LIS/KM Resource

Talkr allows you to listen to text-only blogs on your iPod.

The goal of the Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse Project (DREW) is to create a large database of reference transactions so that researchers might better understand the process and then create tools for measurement and evaluation that managers of reference services could employ.

FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the system information architecture.

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

This article is an attempt to clarify the distinct roles for ontologies and folksonomies, and previews some new work that applies the two ideas together - an ontology of folksonomy.

Welcome to the CC LiveContent project! LiveContent is a LiveCD [1] full of a sampling of and links to free and open source creativity software and Creative Commons' licensed free and open content — audio, video, image, and text — for anyone to explore. Please use this disc if you are interested in trying free media and possibly want to create your own with tools like OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, Gimp and more.

Our profession has been talking a lot lately about centralization of cataloging efforts, digital library efforts, and even IT services. In retrospect, the conversation about centralized reference services was a bit premature, but a new distributed—but as yet unmanaged—infrastructure seems to be emerging. (Perhaps a new cottage industry opportunity?)

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