[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature inquiry

[Steve Toub]

Dan Scott wrote:

> Your assertions about student behaviour conflict with the findings
> presented at Access 2008 just last week by both Ken Varnum (who
> presented on MTagger results at University of Michigan) and Steve Toub
> (who presented research results on social behaviour at Queen's
> University in conjunction with the work Bibliocommons is doing). Both
> presentations showed the results of research that tagging in an
> academic library context is something that appears to be valued by
> librarians, but not particularly (or at all) by library users.

My take: if you build a tagging service with the absence of 
understanding motivations for tagging, use of that service will probably 
be low.

Its still early days for understanding tagging in the catalog, too early 
to know for sure if this is valued by library users. Our preliminary 
research indicated most academic users we interviewed would likely 
contribute at least one or two data elements if they saw the value in 
doing so.



> 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.

Yep. Assigning a persons name to a portion of a photo in Facebook seems 
completely, uh, lobotomized, from assigning descriptive text to a web page.

> Apologies to the speakers for horribly simplifying the presentations
> (hopefully they will be made available somewhere), but my take-away
> was that implementing tagging in the Evergreen catalog interface
> should be a low priority.

I've posted my presentation on SlideShare:
  http://ugc-academic.notlong.com

There's a slide toward the back on strategies for ensuring high quality 
contributions.

There was a breakout group at Access that discussed the idea of sharing 
user-generated content across systems. I think the first step was to do 
an inventory of existing data elements with an eye toward how they might 
map to existing schema (e.g., hReview [1]),xFolk [2], DiSo [3], APML 
[4]); Roy Tennant and I added this metadata inventory/mapping task to 
our "to do on a rainy day" lists, but we'd would welcome others to help 
jump us start this.

I don't know of any InSurge repositories other than the only SOPAC 
instance in production: Darien Public Library. I'm still not clear on 
the actual mechanism for syncing InSurge repositories but seems to 
require some kind of manual setup. The discussion forum for InSurge is at:
	http://www.thesocialopac.net/forum/22


--
Steve Toub
Product Manager, BiblioCommons

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview
[2] http://microformats.org/wiki/xfolk
[3] http://diso-project.org/wiki/Main_Page
[4] http://www.apml.org/