I speculate (re Karen Coyle's point about critical social mass) that the people who seem most interested in developing social networking for use by library patrons are those who are most inspired by the effects of its use. Seem obvious? But the people who are drawn to the "empty restaurant" are unlikely to be in the discussion at all. Are they assumed to be dropping off the globe? Not paying our salaries? These are some questions I wonder about as I observe (lurk in) this whirlwind of agreement. What would this debate look like if there were dissent about the value for libraries of social tagging, I wonder?
Grace Wiersma
Cataloging & Metadata Services
MIT Libraries
gwiersma_at_mit.edu
(617) 253-0643
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 2:58 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Book tagging: Amazon and LibraryThing
I'm not sure how this fits into Tim's analysis, but there is an issue of
critical *social* mass. On LibraryThing, users are creating the database
from the ground up, adding individual entries and tagging them as they
go. Because of the user effort involved, I tend to think of LibraryThing
as a chaff-less list of books. None are added there automatically from
databases of "items so useless we put them in storage." And because most
books have tags, one tends to add tags as part of the social aspect of
belonging to LibraryThing.
Then I look at something like WorldCat, and it recently allowing users
to add reviews. I don't feel motivated to add reviews because my single
review would be just a drop in the bucket, since most of the items don't
have a review, and many of the items in the database are of little
interest and will NEVER have a review. There isn't a critical mass of
reviews to stimulate me to take part. The database is just too big and
my effort would be lost. This may be how users feel about tagging in Amazon.
I guess this is like the "empty restaurant" syndrome. No one wants to be
the only one in a restaurant, and we're all willing to stand in line at
the over-crowded one down the street, even if we could be guaranteed
that the food is the same. We are social animals, and the fascinating
thing about social networking is that it is really social.
kc
Tim Spalding wrote:
> I just wrote up the first really big examination of book tagging on
> the two largest book-taggers, Amazon and LibraryThing. I think it
> might be interesting here.
>
> http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php
>
>
> I conclude that LibraryThing has ten times as many book tags as
> Amazon, and speculate about what this means in light of a much wider
> disparity in traffic. I originally wrote it to include PennTags, but
> it got out of hand and it didn't seem fair to compare them. But my
> comments about how "numbers matter" in tagging is, I think, pretty
> important for the future of efforts like PennTags, Blyberg's SOPAC,
> the Swedish library and others. Tags only work in big numbers. (That's
> why LibraryThing will be coming out with a "tag consortium" in the
> near future.)
>
> Tim
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Wed Feb 21 2007 - 16:00:38 EST