Month: November 2005

This is a response that I sent out on LITA-l, but felt needed archiving here on the blog.

Originally written by Anita S. Coleman on Wed, 30 Nov 2005 on Lita-l:

The point is that blogs simply and plainly ARE NOT scholarly communications. They may be communication pieces, tools, etc. written or produced by scholars, but they are not scholarly communications. Just as non-peer-reviewed articles in trade magazines, newsletters, popular and general interest periodicals are not part of the body of literature regarded as scholarly articles, and are not weighted for tenure and promotion as do the “traditional” scholarly peer-reviewed literature.

“Simply and plainly”? They may not be of a form traditionally considered scholarly…does this mean they are intrinsically not so? Or that they could not become such?

Sitting aside the traditional view of scholarly information sources (see my views on that here), is there a better method of review than open publication and comment? Can anyone intelligently argue that allowing anyone to comment on your paper is worse than the current “insider only” method of scholarly publication?

There’s a lot of baggage tied up in academia’s love affair with the vetting of information sources…issues of authority, issues of access, issues of relevance…but with the current moving us towards individual or university self-archiving and the web taking publishing out of the hands of the few and into the hands of the many, we’re overdue for a shift in the academic publishing paradigm. So yes, I have to say…I think that blogging SHOULD be taken into account for issues of tenure and promotion. I think that any production of knowledge is a valuable one.

So there appears to be lots of talk among the biblioblogosphere about Library 2.0, a takeoff on Web 2.0. I’m a huge proponent here…but I think maybe we have a marketing problem hiding under the digital shine.

I get Web 2.0. We’re talking less one way and more two way, less top and more bottom, less central and more distributed, less professional and more amateur, less yahoo and more google, less page and more blog, less html and more xml. I get it, and I’ve been talking it up for a few years now.

What I don’t necessarily get is…how does this translate into library speak? I’ve talked about giving more power to the patron, allowing them to tag our OPACs and comment on our blogs. Over at ALA Techsource, they list a set of Library 2.0 principles:

1. The Library is everywhere.
2. The Library has no barriers.
3. The library invites participation.
4. The library uses flexible, best-of-breed systems.

With the exception of #4 above (where I simply wish it were the case), you could replace the phrase “The Library” with “Information” and get a much more robust series of statements, IMNSHO.

Information is everywhere.
Information has no barriers.
Information invites participation.

As librarians, our job is now to figure out how to make this information easily accessible by our patrons. We can do this by leveraging technology to make this information more easily found (Google Book Search), more easily organized (flickr) or more easily shared (del.icio.us). But we should remember that The Library != Information.

EDIT: Great set of Library 2.0 doubts and issues over at Ross’s blog. I share some of his snark.

Just catching up with my library news after my vacation last week, and discovered a couple of interesting blog posts that I wanted to comment on. I originally saw this from Jessamyn, but it originated with Jenny and was then picked up by Davey P’s weblog: a new opac interface that for some reason everyone is calling a “tag cloud.” Which, as far as I can tell, is wrong. This is a subject cloud, yes, but to me tagging is all about the folksonomic, the “consumer as creator” concept. The sort of thing I posted way back when….this is a clever way of viewing the frequencies of subject headings, but it’s not tagging and not a folksonomy.

I’d love to see an OPAC that allowed actual tagging to be done. I think it would tell us enormous amounts about our users, and would generate lots of ways that people use our catalog/view our resources that we could never have guessed.

Anyone want to try to whip that up as an add-on to their catalog? User-directed free form tagging, possibly even tied to accounts so that people can generate del.icio.us-like queries of the books they read…that’s what I want to see.