[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature inquiry

[David Fiander]

Academic research has show that "wisdom of the masses" does work in
certain specific kinds of settings. Librarything, google, delicious,
and the "ask the audience" lifeline on Who Wants to be a Millionaire
all demonstrate that it works on a more pragmatic way.

The problem is that there have to be "masses" involved in being wise,
and "the library staff" don't count as the masses. This is why
Librarything for Libraries works: it's taking a REAL mass of book
lovers and using that as the base collection of tags and ratings for
the library catalogue, rather than trying to create a new collection
of tags from scratch in a small community (it doesn't matter how big
your library is, the set of users that will tag is small compared to
the LT community).

-David

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Jason Etheridge <jason at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Deanna  Frazee
> <dfrazee at ci.killeen.tx.us> wrote:
>> Wisdom of the masses....that's where my problem lies.  I don't believe it exists :)
>
> Wisdom of the masses is the main way that relevancy in Google works.
> Except, instead of tagging, it's linking.
>
> --
> Jason Etheridge
>  | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
>  | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
>  | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
>  | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
>  | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com
>