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Monday 10 September 2007

Web 2.0 - Library 2.0: myths and realities

Paul Reynolds
(blogs at McGovern Online)

Inevitable Paula Ryan joke - comments that he's put on a tie.

"I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create." --Time Berners-Lee (Possibly overstating things...)

Web as platform - as opposed to desktop. Internet as the place "in which we all live and breathe." User controls own data. Web 2.0 privileges the user. "The core creator, formerly known as the user, formerly known as the audience."

Key ideas

  • Individual production and user generated content - radical decentralisation of information and content. Of course there are some rubbish blogs. But lets people engage at the level they want to - whether regular or irregular, serious or silly.

    • Acknowledges Christchurch City Library blog - esp sending people up to festival. Hyperlink from blog to catalogue.
    • Hokianga exhibition blog
    • NZ Book Month blog - voice started stiff, now unwinding, relaxing. (Need to watch the voice. Interesting to find a blog you like, and look back to see how the voice has developed.)
    • Beattie's Book Blog - criticised as being 'too prolific' (posting 3-4 times a day)! Working on voice but hasn't found it yet as too excited about what he's doing.

    Technorati - indexes blogs. For a blog to work it needs to be connected with other blogs.
    Mashups; personalised pages with embedded content from other websites.
  • harnessing the power of crowds - folksonomies (tagging, flickr, del.icio.us, etc
  • data on an epic scale: "Invisible rain is captured by web 2.0 companies and turned into mighty rivers of information. Rivers that can be fished." (from powerpoint) -> mash-up - the programmable web. Where are the programmable applications coming out of libraries? Imagine your knowledge assets - photos, texts etc - tagged onto a map.

    • Goocam
    • TheyWorkForYou.co.nz - citizen created content site following what government is up to. (Includes development blog.)

  • architecture of participation - opening up not just code to developers but content production to all users.

    • TradeMe - works because thousands of traders doing it

  • networking effect - the more people on a network the more effective it becomes (some contentious research on this
  • openness

    • open api (application programmable interface) - bit of software to go somewhere, get a bit of data, bring it back, do something with it; or something built by owners of data to let others take it away.
      • Te Ara: authoritative content, great website, wonderful, unique, doesn't get enough credit - not another site in the world does the same thing so well. And 10-year project - there'll be a lot more, including more clever pieces of software. But - its own world, its own sense of control - never going to become wikipedia, and shouldn't - provided it "opens the windows", using APIs to allow exporting data out to school sites, student learning area, federated searching, etc
      • Matapihi: same thing: great site but need work to 'open the windows'
      • 100% Pure New Zealand layer on Google Earth
      • the fitch: a record re reference queries - fits into a wiki - can be built on. When a customer comes to a reference desk, they're the pulse of the community. Done around keywords, which are represented as tags, and new items in each tag can be sent out as RSS feed.

    • standards
    • public data.

  • putting it all together

    • formal - informal
    • taxonomy - folksonomy
    • closed (can't use without permission) - open (mashable by default)
    • them - us
    • network - our space (not just a place to get stuff, but a tool space)

  • Digital Content strategy five-element framework - creating, accessing, sharing, managing, understanding. Where does this leave libraries? - library websites has to dance to these principles - allow peoples' stories to be up alongside formal catalogue etc. But not just putting into repository and sitting there; put into context. Web 2.0 should be a participatory space. It's not a fad sitting over there in a corner.


Questions
No time so go to his website!