As If But When

Photo by museemccordmuseum

I made my first foray into commenting on other people’s blogs recently. I thought it would be an appropriate way to build up some confidence and letting ‘er rip with getting some content online. For too long I dabbled with the notion of blogging [perhaps the single most popular item to blog about is the act of blogging itself], but was too afraid to put myself out there. Well, here goes. To begin, a nice copy and paste of a comment I recently wrote on Brian Lamb’s excellent blog in which I imagined skinning an object repository with flickr. The question that came up was whether you could use a 2.0 tool like Delicious to sit on top of DSpace as a kind of social layer for a rather non-social repository app. Here’s my response:

Well, I wanted to write a rambling piece on the merits of structured metadata (one of the hallmarks of DSpace as a useful repository application), but that would be a digression. Rather, I’ll throw my two bit in on the subject of Delicious and propose a 2.0 alternative. I do want to reiterate that I think the preferred method for what you’re looking for is to build a social network using Drupal sitting on Fedora Commons - that would provide the most flexibility, but would require the most work.

While Delicious is handy, it does have limitations:

1. it cannot ingest content in batches;
2. it’s fickle with tag management (it wouldn’t be difficult for me to spell actuarial actuerial) which either leads to serious tag management, the construction of very complex RSS feeds (include tags: actuarial, actuerial, actuareil…), or omitted content by virtue of a spelling mistake);
3. a user cannot tag other users’ content;
4. the notes field is restricted to 1000 characters. Brian has already outlined the positives, so I’ll skip that bit.

As for a more flexible 2.0 tool that would require minimal effort to get up and running – at least as a prototype interface on top of Dspace is… flickr. Ok, it sounds a bit odd, I know. But we’re just throwing around ideas, right? Each object in the repository can be represented by some kind of image in flickr. The Description field can include all that lovely structured metadata: Title, Author, Subject… and include the persistent URL to the object. The tags can reiterate the metadata and others can contribute tags not included in the original metadata. Users can comment on the objects. You’ve got a robust API to do some fancy things with the flickr content using tag clouds and link rolls. You can batch upload images (that is, images as representation of the DSpace objects). Where can we see this in action? There’s a few large repositories that feed there content into flickr already: the McCord Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Powerhouse Museum. Each of these flickr users permit users to tag, comment, and place notes on their content. Each one links back to the object in its repository. It might not be fancy, but it works. And it opens the repository to a very large community. Obviously there’s going to be issues about my proposal - I still have the same concerns about the consistency of tagging, though at least flickr allows for full text searching - but I’ve said enough. How’s that for a crazy librarian’s ideas? Most of what I have to say is generally less outlandish. But I thought I’d take off the glasses, loosen the cardigan, and have some fun.

So there’s my first blog post. I kind of like this idea and am going to pursue it. We have a small collection of electronic theses and I might just upload links to them in flickr to see what kind of response we get.