Participation and Power

Combining Community Features with Existing Metadata in NextGen Public Interfaces
Kelly M. Vickery, University of Kentucky; Dinah Sanders, Innovative Interfaces

Encore is an Innovative development. Uses community tags to flesh out marc records.
Example one item that deals with DRM does not have any subject headings indicating DRM; community tags did describe the item with DRM. so they went back to the item record and added a subject heading for DRM. Encore 2.0. patron is authenticated, which also adds a level of policing... gets very few trash tags.

Though administration module, can view recent tags and approve them. Can build a thesaurus of tags which are also whitelisted. Also whitelist at record level... A page for patrons so you can track who is actually tagging. Can block patrons or patron type.

Rapid, iterative developmnet and the partnership approach. Large group of development partners. 100 libraries are currently involved, and about 3 dozen development partners.

U of Ky. is the latest partner. Integrating Encore with Voyager.
Had looked at Aquabrowser, Endeca, Primo.

Another case of datadump to III. Marc/serial holdings; item information; item circulation status; location/collection; patron records. Kentucky made the decision not to include circ status as it was 24 hours behind. In order for tagging to work, need to have LDAP communicating with Encore. (LDAP for patron authentication)

academic tags: groupings for courses
syllabus readings
impromptu course project reading lists
course reserve lists
collaborate tagging for group projects

animal names: bovine - cow; equine - horse
tagging can help institute new terminology or changing terminology (plutoid for dwarf planet)

public library examples of tagging: shared tags
bookclubs can tag their reading lists and meeting times
informal vocabulary, disambiguation. acts like a see-also reference
emerging vocabulary: gitmo, podcasting - fills gap between common usage and inclusion in LCSH.
encore 3 will include reviews and ratings
Pre-coordination vs. iterative "berry-picking"
Patrons are significantly less familiar with index searching compared to keyword searching. Only 4% of searches at U of Glasgow used the subject search.

2/3 encore users reported using the tag cloud, prior to the addition of community tags.

Collection development => conversation development => collaboration development

I was disappointed that this session was about a proprietary system, but I did learn quite a bit. Vickery's presentation provided much food for thought.