The Laws of the Jungle

1. On p. 88 Weinberger writes that order often hides more than it reveals, which may be yet another reason why people prefer the search engine over the library catalog. What experiences have you had in which you discover something of interest through Google or a library OPAC while looking for something else?
2. What do you think of Weinberger's statement on page 89 in the first full paragraph about how the way we organize information limits our vision and gives more power to those who control the organization of information than to those who create it?
3. From your experience of working with Flickr or another web based photo archive for your second assignment, do you agree with Weinberger's statement "that the bigger the mess the more accurate is Flickr's analysis (p. 95)?
4. Check out the PennTags project that Weinberger refers to in this chapter at: http://tags.library.upenn.edu/
Explore and comment on its usefulness as a search tool for a library collection.

1
I rarely use Google for anything more than a specific search and typically find what I need and get out. I regularly get lost in my library’s OPAC. It started last year just after I started my job and started learning about MARC on my own. I noticed that some of the subjects and authors shown in a surrogate record were active links (that I could click on and see all the records for that author or subject. However, some were not. For example, some of the books in our catalog by Beverly Cleary had active links and some did not. If I clicked on the active link for Beverly Cleary, I could see a list of books by Beverly Cleary but those without the active links may or may not be in that list – usually not. I learned that this was related to how the MARC records were entered. When I saw how useful it was to have those links be active and how much better it would be for patrons if the catalog records were updated so the active links would actually return *everything* the library has by that author or subject, I started spending a little time each week finding and updating the MARC records in the appropriate fields. I also found something similar for book series. Sometimes books 2-4 are linked by the MARC 490 field but book 1 is missing that entry – possibly because at the time it came out, it was not thought to be book 1 of a series. Following these links in our OPAC regularly leads me to information that I didn’t originally come to the OPAC for – especially the subject links.

2
I could not recall this exact quote so I re-read it. Glad I did. Weinberger uses that statement about media. He says “editors are more powerful than reporters, and communication syndicates are more powerful than editors because the get to decide what to bring to the surface and what to ignore.”
I certainly agree with him in this context of mass-media. I’m not so sure I agree, though, if the context were libraries and/or librarians. I like my miscellany with a bit of organization and I like my organization with a bit of miscellany. I don’t see it as a power struggle although I’m new to this profession and I’m sure there are battle lines drawn in places that I have not discovered yet. Certainly, the organizer’s bias will be evident in the process, but I hope libraries are organizing with the end user in mind. I should clarify. I do not mean that libraries should decide how the end user will want to use the information and organize it accordingly, rather, libraries should organize information to be as open as possible so that users can access with varying degrees of organization or miscellany – and the choice as to the exact degree is up to the end user.

4
PennTags has potential. I like the idea of bookmarking sites and making them available to others. It seems like del.icio.us but for a limited group of people. That isn’t a bad thing but it does seem like maybe PennTags isn’t very popular now. (UPDATE: After looking through more of the tags on PennTags, some of the tags are still in relatively heavy use through July 2013!) I think something like this might be useful but I’m not sure that it is needed in my organization. We use Google Apps for Education so we all have the benefits of Gmail’s powerful search capabilities. I do still use browser based bookmarks and sync them to all the computers and browsers that I use regularly. However, when I find a site that I *really* want to make sure I can find later and/or one that I want to share with my co-workers, I just send the link in an email with some text that will make it easily findable via Gmail search. I did this recently with the website about explorers mentioned in the 21st Century Librarian article we read/watched a couple weeks ago. I emailed the link to my co-workers with enough explanation that I can find it later in just a few seconds.
Our library does not currently catalog websites, but if we did or if we decide to in the future something similar to PennTags may be helpful even if just as a part of the brainstorming process. We do subscribe to some services that provide a curated list of websites appropriate for various ages on various topics and those websites are searchable through our OPAC… if we could just get students to use them.