So I got back from holiday break, expecting to find a modest trickle of hits, and was astounded to find that the blog had scored an unbelievable 111 views. What could people be looking at given that my trademark witty banter was absent? The answer: LOL Cats. Yes, friends, people in search of their LOL Cat fix search WordPress or Google and find my blog. Apparently, the key to getting a lot of hits is to post photos and if those photos happen to feature cats with amusing captions, so much the better.

A closer look at the search terms people have been using to find my blog revealed the following gems:

• “How to be a nazgul”–Well, first you take a ring of power from a dark overlord. Then you fall in shadow and after that it’s really just an eternity of screeching and chasing after short people with jewelry.
• “Corona research biased”–We’re either talking about beer or the auroras and either way I have no idea what this searcher is actually looking for.
• “Slave girl/Orion slave girl (s)”–A very persistent search term. Guys, just go buy yourselves some Boris Vallejo calendars and call it good.
• “A good cheerleading method”–Rah, rah, boom, bah?
• “Banner administrative software bad”–Won’t be getting any arguement from me.
• “Motivational/Motivational poster”–You won’t be finding any motivation around here, people.
• “Cat bonzai”–You let your cat prune your bonsai by having them sharpen their claws on it?

Ah, it’s good to be back.

From the wicked cartoonist & librarian team at Unshelved. A little commentary on Library 2.0 and Web 2.0. Click on the strip to see the last frame which wound up under the sidebar.

I have been spending an unnatural amount of time on YouTube recently because I’m preparing for an oral history panel on the changing face of Middle Eastern dance in America. I search for and collect fusion dance clips that I think are representative of trends in the dance community. I then put them into Del.ici.ous for my panelists to see and I’m also putting them into a handout that I intend to distribute at the conference.

The downside of searching by tags on YouTube becomes very apparent when you’re trying to use it for research. For example, I remembered seeing a ballet/belly dance fusion number, but had the hardest time bringing it up. “Belly dance” is far too general and it wasn’t under “ballet” or “fusion” either. Fortunately, I remembered that the performance had been filmed in Iceland and by putting in “Iceland” and “Belly Dance”, I was able to find the clip I was looking for. I should add that nowhere in the tags attached to this clip was the term “ballet” even though the dancer was clearly doing ballet moves. Arrrgh!

Social cataloging relies heavily on the wisdom of the collective which works up to a point, but while the group may do okay, individual taggers can be sloppy, ignorant of the subject, or both. When that happens, the information winds up buried.

It’s just a wild and an untamed thing …. –Rocky Horror Picture Show

Back in the Really Olde Days when I was but a wee nipper, our high school biology teacher had us do an interesting exercise. We were to pretend that we were stranded astronauts trying to make it back to our base. He gave us a worksheet listing various items that we could take with us and we not only had to chose which items we would take to help us survive, we had to rank them in order of their importance. First, he had us do the picking and ranking on our own. Then he gave a second copy of the worksheet and we had to form small groups and do the same thing. Afterwards, we compared the two worksheets. The one that we had done as a group had more right answers than the one we had done individually. This was my first introduction to the intelligence of the collective.

What I find most fascinating about LibraryThing is not the bookshelf or community functions, but the tagging. The LT community is now large enough and has generated enough tags that they can actually catalog by consensus. That is, if you pick any one book from the list and have a look at its tags, most of them will accurately describe the book. There will always be a few inaccurate tags in the mix, but the majority are spot on. LT is an excellent example of a folksonomy–a taxonomy where the terms are generated by non-experts.

The other thing–and this is a big one–that fascinates me about tagging is that for the first time we can really see how people think about and use information. To understand why this is exciting you have to understand that most of the time librarians can only count the number of times people access information. That is, we can tell how many times a book circulates or how many hits a database gets, but we can’t tell what the patrons thought about the information they found. Did they find the book they needed? Was that article really what they were looking for? LT is essentially an on-line laboratory for information scientists.

I think that it would be very cool to be able to either overlay or import LT’s tag clouds into our own catalog and then to be able to search on them. LT has already done most of the work, including cleaning up the spam tagging, so it would essentially be a free extra for us.

This is one of the most interesting Learning 2.0 assignments to date. I was inspired to look up other articles on tagging in the Library Literature database and to follow the discussions on LT itself. I highly recommend watching the video of Tim Spaulding’s lecture on LT and tagging at the Library of Congress which is about 40 minutes long. Tim introduces LT and then talks about the strengths and weaknesses of tagging vs. controlled vocabulary and about the importance of opening library catalogs to on-line search engines. I also recommend checking out the discussion of tag mashups, LT’s version of Boolean searching.