Exploration 9 - What's Next and Looking Back

"Remember how encouraging it was to see that first comment posted on your blog post?"

Sniff...I'm still waiting for mine!

Aside from the loneliness, it's been rather fun learning about the many possibilties that exist with web 2.0. Before the project, I usually just thought of web 2.0 in terms of what I was already familiar with: YouTube, MySpace/Facebook, blogs, tagging and folksonomies. Granted, all of those things were wonderful but at this point, they are old hat to me. I'm experienced with them and I've gotten to the point where I see the value, but believe that our technological limitations here in the library prevent us from using them to our full advantage.

While this project gave you the opportunity to explore those sites if you had not already, I enjoyed how the focus was on other less talked about tools of this revolution: online desktop publishing software, web-based "libraries", and social bookmarking were all things that I had heard of in passing, but never really explored in terms of thier usefulness here in the libraries. After exploring them in the name of on-the-job research, I see their value as more than just a time-waster and am seriously considering how I could use them in my day-to-day duties.

In addition, I came to appreciate other sites in a different way. Before the project, Flickr was the place (along with Picasa and Photobucket) was a site I went to to to view pictures from a friend's trip or night out. Now I see that fellow librarians and major institutions (such as the Library of Congress) are taking advantage of it as a way to reach out to others in their field, or simply use participatory culture to both aid their research as well as open up their collections to a whole new audience.

Though I haven't decided yet if I'll keep updating my blog, I do plan to continue utilizing and looking into the possibilties of web 2.0 in our library. I still believe that we need to do more to improve the technological capabilities and capacities of our system in order to support new technologies. At the same time, I now realize that there is plenty out there that we can handle with our current setup and use to the benefit of our patrons as well as each other.

Exploration 8 - Social Bookmarking Sites and Folksonomies

Social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, fall into the catagory of "things I've heard a lot about but have yet to check out myself". The idea interests me, as I have always just been in the habit of emailing myself interesting links, but never figuring out an organized way to gather and access them. del.icio.us seems to simplify a part of our job (finding and evaluating great sites for patron and staff use), while also giving us a better way to share it.

I see social bookmarking sites as a great way to share links with each other and the public. We can organize them according to topic, and even write a few sentences (or a whole review!) about what's on the site and what it's good for. Linking del.icio.us up with our recommended sites page would be smart, as librarians from around the system could continually update links on the page and add new sites as we see them.

The general concept of folksonomies is something I've discussed on here many times before, so I'll just repeat what I've always said: the idea and implimentation of folksonomies and tagging into library catalogs and other information sharing sites is a truly revolutionary thing. It will hopefully make it easier for people to find what they are looking forward, based on natural language descriptions of materials.