Review: 1

User Collaboration in Websites

Judith Pearce presented a paper entitled “User Collaboration in websites” (Pearce, 2006) at the ARLIS/ANZ conference (“Framing the Future”), in September 2006. In this presentation Pearce examined Web 2.0 and how the National Library of Australia (NLA) is using Web 2.0 applications in two of its services offered online, Picture Australia and Australia Dancing. Her aim is to explore how user collaboration can help the NLA to remain relevant in this rapidly changing world of information technology. In doing so, Pearce first identifies websites that use the technology of Web 2.0, such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Google and Flickr, then goes on to describe how Flickr and Wikipedia work and how the NLA has adapted these Web 2.0 applications to its own purposes. The article reveals how the NLA has incorporated Web 2.0 in two projects, and examines their limitations and their outcomes.

In 2004 Tim O’Reilly made the term “Web 2.0” popular when he first used the term while at a conference brainstorming session (O’Reilly, 2004). Indeed, if one is not familiar with web 2.0 technology this article may be a hard to comprehend. A brief look at Wikipedia’s description of Web 2.0 and “The web is using us” on You Tube, will set give one a better understanding of Web 2.0. Pearce goes on to say that users participate by contributing data or through tagging, comments, ratings and reviews.

Pearce identifies websites that use the technology of Web 2.0, such as blogger, Wikipedia, Google and Flickr. Pearce describes how Flickr and Wikipedia work and how the NLA has used this web 2.0 applications in two of their services Picture Australia and Australia Dancing.

Picture Australia is a project which encourages user collaboration by allowing users to add textual information and photos to the collection is now looking to increase the number of its contemporary pictures through the Flickr project. According to Pearce, it is the historical content or “Killer Data” (Greener, 2005) that sets Picture Australia aside from Flickr and Google. Pearce goes on to explain how this project works and the outcome for the NLA, which is increasing their collection, in both volume and topics. For example users are adding interesting juxtapositions of old and new pictures with the same subject (Pearce, 2006), thus allowing Picture Australia to increase its coverage of topical issues and widen its audience. Images are tagged by users, creating a form of metadata. Pearce describes this form of tagging as a little problematic, but tells that the NLA is addressing this by monitoring the images and giving advice to users on tagging.

Pearce suggests that future improvements would in the direction of tagging, which in turn would make the images easier to find. The NLA is considering the benefits that a thesaurus would have on the tagging. The Powerhouse Museum and NLA are both experimenting with tagging, with the NLA having a working group to look at all annotation (tags, comments, notes, ratings and reviews) requirements of its own collection.

Turning now to Australia Dancing, which is a directory of resources both current and historical. “The directory service is supplemented by other pages enabling discovery, location and access to information about dance in Australia through links to other relevant site” (NLA http://www.australiadancing.org/about.html ) Australia Dancing uses the technology of a wiki to collaborate with its users. However users must be registered and abide by the rules before they can contribute to the wiki. While a wiki is suitable to generate a set of encyclopedic pages such as the pages of Australia Dancing, it may result in information that is incorrect from users, a common problem with wikis. Pearce claims that Australia Dance will need to embrace Web 2.0 technology to meet user’s needs.

This article is an excellent read on how Web 2.0 technology can be incorporated into libraries. (commonly known by the buzz word "Library 2.0) with suggestions of service models to be considered. It deserves to be read widely in the library sector, especially by those wishing to enhance their perspective of Library 2.0 and implementing it into their library environment, thereby giving readers an understanding of the underlining concepts of user participation, collaborations and contribution of their knowledge and experiences tot he library service and programs.

References:

ANderson, C. (2004), The Long Tail, Retrieved July 26, 2008. from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html

Casey, M. & Savastinuk,L. )2006, September 1). Library 2.0; service for ther next-genertation library. Retrieved 14 july 2008, from, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html?q=Library+2.0

Mossman,K. (2006). Serving the Niche: Viewing libraries through Chris ANderson's "Long Tail" lens. Retrieved Aug 14 2008 from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6349032.html

Wikipedia, viewed 15 Aug 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/main_page