SPAM: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature inquiry

[Karen Schneider]

Dan wrote,

"Ken's presentation showed that if you build it, they may not come -
MTagger has a very slick interface but after a year in operation less
than 2000 tags in total had been assigned by anyone - and most of
those tags were assigned by librarians, not students or faculty.

"Steve's presentation showed that students didn't get "tagging" in a
library catalog, even though they recognized the feature in Facebook.
Completely different contexts."

I was there, and agree with at least some of this assessment, but have some
cautions.

* The Evergreen population is not just an academic population. What is
uninteresting to people who are hunting down books for an assignment could
be quite interesting for people who have just returned books and are seeking
to place more holds.

* Building social engagement tools is non-trivial. I attended this spring's
IA Summit 2008 and was further edified on the strategery involved in making
social engagement mechanisms work. Without scale and without proper
insertion in the workflow (just two of many considerations), tagging will
never work. (Ask yourself, WHEN do you review Netflix movies or comment on
books on Amazon?) I see developers for commercial library system say "oh
yes, we have tagging," which they have just slapped on their systems in
response to a clamor for this feature. I have also listened to vendors for
commercial ILS's happily agree with librarians who insist that social
software systems should be tightly controlled and "vetted." Tagging systems
buttoned down that tightly will be a big bucket o' fail.

* Tagging often fails where user engagement succeeds. Bibliocommons and
SOPAC are both designed not around specific tools (e.g. tagging) but around
social tools designed around user behavior (sharing books they have read,
building reputations in a reputation system, etc.). I give SOPAC the big
nudge here because its openness could encourage wide adoption.

* Library development too often tends to design tools that poorly mimic on a
tiny scale tools that are useful on a big scale. Users may never want to tag
in their local library catalog. It's not where we live (sorry, even in
Evergreen ;> ). But we do want our systems to make it really easy to
tag/bookmark/store/share what we're encountering in the catalog in our
environment of choice--even when the "environment" is ye olde email. Look at
YouTube, Flickr, NPR,  for options to do this easily.

* Bookbags may be the new tagging. ;-) I say that mostly facetiously, but
one thing about a bookbag is that it is a built-in affordance. Why do I tag
in a catalog? I have no idea (therefore I do not). But a bookbag immediately
suggests uses (store, share, market) and an inherent portability that (if
visible, as pointed out in an earlier post) could make more sense a user.

* Earlier this year I heard Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons present, and she
pointed out that a relatively small percentage of people will ever actively
participate in a social engagement system. That being said, the people who
are not tagging/rating/reviewing/etc. have a name: they are audience (just
as people reading this list who are not posting are audience). Audience is
powerful. The smarter systems know this and leverage the audience to do
things such as vote on items, rate raters, etc. The user who cannot be
bothered to review a movie on Netflix might well be willing to click on a
star rating when she logs in to update her queue.

Are these social engagement functions the highest priority? Perhaps not,
given that we still need to develop credit-card payment, acquisitions,
serials, etc. ;-) But out in the field, the interest in improving the UI for
Evergreen is high. The front end is the user's experience.

-- 
-- 
| Karen G. Schneider
| Community Librarian
| Equinox Software Inc. "The Evergreen Experts"
| Toll-free: 1.877.Open.ILS (1.877.673.6457) x712
| E-Mail/AIM: kgs at esilibrary.com
| Web: http://www.esilibrary.com
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