Semester I wrap up

To SCLS gurus, thanks. Often it is difficult to get the news from PlayAway; but non-players fade every day for lack of what is found there. (with apologies to William Carlos Williams). I'd suggest keeping the instructions as they are; for one needs to learn these technologies by doing. Wrestling with sites as they are on the web is informative; and SCLS teachers do help when queried.

The movie for this wrap-up "Information Revolution" moves too fast for my central nervous system. I became a bit sea sick, literally. Not enough time at sea, perhaps.

When discussing authority files vis-a-vis tags, it is interesting to note that authority control terms can be readily added as tags to entry; whereas the converse is not true. One can cut and past any old authority file one likes. In fact, it would be interesting to consider domains of tags. One could, for example, ask for a set of tags applied by oceanographers to a topic as opposed to say tags applied by travellers on cruise ships. These sets of tags would be represented as different tag clouds; a bit like stratified random sampling.

As to the material culture of the web, one always wonders just where is the web? It is actually held on several large storage computers somewhere. (Old missle silos in Kansas? Who knows?) As for libraries, we do need physical space for the equipment and data storage. This alone is a different physical conception than the old catalogue files; but it is physical.

A dizzying set of concepts: humbling and awesome.

Looking towards Semester II and hoping to play while dropping the nagging awareness that I am playing.

Good sized city saves work

Madison WAS listed at Wikipedia, thus giving Lesson 9 an easy out. But I was interested in the Wikipedia explanation of their incoming data process. And, if time allows, I'd like to peruse the ProjectPlay sandbox wiki.

Also, I'd like to reviews the first 8 lessons to strenghten any memory cells that are up to it.

Thanks again to the mentors of ProjectPlay hurtling us into the Social Sphere 2.0.

Eureka!

Wednesday a library customer asked if we "had a list" of volunteers to help catalogue a small collection. I was able to suggest LibraryThing to the customer. Knowledge is out most important product! Thanks to PlayAway

del.icio.us Popular tags

Finally for this week I looked at the del.icio.us site (in lieu of creating yet another account; as I'm weary of accounts). But a look at the Popular tags on del.icio.us was interesting (as is learning re social networking). I tried history, and found a link to a NY Times article re The Manhattan Project of WWII and how it got its name. A family member of mine had worked on the project in Chicago, but the article described how the name was taken from Army Engineer offices at 270 Broadway in New York, which was the first headquarters for the project. The name was developed from the standard bureaucratic method then in use and was simply named for the location (Manhattan Engineer District -- later shortened). Thus, no secret spy name; just administrative naming.
Interestingly, while using the back button the link didn't appear again; that is, the link to the del.icio.us subscriber. Clicking the Tag Cloud brings up different links at different times. I think. Alas, it's a continually morphing world.

Delicious Tags

Have added labels to previous posts; labels are the equivalent of tags. Editing the layout for the blog, I preferred to post the labels list below outside sources.

Libraries can use social tagging much as the example libraries given in the instructions for this week. For my particular niche, I have been thinking of the Madison Community Grant Foundation DVDs at Lakeview. This collection is for film studies; and film studies in the myriad senses that such studies can be conducted. Tagging/Labeling is a "prime suspect" for how to do such in the public sphere. Users of the collection could comment at a library blog or del.icio.us site and form a Tag Cloud that maps out the collection as conceived by the users. This is quite different from a strict, formalized structure (say only watching films in chronological order) that a syllabus might provide.

Concerns: Would customers respond to such a process; and if so, what is the meaning of their tags? As with WIKIs, must we beware the chronic overuser, who might load tags on the site (perhaps silly, or nonsense tags)? As with GOOGLE hits, which can be loaded with advertising vocabulary, how do we limit responses to the Tag Cloud?