The articles for this weeks' reading were probably my faves because it discussed the current trends going on in libraries and the wider public, social software that impact how we learn and its broader effects on society.
The article on Using a Wiki by Charles Allan, basically describes how to use a wiki to manage a library instruction program. It seems that wikis are great for collaboration and for aggregating individual knowledge. It manages information and everyone (given access to the wiki) can edit the document. (Here it comes) BUT, the surrounding environment should be conducive to share information to produce an effective wiki. I say this because in some office environments, individuals are protective of their experience or knowledge.
Creating the academic library folksonomy by Xan Arch, describes social tagging and the use of social tagging in universities. Social tagging allows users to create bookmarks or tags for websites and save them on-line. When tags are created it can be a subject or key word created by the user, this is folksonomy--or taxonomy created by other people. UPenn is utilizing social tagging to bookmark quality websites and records the information in their on-line catalog to share the resource with other users.
About wikipedia & Jimmy Wales, it was interesting to learn about the neutral point of view espoused by Jimmy Wales and his league of volunteers regarding content in wikipedia. The social concept of cooperation gave me goosebumps. Also how 1/3 of the traffic and written articles are in english and the rest are in other languages. And books like Linked and The Wealth of Networks come in to mind regarding the strength of collaboration...
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Interesting point that not all professionals may want to share their expertise with a wiki! Much like wikipedia it assumes a pretty positive view of human nature. I assume that librarians and archivists are not as competitive in this regard as other businesses, though...
you are spot on about the readings this week. i enjoyed the video of jimmy wales and gaining insight into this organization. think he may have a bit of a god-complex but i guess his heart in the right place. i do like the collective activities that go on there...like a virtual hive, producing sweet, sticky information...hmmmm
I also agree that you bring up an interesting point when you mention that not all professionals want to share their information. I tend to think of professionals wanting to give freely, but you are certainly right that there might be some who don't.
I thought the video of Jimmy Wales was really interesting. The concept behind the community approach is great, at least in theory, but there must be a huge trust factor, which I think he alluded to at one point also. A great point about professionals being protective of their work products/methods.
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