Power to the People: User-generated content in digital collections

Meredith Farkas
Norwich University
Readex Digital Institute 2007
Power to the People User-generated content in digital collections

Web 1.0: Democratized access to information

Web 2.0: Democratized participation

What is social software? My definition: To be defined as social software, a tool must meet at least two of the following conditions: 1. It allows people to communicate, collaborate and build community online 2. It can be syndicated, shared, reused or remixed, or it facilitates syndication 3. It allows people to easily learn from and capitalize on the behavior or knowledge of others

User contributions to the web
Content
Blogs
Photos
Online community contributions
Wikis
Audio and video
Annotations
Comments
Tags
Ratings
Custom collections

Cultural heritage materials online
Too much stuff to process by experts
Insufficient metadata makes things un-findable
Issues of re-findability
Goal of museums and related institutions - foster connection to historical materials
Traditional linear exhibits do not translate well online, reflects a single way of looking at/collecting items.

Tags
User-created descriptive metadata
A tag is usually a single word, but multiple tags can be assigned to a specific item
Brings similar content together
Makes content more findable
Folksonomy - system of organizing items through tagging

Many ways to describe... dog brooklyn ice cream factory Ice Cream NY corgi summer girl ice cream LaSalle puppy bad owner How will people search for this?

Where the tags are

Why tags?
Lets people make sense of content using their own vocabulary (cinema? movies? film? motion picture?)
Helps people to re-find content
Helps people to discover content
Good solutions for situations where content can’t be formally cataloged

Why not?
No control
Multiple terms to describe a single concept
No disambiguation
People can use plural or singular, use dashes or underscores to connect words, etc.
Different levels of specificity
People tag selfishly (to_read, chapter1, EN101, etc.)
“ Tagging bulldozes the cost of classification and piles it on the price of discovery.” (Ian Davis of Talis)

Improving tagging

Personalization
People want to collect like items for research, etc.
People want to remind themselves why they collected each item
People want to search the collections they’re interested in
People want recommendations based on their interests

Social software features for digital collections
Comments
Tagging
Personal annotations
Personal collections
Social networking

Examples: Commenting

Examples: Tagging

Personal collections

Examples: Recommendations

Social Networking Features
Friending - follow other people’s tags or annotated bibliographies
Groups - collect items in a single pot
Profiles - who are these people?
Discussions - discussion boards on relevant topics

Why do any of this?
Allows the user to interact with the resources in a more personal way
The stories people tell about historical items are as important as any other characteristic
Tags make items more findable
Let your users make your materials more findable
Building community makes your site more sticky

Issues
Moderation
Differentiating between user content and institutional data
Making it easy to contribute
Making it appealing to contribute
No more silos! Making content portable and shareable
If you build it, will they come? Evaluate your population

Thanks!
Meredith Farkas
[email_address]
meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/
Slides and links at http://meredithfarkas.wetpaint.com

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Power to the People: User-generated content in digital collections

by Meredith Farkas on Sep 01, 2007

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Power to the People: User-generated content in digital collections — Presentation Transcript