Thing 15: To infinity .... and beyond!

Interesting subject this week on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. I agree that libraries need to respond to the culture they exist in and our culture is moving toward one where the user (customer) is in charge and he or she requires and expects more flexibility and ease in his or her interactions with institutions and information.


Of course, I am also most interested in how all this will affect my library speciality, cataloging. Traditional cataloging, justifiably, has come under the most fire in the Web 2.0 world for being too rigid. In a world where people are tagging their blogs, tagging their Flickr pictures and creating mini-bibliographic descriptions of items in their digital world, the library MARC record and use of the Library of Congress Subject Headings does seem old-fashioned.

However, I am concerned with this rush toward customer-based description. I am afraid that people will forget why authority control, MARC tags and classification schemes were created in the first place--to provide standardization in a world that is anything but. That said, customer tags are also valuable since they provide a glimpse into how people are actually thinking about and mentally categorizing material. Obviously, there needs to be a way to accommodate both customer-based "natural language" tags and standardized headings.

Thing 11: A busman's holiday for me

I actually had already explored LibraryThing a few months ago. I initially wanted to use it to catalog my large collection of Christmas music CD's which could use some form of bibliographic control. Although the website implies it is useful for creating music catalogs, I disagree. I could not find MARC records for many titles in my CD collection so I gave up in disgust.

I then decided to catalog my collection of film books--this was much more successful and I cataloged 41 titles.

Despite the fact I was able to fairly easily create a catalog list, I don't know if I'd ever really use this service. Sure, I'm a cataloger by trade, but it seems almost too nerdy to have your own library online. Then again, sometimes I do have a hard time finding books that I know I own.....