I was looking through the LIS 768 blogs the other day when I decided to count up how people felt about the whole Maricopa issue. This is a rough estimate and some people might argue the positives/indifferent/negative counts but these were the numbers that I came up with based on the tone of the post:
50% positive,
37.5% indifferent,
12.5% negative.
It looks like the majority has come down on the side of BISAC and Maricopa. What does this mean for the future? These are the future librarians of America and it looks like they would implement BISAC in a library. Even the indifferent ones would probably go along with an implementation. Will the Dewey system slowly fall by the wayside to be forgotte? Maybe, maybe not. The Dewey system is entrenched. There is A LOT of library infrastructure built around it. To really implement something like BISAC would mean Stripping a lot of book spines of their Dewey stickers, editing the catalog data to include BISAC data, recoding the catalog software to accommodate BISAC. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be done to fully implement BISAC. I don’t think it’s something that can be phased in but has to be done all at once. That’s not to say that I’m against BISAC. I, for one, welcome our new BISAC overlords. Whatever works. Honestly I don’t really care one way or another.
This is an homage to The Librarian from Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld Novels.
Seriously, I think being either a gorilla or an orangutan would rock. You’d basically have 4 hands, not to mention a 400 lb. gorilla can sit wherever he wants.
In our discussion last week on the effect of the iPod and iPhone in libraries we made several conclusions. First, we expanded on the iPod to include MP3 players (or digital content player). We also felt that the iPhone was still too new to have a serious impact on libraries (at least any more of an impact than PDAs of one type or another have already had). We discussed the type of media that libraries would now have to acquire to provide for digital content players:
- MP3s
- Podcasts
- Digital Books
- Movie downloads.
We then discussed how libraries would store this content. Would it be on a central server? Would it be available through an online digital service? Would the library still buy physical copies of content? Would the library check out content players to patrons with preloaded content?
We talked briefly about what equipment a library would have to purchase to provide for digital content. If the library doesn’t purchase or provide technology to patrons, then this could drive a wedge deeper into the digital divide.
We also briefly discussed the issue of DRM. Aurora public library has a service called Media Mall that allows patrons to “check out” digital content. It only resides on the computer for a limited amount of time before automatically being erased or uplayable (returned) from the computer. Unfortunately these downloads are not playable on iPods, only through the Windows Media Player (double check me on that).
After school let out today I was plugging away at some reading I have to do for my class when I noticed that the students in the lab were eerily quiet. When kids get quiet I tend to get paranoid and think they are up to something so I wandered into the room to see what they were up to. They all were mesmerized by two of the students who were swiftly navigating through Wikipedia. I went over to their teacher and asked him what they were doing.
“They’re Wikiracing.” “They’re what?”
“Wikiracing. They start at the same page and then have to navigate to a random page using links on their current page. No searching allowed.”
I had never heard of this before so I was really amazed by this game. The kids probably played it for 15 or 20 minutes more and they were totally into it. I want to play.
Over at Joystiq there was a post about a Gamestop manager that was refusing to sell video games to kids that couldn’t prove they had good grades at school. (Original story here.) I’m not sure how I feel about this. A part of me is thinking that this guy really has no right to deny kids video games. That’s not his job, it’s the kids parent’s job to withhold video games if they are doing poorly in school. Another part of me is thinking, “Good for him.” Why not hold kids up to a standard?
Mostly I’m thinking that this guy is going about this all wrong. It’s a good idea but it really isn’t his job to withhold video games. He could approach this from another angle. Instead of withholding video games from kids for poor grades, why not give a discount (say 10% – 20% off) on video games for good grades. Then this plan goes from being a negative to being a positive. Another idea is to give kids with good grades a 2 for the price of 1 on used games. Give them a reward for doing something right. We constantly punish kids for all the wrong things they do but sometimes it really feels like we never reward them for all the stuff they do right.
Tags are great, I really like them. I’ve used tags myself and they tend to be really useful, but I’ve also found them confusing and unnecessarily complex. For example, if you glance to the image on your left you’ll see the tag cloud for my del.icio.us bookmarks. Look at the unbundled tags. If you look at the l’s you’ll see Librarians, libraries and library. Also in the b’s is blog, blogging and Blogs. There should be a standard for tagging that should be endorsed by web 2.0/library 2.0 entities otherwise what we will end up seeing is repetitive and inefficient. When tagging you shouldn’t have to ask yourself: Should I use singular or plural? Should I capitalize or not? Should I use the verb or noun form? For lack of a better term I would say that tags need some form of bibliographic control. I’m not a coder so I don’t know how difficult it would be to write in some kind of bibliographic control but it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult. Perhaps tags could be compared against a dictionary and singular forms could be used over plural forms and nouns could be used over verbs (when applicable). Wikipedia seems to practice a form of this. If you go to Wikipedia and search for blogging you will be directed to the page for blog. If you search for libraries you’ll be directed to library (but if you search for librarian you will find an entry for librarian). I’m all for the wisdom of the crowds but I also think there needs to be some kind of management or you may end up with chaos.
What I basically would like to see is an implementation of a form of subject headings. Tags are definitely different from subject headings in that they are broader and encompass multiple facets of a work but the basic idea isn’t all that different. I think that web 2.0 could really benefit from some tag management.
