Group items tagged

Good background article by seminal thinker/researcher in area of information-seeking behavior (T.D. Wilson)

Tagging As a Community Building Tool I'm just finished an awesome book called Tagging: People-Powered MetaData for the Social Web by Gene Smith. It sounds like a dry subject, but tagging is really super cool and ha massive implications for the design, building and nurturing of online communities and I thought I'd jot down some notes I took straight out of the book so you can see why. ************************************* How tagging works: 1) Tags are multiple ways of finding something 2) Tags are a way to browse 3) Tags are part of a community pool - act as a bridge between personal and community knowledge 4) Tags connect objects to other objects 5) Tags are hooks used to pull information together from other website that use tags, like Technorait, Flickr, Delicious. Tags by themselves are like a filing system without files - needs USERS and RESOURCES to be useful. Tags can be created from three perspectives: - Information Architecture (organizational content) - Social Software - to facilitate group interaction - Personal Information Management (PIM) - organizing stuff for an individual's use. There can be friction between these. Tagging is related to the re-emergence of oral culture online. (Alex Wright) Tagging is NOT like folders, where you move something from one place (inbox) to another (folder) - tags allow things to live is several places at once. Tagging is SOCIAL = personal + collaborative at the same time. Tags show minority viewpoints as well as consensus. (Tag Clouds are a visualization of this). Value Centered Design = value comes from balancing the goals of the people who create the system (RETURN ON INVESTMENT) with those of the people who use the system (RETURN ON EXPERIENCE). Motivations for users to tag (ROE): - ease of use - to manage personal info - sharing and collaborating (---> communities of interest) - fun - self-expression Business benefits (ROI): - to facilitate collaboration - to obtain descriptive metadata - to enhance fin

The Web has changed patterns of information weeking, necessitating elaborating on the previous models of information seeking.

An expert in the field of user studies gives some background to the topic.

Good summary of Belkin's ASK model

I have to explain the main models or concepts behind information seeking for Competency J. The commentaries are good because some try to defend, others agree with the writer.

Mooers actually suggested that it was too much trouble to have information because then you'd have to do something about it, and it wasn't about building better databases; his law was adapted to the LIS field to mean the same as the Law of Least Effort. It's an intellectual climate that is the problem. He was pointing to certain specific environments where this is true (such as some companies or laboratories).

Useful for summarizing state of research on information seeking

See the chart constructed from a lecture by Terry Winograd LIBRARY CULTURE vs. INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE

Good rundown on all the most prominent researchers on information seeking models

Tools for teaching info literacy skills

We do not expect our learner to travel down our same path as librarian or researcher but to become independent knowledge seekers. There is no right or wrong process of research, although there are many heuristics we can pass on. Applicable use of information requires that we see knowledge acquisition as amorphous and changing. As librarians, so we are too. Let us teach those who come to us our strengths, not our past.

In my opinion, Information Literacy Instruction is related to the research process and critical thinking skills.

online journal

A 2005 article by Kuhlthau, attempting to find a conceptual framework that incorporates allied areas (not just LIS)

Summary of Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries by Robert S. Taylor