Computers in Libraries 2008: User-Generated Content

Computers in Libraries 2008: User-Generated Content

Roy spoke to a completely full medium-sized room, with an overflow room which was also full. I sat on the floor with, what seemed to me anyway to be, the rest of the bloggers.  It was nice and cool, thankfully.  Obviously, Roy is a popular speaker!

More (decent) content is better, began Roy.  If people's content relates to our mission we should find a way to let them contribute.  More access is better, as well.  More paths to the same information is better - and will get more people to find stuff.  Tagging can help to provide personalized service as well, pulling together content for, for example, a particular class with a class tag.  This can also foster interaction and a better sense of community.  We don't know everything but if we can allow users to contribute what they know, our services can only be enhanced.  Also, more data trumps better algorithms every time.

Roy pointed to the University of California's eScholarship Repository - faculty send in their articles to indexed and archived by the library.  Roy mentioned Kete.net.nz, a site devoted to a specific community that relies on user content.  It is from the same people who brought Koha to the library world.  They are digitizing the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.  They have records for soldiers from WWI and WWII with tons of information about each individual.  Looking at what has been submitted by the residents, you see ads for houses, unrelated videos, etc.  Roy also pointed to the Great Lakes Images database of historical photos.  Roy lastly mentioned WorldCat, where you can review and/or rate an item.  He also mentioned the Library of Congress's presence on Flickr - the press they got for the project resulted in a lot of user-generated content on the photos.  They got 5.4 million aggregate views in one month, and more than 10,000 unique tags.  They also acquired 11,000 contacts (friends) within Flickr.  They got more than 3,500 comments posted by more than 1,400 users.  By putting this collection online, LC has a higher profile for their collection, engaged the community, started discussions and revealed personal histories, and there were a few corrections and additions to metadata.  Roy also mentioned Boston Public Library's collection of historic postcards on Flickr.

Roy then moved on to talking about Hennepin County Library's "BookSpace" site, which encourages users to contribute their own comments and book lists.  I love that site and point to it in many presentations!  The nice thing about tags, says Roy, is that it is user terminology not librarian-speak.  IT is low barrier--very easy and quick to do.  Roy cites "Social Classification and Folksonomy in Art Museums" from a 2006 ASIST SIG-CR workshop.  They looked through the tags that users created and only dropped a small percentage (6.7%) of user-generated tags, mostly due to spelling errors, that it wasn't a word, or was in a foreign language.

Roy discussed LibraryThing and what they're doing with tags.  One is that they are mashing tags together--aggregating synonyms for concepts, like WWII.  You can do a serach on the site to find books tagged with certain phrases or concepts, including excluding certain tags.  This is an example of how with the more people you have tagging, the better results you end up with.

Roy talked a bit about third party providers in the arena of user-generated content including LibraryThing, LibGuides, and ChiliFresh (a new company with a review engine).

Libraries need to get used to being in a messy world and not having perfect subject headings.  Tagmashing, a la LibraryThing, is one way to approach trying to clean a bit of that up (in a better way, even, than is done with subject headings in library catalogs). 

Some issues to consider if moving into the space of user-generated content.   Ask the following questions.  What are your goals?  Are you set up appropriately to meet those goals?  Are there strategies you can use to maximize benefit?  How can you distinguish between user and library content?  Will you need to vet or moderate?  Is the potential impact worth the investment?

There is a lot of potential for user-generated content in libraries.  We need to get up to speed on how to foster this type of participation and how to best use things like tags most effectively.

Great overview presentation Roy.  You explained the concepts of the issue of user-generated content in libraries and did it in a way that makes sense to people at all levels of knowledge.  I really liked the examples given, and will have to go check a few out as I hadn't heard of them before.  As always, an awesome Roy talk :)

CIL2008