5 Apr 01:08
library websites and folksonomies
I'm curious if anyone is thinking about incorporating some type of folksonomy [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy ] or other type of social software into their libraries' website or, dare I say, OPAC? There's an interesting podcast at IT Discussions by Clay Shirky of NYU, who is advocating moving in this direction. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html Some of the assertions presented: - Ontologies are a 300 year old hack, a shelf-based paradigm. - Ontologies may be on the wrong side of the "Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?" question. - and others My impression is that implementations such as http://del.icio.us/ are fascinating, but not really that useful over the long-term since terms are not static and can't be analyzed over time. Since Google's page rank algorithms are essentially "social" and very successful, there may be something to the idea of adopting a social-software approach in some way. Maybe a citation analysis algorithm which queries an organization's institutional repository? Any thoughts are appreciated. -- -- Steve McCann Digital Projects Librarian Mansfield Library The University of Montana steve.mccann@... "permanently beta"
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