Week 12 Reading Notes

Weblogs: their use and application in science and technology libraries.
The article begins with a general overview of blogging software, the history of blogging, and the blogging phenomenon. It also looks at early chatter in scholarly publications about  the application of blogging in scientific fields, and sees that most of the chatter was rather about the phenomenon itself and not about any potential application. 
The article then outlines a practical approach to setting up project blogs, and addresses concerns regarding update notification via email, or RSS. The idea is, the readers or users needn't visit the site regularly to receive content, a one-time visit and sign-up is all that would be needed.
The article then discusses the use of a blog specifically for internal use by a reference desk, and how it would be preferable to a cumbersome email approach of disseminating relevant information for the reference team.
Finally the article discusses success with group blogging regarding student research projects, and student organizations. 
Blogging software certain is easy to use and straight-foward, especially when dealing with group projects that need a web presence. It is easy for layman to set-up, give permissions, and manage content of their projects. 


Using a Wiki to manage a library instruction program: 
The article details basic information for creating your own wiki using free websites, and also literature on developing wikis for the use in libraries. 
The article then details how a wiki can be used as a knowledge management system for instruction on how to use the library. Users can update the wiki with relevant or changing information. The wiki would be an internal boon for library instruction, as a resource for librarians who do not regularly teach the program. A single repository with all the relevant information is preferable for training/instruction over say standard handouts that may get outdated, or one time conversations that aren't preserved anywhere.


Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy:
The article details the success that has been had and could be had with taking a social bookmarking sites like Delicious or StumbleUpon and building them internally with academic libraries. Rather than having students and scholars have to turn to the larger sea of internet taxonomy, academic libraries could have a ready-made tagging language and tagged articles and blogs and webpages for their own users. This would relieve some of the great burden off the student of having to wade through Google Scholar, EBESCO, or other bibliographic sites looking for potential information for their research. 


Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous and full-scale implementation of Wiki software.  
As Wales explains in the video, wikipedia is born out of the ideal of a freely and globally available encyclopedia. And not just any encyclopedia, but an inexhaustive, complete coverage encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has one employee, a software developer. All other workers are volunteers, from server admins to article contributors. 
And all of this turns out a 1.5 billion page view a month top 50 webpage, more popular than the New York Times.
Wales believes the core idea that keeps Wikipedia so successful, is neutrality. Neutrality and a belief of neutral cooperation between many people from multiple backgrounds. Peer Review is real-time, and is monitored via IRC, email and RSS. 
However the bulk of Wikipedia is edited by a relatively small (1000~ people) population.