Comments on Week Twelve Readings

Here, here, and here.

Week Twelve Readings

Let me begin my weekly rant by discussing how frustrating and un-user-friendly the Pitt library website is. Can I even access this article from off campus? I find Zoom! to be ridiculous--unless it’s this Zoom!, in which case, party on--and searching by e-journals takes me to Haworth’s site, which of course I can’t access. Serenity now!

I’m actually using a wiki right now to collaborate on an online poster in LIS 2000. Good times. Anyway, this article makes wikis out to be all things to all people, and that can be dangerous. Wikis are not a panacea and will be met with hostility from technophobic faculty who think of this when they think of wikis. They’re probably better used at larger libraries, in terms of staffing, than smaller ones, me thinks.

A folksonomy is “a taxonomy created by ordinary folks.” There’s no interoperability here because each user can come up with their own tags, and this has pros and cons.

Pro: it’s easy, and maybe even fun to tag stuff, and anything that gets people using libraries is on balance a good thing.

Con: everyone giving an item their own tag leads to a jungle of garbled messes and missed opportunities to connect and communicate. Bring on the semantic web!

The video is nice, but we've been using Wikipedia all semester long, and I bet most of us have used it longer than that, so this video is a little late for Lenny.