the books in a collection then the catalogers so why not give them access to the cataloging process?
The activity on SPLs OPAC is best described by Haythornthwaite’s term “lightweight peer production." To contribute to the OPAC users do not need to make long-term commitments, they do not need to build social capital and they do not need to maintain or groom their contribution. Social tagging on SPL’s OPAC is as simple as clicking a link and entering the content.
This new aspect of SPL’s OPAC is utilizing an online concept that many (if not most) of their users are already using: Social Filtering. Kristina Lerman stated, “Rather than actively searching for new interesting context, or subscribing to a set of predefined topics, users can now put other people to task of finding and filtering information for them (2).” Due to Intellectual Freedom issues SPL’s OPAC works a bit differently then DIGG or Facebook where users are more or less open to full disclosure. Since libraries are a finite community (limited to only those with a library card) their collections are already being filtered concerning a particular slant (i.e. the community). So it may be safe to assume that social filtering in Library 2.0 enhanced OPACs are working the same way.
I am increasingly curious if social filtering would be more useful in academic/research OPACs and digital collections. Gazan stated, “While used textbooks are obviously less costly, they often carry another benefit new textbooks don’t: highlights, underscores and other annotations by their previous owners (1).” While thinking about this statement I began thinking about a new (perhaps?) concept that utilizes a common practice in social computing. That concept being Social Highlighting. Many of us already geotag ourselves when we are out by checking into restaurants, coffee shops and so on. What this is doing is cataloging our routines. Just this week both Foursquare and Whrrl have created an algorithm to compare users activities with their friends and with the greater community. To put this more popularly, on a SNS like Whrrl all of our digital selves are getting together and talking about what we have done then based on that digital discussion my digital self will come back to me and tell me what I should do next. What this is doing is taking our self-documenting digital selves and finding patterns within the larger community. Lorcan Dempsey calls this “A ‘signed’ network presence … People have become entry points on the network, and signature is important (13).”
Below is an example of a Whrrl suggestion:
If patterns in our daily lives can be recognized, which I believe they can, then digital representations can help promote productivity. Both Netflix and Amazon do this with amazing accuracy as they make suggestions based on what we have viewed. Think about the impact this could have on library OPACs. An app could be integrated into an OPAC that says, “students who have previous taken the courses you are enrolled in have viewed the following resources.” Digital Highlighting, as I introduced above, would work in a similar way. Now that digital resources can be digitally annotated those annotations can be preserved and should be viewable by future patrons. The digital catalog could create a map of previous annotations and even rank those annotations based on frequency. The question comes up as to if this would take away from the learning process and I would suggest no. Essentially, all it is doing is letting our digital representations get together for a conversation and based on that conversation making suggestions based on previous patterns.
One aspect silent in this entire conversation concerns the role of the library at a much larger scale. Libraries are collections of resources and not individual resources. Cataloging, in one sense, is collocation. Subject Headings allow for collections to be brought together in a way that is useful for its users. The controlled vocabulary works best at the collection level and not at the individual resource level. Library 2.0 works the other way around. Social tags are more about describing the work in hand then it is about figuring out where in the collection the book belongs.
In the SPL OPAC I found the following movies to be good examples of where Library 2.0 falls apart: Never Let Me Go and Casablanca. I noticed that one of the tags for the movie Never Let Me Go is “Bad Hair”.
I question if this is a useful tag for this movie. As I have not seen this movie, it is possible that a character has to deal with a bad haircut but my guess is that whoever tagged this movie just did not like one of the character’s haircut. When I followed this tag I found that there are two movies with this tag and my guess is that the same patron created them. For Casablanca there are two tags that are the same concept but spelled differently: world war two and wwii. This makes me wonder if other resources about World War II would be hidden based on this duplication.
These tags are more or less creating taxonomy clouds. If the descriptions are vague or wrong then it makes the clouds less useful for future patrons. Adding a more useful help screen and then explaining what the goals of the program are would help this aspect of SPL’s OPAC. If collocation is important it should be stated.
I began this post by suggesting that patrons using Library 2.0 tools are similar to monkeys pushing buttons at a typewriter. But this would be stated better by suggesting that non-professionals or patrons can be helpful in the cataloging process. They can also be excellent resources when it comes to describing items in our catalogs. But I think more important is the way patrons are using resources, how that process is digitally cataloged and then socially filtered.
