Here Comes Everybody...

Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, is a fascinating look at the way Web 2.0 and social networking is touching every aspect of society. I found it highly thought-provoking and encourage anyone who's interested in this stuff to have a read.

I talked about a couple of things that struck me from the book on the RISG blog. Here's one...

Beth Jefferson, Bibliocommons and the Next Generation Catalogue

This interview with Beth Jefferson, Founder of Bibliocommons, inspired a post on the RISG blog about the future of library web sites and catalogues. Go on, read it...

Sutherland Library Catalogue Google Gadget

I've created a catalogue gadget for Sutherland Shire Libraries (MPOW). It was reasonably easy to do - the hardest bit was getting the CSS to work in both IE and Firefox.

It's at the end of this post. You can also see it on the Sutherland Shire Libraries News blog.

I've written a bit about why I did it on the RISG New Technologies blog.

If for some bizarre reason you want to add it to your site feel free. It's available from the Google Gadget directory.

Here's a video of Clay Shirky's speech at the Web 2.0 Expo 2008. His recently published book, Here Comes Everybody, looks at the culture of participation that is growing around Web 2.0.

I know that most public libraries in NSW are thinking about using Web 2.0 tools to reach out to users. One of the questions many people have is why we should be doing it if our community doesn't currently use those tools? Indeed, we are struggling to get much in the way of comments on our blog from the members of our community at my place of work. Comments aren't really on fire on the RISG blogs either (c'mon people, share!). But it's only a matter of time. Clay Shirky puts that argument in an eloquent and entertaining way.

21st Century Library Management Systems

One of the things that Library Catalogues do really badly is ranking search results. In fact, I don't know of any out of the box ILS OPACs that even offer relevancy ranking as part of their search. Even the add-on discovery services like Innovative Interfaces Encore and Sirsi Dynix Enterprise that do offer relevancy ranking base it predominantly on how many times and where keywords appear in a record.

It seems to me that collecting data about which items in your collection get used most and the kind of 'he who used that also used this' data that powers sites like Amazon and LibraryThing could greatly improve the discovery environment of your library catalogue.

So I was interested enough in the report from the JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study to post about it on the RISG New Technologies blog.