Wikis, blogs, photo sharing, feed readers, and social networks are all attempts to store and organize information. Tagging is a common feature integrated into all of these tools, allowing users to label what entries contain or are related to. A limiting factor of tagging is the way personal vocabularies evolve and mature over time, making it increasingly difficult to create and apply tags consistently. These inconsistencies limit searching and sorting capabilities. When one or more additional users with tagging permissions are added to an account, the problem multiplies.

Twine is one potential solution. A product of Nova Spivack’s Radar Networks, Twine is on the verge of mainstreaming semantically analyzed content. Using the framework of a social network, Twine invites users to save information and share it with others. The way tags are applied is what makes this product different; Twine uses an algorithm to scan, locate, and create tags from your selected content. This presentation will review the mechanisms behind Twine, introduce the user interface, and demonstrate potential uses.

http://www.twine.com

New York Times Article about Twine

Presentation (PDF)

Disciplinary characteristics, work practices, and conventions of academic conduct play an important role in researchers’ adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) such as digital repositories and e-publishing systems. Technology deployment cannot be fully understood without comprehending how a specific technology is embedded in its social context. The presentation provides an overview of two case studies in progress at Cornell University seeking to explore interdisciplinary collaboration patterns among researchers. Based on social networking and ethnographic methodologies, the case studies involve two distinct disciplinary ecosystems: the scholars of humanities, and medical scientists and biomedical engineers. Studying scholars’ collaboration styles reveals useful design principles to factor in the development of e-scholarship services. Also included in the presentation is a brief overview of how social constructivist theories can be applied to inform ICT design, assessment, and promotion processes in support of scholarly conduct.

Presentation (PDF)

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded the MESUR project at the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory to explore the possibilities of usage-based scholarly evaluation metrics. MESUR has collected usage data from some of the world’s most significant publishers, aggregators and institutions to build a reference data set of nearly one billion usage events that are semantically related to all relevant citation and bibliographic data. Preliminary investigations on the basis of this reference data set have yielded one of the most comprehensive surveys of the validity of a variety of citation- and usage-based metrics of scholarly status to date, including large-scale mappings of science. This briefing will discuss the MESUR project’s general methodology and preliminary results, and demonstrate an interactive environment that enables users to explore the relationships and rankings of journals resulting from their usage.

http://www.mesur.org/

Presentation (PDF)

Virtual Worlds (VWs) offer new opportunities to create, contextualize and share knowledge. New tools and platforms permit the modeling, reassembly and digital restoration of objects ranging from whole cities to individual bricks—together with the behaviors of virtual people and animals inhabiting the space. They can provide new forms of publishing and can link complex bodies of information together in ways that leverage the strengths and immediacy of visual communication. These environments are only beginning to be part of the scholar’s toolbox and many of the existing platforms and tools have not been designed to support scholarly research. The Federation of American Scientists has begun developing prototype technical tools and management processes to collect, render, peer-review, edit and preserve digital assets for 3D virtual environments. It is one of several initiatives by the Federation of American Scientists attempting to define the technical requirements of VW environments for scholarly use and a coherent strategy for understanding and leveraging their potentially unique capabilities for scholarly inquiry.

http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/index.html
http://www.fas.org/programs/ltp/emerging_technologies/index.html
http://vworld.fas.org/bin/view

Presentation(PPT)

Mannheim University Library is surveying how new means of communication in the context of Web 2.0 could help to optimize its own business processes towards a more customer-oriented development. Current concepts of customer relationship management and online marketing strategies are analyzed and adapted to the requirements of the public sector.

The first issue is to encourage the library’s patrons to participate in an active dialog and to evaluate patron-generated content. Weblog software enables patrons to publicly review and rate the library’s media in its online catalog. Additional information is thereby provided to other patrons on whether a library item is suitable for their purposes. For the library, this information offers the opportunity to survey the acceptance of its products and to identify the subject areas most heavily accessed. Another aspect is the ability to “tag” library items in a way comparable with Connotea or Bibsonomy. Why shouldn’t the library’s patrons participate in the librarians’ task of subject cataloging?

The amount of electronic information increases enormously every year and comprehensive subject indexing cannot be handled by the librarians alone. In addition, Mannheim University Library provides a Weblog to gather information about the patrons’ evaluation of the library’s services. Exploiting Weblog comments not only offers a new way to provide quick and helpful responses to the remarks entered by patrons, but also to efficiently adjust the library’s services to the patrons’ needs.

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PPT)

The data storage needs at Wesleyan have grown exponentially in the last few years and the institution has been able to accommodate needs as they have grown. Increasing use of the Web and multimedia in teaching and learning are primary driving forces for this increase. It became apparent that the institution’s approach to meeting these needs resulted in a very fractured file space that was confusing and difficult to use. A radically different strategy was needed to provide a large and scalable data storage mechanism that was easy to use, that supported multi-platforms, and that distributed the access control to enable collaboration. In collaboration with the library (whose interest in the project stemmed from the need to manage E-reserves, special collections and archives), ITS launched a year-long search for such a system. In this presentation, the search process will be discussed in detail; the selection and implementation of Xythos and the current state of the project will also be considered. This product has been helpful in achieving some goals, but there are a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out that will be addressed in the presentation.

http://wesfiles.blogs.wesleyan.edu/

The University of Washington Libraries has been using OCLC’s beta WorldCat Local (WCL) product as its default online public access system (OPAC) interface since April 2007. WCL provides a localized version of WorldCat.org with custom branding and relevancy ranking that puts local and consortial collections first and interoperates with UW’s pre-existing integrated library system (ILS) and fulfillment systems. Presenters will review WCL’s architecture, usability testing and user experiences from UW, and the substantial impacts that WCL has had on the university’s interlibrary loan and consortial delivery systems. Presenters will also discuss some early thinking on the implications for record maintenance in a network-level discovery environment.

http://uwashington.worldcat.org

Handout (MS Word)

Presentation (PPT)