ALA - 6/25/2007

This was a well-attended program with three speakers. Matt Bejeune, an assistant professor of library science at Purdue and a doctoral student at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, kicked things off. He’s studying the use of wikis in libraries and has looked at 35 examples pulled together from the LIS literature, the Library Success wiki, and a handful of listservs.

Matt grouped the wikis into four functional types: collaboration between libraries (i.e. the ALA wiki); collaboration between library staff; collaboration between library staff and patrons; and collaboration between patrons (through tools provided by the library.)

More than three-quarters of the examples he found were in the first two categories, though he’s more interested in the latter two types. He showed some examples, but too briefly to get much sense of what they were about. He asked why there weren’t more and how we might allow users to build/modify library information.

The presentation was a preview of an upcoming article, but didn’t do much more than lay out the framework of his research. Look for the article (in the September 2007 Information Technology and Libraries) for more detail. There’s also a companion wiki for the article, and his slides are available online.

Meredith Farkas, who maintains the Library Success best practices wiki and blogs at Information Wants to Be Free was next and also focused primarily on wikis.

She took a quick, though not quite so cursory cruise through several examples, from public libraries, academic libraries, and others. (Definitely worth checking out some of the links on her presentation Web page, which also has her slides.)

Perhaps most interesting was that she presented wikis in the context of knowledge management. I haven’t heard KM mentioned that much since leaving corporate and academic business libraries, but it made a lot of sense here. Not only do libraries have institutional knowledge that they’re not very good at capturing, she pointed out, but library patrons have a lot of knowledge that can be useful to other patrons. Wikis can help make it possible for them to share what they know, though it’s important to remember, she warned, that incorporating knowledge management behaviors into an organizational workflow takes time.

Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing was last, and his presentation was the most focused. (It also generated the bulk of the questions and discussion from the audience.)

I’ve used LibraryThing, though I really haven’t taken advantage of the social cataloging aspects that give it its power. (I’ve put my collection of thematic and historical atlases in it, and it serves as a content manager and display tool for my new books in communication studies at BC.) But Tim gave a powerful demonstration of what LT’s social cataloging can do.

A key part of his presentation showed how LibraryThing data has been incorporated into the catalog of the Danbury Public Library in Connecticut, the first, and so far only, library to work with LT this way. Search a book in the DPL catalog and if it’s among the 15 million books in LibraryThing, you get three things in addition to the regular catalog data.

First, you get a FRBRized list of related books in the library’s catalog, including translations, audiobooks, different editions, and others. Then, there’s a list of similar books based, I think, on books that people who have this book are also likely to have. (Examples I looked at seem to work very well.) Finally, there’s the LibraryThing tag cloud which gives you access to other book categories and topics beyond the LC subject headings. (The list in automatically generated from the tags most frequently applied to the book.)

Even newer, and not yet officially launched, is something called TagMash which will allow you to search LT tags in different ways (i.e. diaries and germany, or diaries and germany not girls, etc.). This appears to offer a kind of power and functionality that will be a very useful addition to LibraryThing.

Tim hasn’t made any slides available, but you can read the excellent and provocative introduction to his presentation which he’s posted on the LibraryThing blog. And you can read more about the Danbury/LibraryThing project in an earlier post at or try the catalog yourself at http://cat.danburylibrary.org/