Wikis

For the purposes of this week's assignment, I added North Fond du Lac's Public Library as an external link to the North Fond du Lac entry in Wikipedia, but what I'd really like to do are fix are the entries for my hometown. An early baseball player named Ginger Beaumont lived for many years in Honey Creek, a fact you would learn from his entry in Wikipedia, but the link for Honey Creek, Wisconsin takes you to a town in Sauk County. There is no entry for my Honey Creek in Walworth County, which has existed since 1836. Since it's an unincorporated community, I wouldn't be able to get the same depth of demographic information as the Sauk County page, but the Spring Prairie, Wisconsin page has an external entry to another little community within the township. I've sent for two books for more background on the history of Walworth County's Honey Creek so I can create a page for the community and return Ginger Beaumont to the Honey Creek he knew and farmed.

One use of Wikis for library staff is for cooperative projects, either staff within our own library working together or staff from multiple libraries. Instead of sending group e-mails, which may or may not be read by all, or which may not be received if someone forgets to reply to all, the work can be found and edited in one place. Everyone has the same working copy and can make their contributions as they find time. I also like the library and community sites that let users make changes, though I do like the log-in features that add some responsiblity for the changes made rather than let edits be done freely and anonymously. There's a lot that can be done with Wikis and with the software and often the hosting free, it's well worth exploring.

A del.icio.us list of favorites

Our library website has a recommended sites page. A great deal of thought went into the selection of sites and how we would arrange them. Then we had to lay them out on the web site, typing out their titles and creating the links. What a different process it would have been with del.icio.us: find a useful site and simply click on the tagging icon and it would go into our list. We no longer would have to worry about arrangement or where to put sites that fit into more than one category. A site could have several tags and be found under any of them, with the user moving quickly from tag to tag, scanning the contents. I've been impressed where I've seen this in practice on library sites.

For me, del.icio.us is useful because I use four different computers on a regular basis: my office PC, a Reference Desk PC, my home desktop computer and a laptop. There are some sites I go into no matter where I'm logged in, but inevitably, I've ended up with different bookmarks on each. I've also added many, many favorites without getting around to doing much organizing of the list. Tagging on del.ico.us should help me get faster to the sites I'm trying to get back to when I'm trying to solve a problem. I've just started my del.icio.us list, but will try to make this part of my usual web experience.

LibraryThing LibraryFun

I've had a LibraryThing account for a while now. I'd like to go back soon and enter more of my books-- I was surprised how quickly the list grew while I only got through one of my bookcases. It's so easy to enter them and a pleasurable thing to do because trying to think of which tags to apply had me remembering what the books were about and trying to recapture how they made me feel at the time. It was also interesting to discover that there were one or two people who not only had some of the same limited-ownership books as I did in their collections, but those people seemed to like many of the same bestselling titles.

The tagging seems to me both a strength and a weakness of LibraryThing. By not enforcing a defined glossary on catalogers, it makes it easy to enter books and may striker closer to the way that the average person thinks when they're looking for books on a topic. But there's also going to be a large range of specificity and broadness, plus people who have contrasting ideas of what tags belong with a book. With the large volume of books and people entering their collections, it likely is an effective way to tag books.

At least, I'd judge so by trying a couple titles in the Book Suggester. First, I tried an old favorite: Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham. The Suggester came back with the other titles in the Poldark series, which I've already read, but also Penmarric, which is also a historical novel set in Cornwall, and a couple titles by Daphne Du Maurier. A recent book I enjoyed, Dead Connection, by Alafair Burke, resulted in a list of other suspense novels. The Unsuggester is more of a wild card: it seemed like a hodge podge of books suggested at random. Perhaps I'd look there if I reach that desperate point of being out of things I want to read, but as per usual, there's a small stack of library books on the end of my kitchen table now waiting for their turn to be read. So many pages, so little time ...