Library Web Chic

One issue that I’ve been having of late with the feeds I read is that I love to tag and flag things in Rojo. I see something. I want to read it later. So I flag and/or tag it. The problem is now I have amassed 100+ things flagged/tagged. Plus there is a plethora of things that I’ve FURL’d for future use. The nice thing is that when I have a needs I can go back and search for these things and finding them in my personal subset is certainly easier than finding them on the web at large. In fact, I’ve FURL’d more and more of late because its easier to search my FURL than it is to search the web on a topic.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and how it relates to libraries, particularly large academic libraries with millions of books. If a student finds a useful resource in the library, do libraries find an easy way for the student to get back to that resource? No, not really. Today, I was trying desperately to remember the name of a book that I read, while I worked at Corland, so that I could share it with someone else. I couldn’t remember an author or a title, just roughly what the book was about. So I searched Cortland’s catalog, which is quite small comparably to catalog’s at ARL libraries and couldn’t find it. This example illustrates a major way in which libraries are not meeting their users needs. Libraries aren’t helping users keep track of the information they are encounter, using, gathering. Instead, in the realm of personal information management, users are left to rely on a disparate set of tools to stitch things together. I use Rojo, FURL, Flickr, LibraryThing, Wordpress, and a few others to keep track of things and tools like SuprGlu to bring it all together. Each has its own login information, and folksonomy that I’ve created. A part of me wishes there was one good place to go to keep all my stuff. However, more than that I wish that there was an easier way to get information from the library sources into these tools and from one tool to another.

Many library resources provide users with ways to mark and keep things for future reference but because these are seperate resources, there isn’t a good way to combine mark search results from different resources. (Okay some federated search tools will help you do this but I’m not sure this is the answer. to the problem or a bigger problem itself.) Add in the complication of merging said results if they are in different formats. How do you aggregate results results from a image database and a citation database or the web at-large? When I was in library school one professor talked about the idea that information wasn’t information unless it had context, unless it was being used by someone for something. This is the sort of “if a tree falls in the forest and there is noone nearby to hear it..” arguement. However, it bears some thought.

What good is the information we have in our libraries if people can’t use it in useful ways? This is both an issue of allowing people to remix information effectively and also helping people create and organize their own personal collections of information. Why can I always find information about the things relevant to what I do? Its isn’t because I’m a fabulous web searcher, its because I stash potentially relevant information away on a regular basis for future use. And if I don’t have something stashed away, I look to the people doing similar things and see what they have stashed away. This makes finding things much easier. (See Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki) Libraries need to be facilitating this building of personal collections because it helps users to evaluate and give meaning to the information they find. It also enables the building of collective wisdom on things, which helps others find relevant information more quickly. Subject Librarians can also contribute by building collections and giving users context for information in those collections. By helping users to build personal collections of information libraries can bring a great deal of value to the information landscape.

Update:

A few people commented on this post saying that LibraryThing is only good for books. This is true. However, if you want something good to tagging, flagging and sorting article citation information, you might want to check out CiteULike, which is a free online citation management tool. I use it off and on and have found it very helpful in the past when I’m constructing bibliographies. It is good for collaborative work because you can create groups which people can subscribe to.

Update 3/13/2005

I forgot to mention Connotea, which is another web-based free citation. It is worth checking out as well if you want to tag and organize your references and share them with others.