Week 10: Tagging

Tagging can play a useful role in finding stuff.

Controlled vocabularies save the day in nuanced cases (to differentiate a synonym of "floodgate" from "Watergate Affair 1972-1974"), but what speaker of American English will think of the search term "cookery" to get herself to the 641s? If members added tags to our OPAC they could find things using terms meaningful to them. Subject tracing would remain, of course, for authority on the item's "aboutness."

If HCPL YA staff shared a common Flickr account for posting images on our YA webpages, we would tag pictures. That way, we could create a slide show of, say, Free Comic Book Day activities across the County.

A while ago, Platinumb showed me how she used delcious to keep sites handy for use at the reference desk (DU's bookmarks). Eventually, I started one for North Park. I add sites at least once a week using the buttons I added to my browsers, but I consult it only once every ten days or so. I don't think the rest of the staff find it a useful tool, so it fails to bring together the little gems each of us know.

As we did this exercise, Platinum cued me in on some advanced techniques like bundling ("broad terms" for you fans of cataloging) and networking. I networked Norton Park (in my mind that's what nortpark means, but that's a whole 'nother story) to DU and TW. Norton hasn't tagged anything "demographics" but those libraries did. After a search of our bookmarks got no hits, I clicked "network" just under our name and got suggestions from colleagues! Way cool.

North Park's reference staff tags posts in our blog so we can get back to them quickly. A common FAQ: how do I fix it when the image on a public PC's monitor gets rotated 90 or 180 degrees?

In the last 5 - 6 years, tagging has gone from a "controversial" topic in library school classes to something I do daily.

Good News Everybody

Thanks for the good news, Bizzaro! By the way, when did the url change from .gov to www.usps.COM?

Week 5: Podcasting

Application

A fun way for teens to contribute to the library community is through sharing their opinions about what they read. For the video camera-shy, a podcast would be a cool way to participate.

Here's a sample podcast.

Podcasting as a project or program would draw young people because it's fun. We'd be providing them with a skill they could use later, and we'd be fostering creativity and the sense of self-worth kids get when adults show that they value a young person's opinion.


Backstory

It took me a while to get this to work. I need to work on my skills in the area of "read all the directions slowly and carefully." Which is ironic since that is the kind of thing I say weekly to patrons as I help them understand an online application or how to open an email accout.

Then, the staff PC in NP's lab didn't want to "see" one of the programs I needed to make all the technologies to talk to each other, so my dreams of using it as a peaceful recording studio on a Thursday morning were shattered.

I found these podcasting directions that the Web 2.o Committee suggested helpful.

The part about downlading Audacity and the LAME thing for making MP3s was the tricky part.

Many thanks to Deanna for talking me through this bit. Library Robot's blog entry on podcasting helped, too.

Now my desktop is littered with icons for programs, and I can barely remember which I used and which I didn't. . . . Which week do we study productivity??