Liberal Education Today

Post details: Crowdsourcing and participatory databases

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Crowdsourcing and participatory databases

Filed under: Libraries — Bryan Alexander @ 04:00:34 am

Notes on a "Read/Write Web Opportunity" presentation, at the NFAIS conference. Speaker is Aaron Schmidt, Director, North Plains Public Library.

Schmidt began by describing participatory media and crowdsourcing in terms of nonprofessionals performing librarian functions. Examples of this sort of thing include Ask MetaFilter, Flickr's ID Please group, 43 Things, and the Library of Congress-Flickr image annotation project.

Schmidt urged librarians to take advantage of this phenomenon, and gave
Hennepin Public Library's Bookspace as an example.

Schmidt then called for participatory databases as a way for libraries to engage with this wave. He offered a wish list for such a thing, including

  • a useful interface
  • tag clouds
  • history of articles retrieved
  • embraces open web and databases together
  • better URLs

Question about Web 2.0 storytelling. Answer: should be used to make classes and presentations more interesting.

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