Connect with the Campus Library!

There are (at least) a couple fun sites for sharing your books and socializing with other readers. There’s the relatively new Goodreads where you can see what your friends are reading, find good books to read and keep track of what you have read and want to read. It’s free and fun and worth a look if you enjoy reading, discussing and discovering new books.

I See Dead People(’s Books)

Also there’s LibraryThing, which has been around for a bit longer. Here you can do the same kinds of things, plus you can find people with similar reading interests.

Not quite as morbid as it sounds, at LibraryThing, there’s a group devoted to cataloging the collections of dead people. Wanna see what was on Tupac’s bookshelf? Wanna know what Sylvia Plath was reading? Now you can. For a complete list of cataloged authors, including libraries in progress, visit the group I See Dead People(’s Books) over at LibraryThing.

Mme. Currie and 4 students (LOC)

Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

There’s been lots of buzz around the new joint project between the Library of Congress and flickr, the photo sharing site we blogged about last year.

The Library of Congress has uploaded several thousand photographs from their collection and invited the public to help tag the photos, to leave comments, and to otherwise enjoy a color photo collection from the 1930s & ’40s as well as a black and white collection of news photos from the 1910s. There has already been an amazing response to the photos–over 1 million views in just two days!

These photos are just a small sample of the many fabulous LOC digital collections like the American Memory Project and the Veterans History Project, but the social features made possible by flickr make this project into something else entirely.  It’s beautiful when history meets technology!

Do you know what wikis are?  According to Wikipedia, the king of all wikis, a wiki is usually a collaborative website which can be edited by anyone with access to it!

Wikis have many applications, including sharing of knowledge within organizations or communities with specific interests. You can find a wiki on just about any subject!  Just try a search on Wetpaint or wiki.com to look for subject-specific wikis.

You want to build your own wiki?  PeanutButterWiki, Wetpaint, and Wikia are some of the most popular free wiki services that allow you to create your own wiki community. Teachers, you can try to set up a wiki for the courses you teach! For more information on such services, you may see Wikipedia’s List of wiki farms.

Despite the ongoing controversy on the reliability of projects such as Wikipedia, a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than a third of American adult internet users (36%) use this citizen-generated online encyclopedia on a regular basis.  It’s perhaps ironic that despite efforts to discourage college students from using it as a serious research tool, the same study reports that Wikipedia’s popularity is particularly strong among the well-educated! 

An interesting article by Larry Sanger, “On the New Politics of Knowledge,” points to the merits and pitfalls of the new collaborative web environment responsible for the creation of resources such as Wikipedia and what we consider common knowledge.  Sanger, with a Ph.D. in philosophy and one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, argues that the democratization of knowledge as a product of contributions by the general public has indeed allowed a wider representation of different perspectives and a more efficient way to generate accurate information under the watchful eyes of multiple contributors.  On the other hand, he also contends that collaborative projects such a Wikipedia need an additional layer of oversight to add credibility and depth, and to confirm what the expert opinion is on different topics. Wikipedia’s stand that the word of the crowd is to be trusted as a product of collective effort, indiscriminate of the contributors’ levels of expertise, is flawed, says Sanger. Wisdom and knowledge need to be appreciated as more than social constructs of an undifferentiated, anonymous crowd of contributors. 

To provide a practical application to his arguments and counter issues of reliability of projects such as Wikipedia, Sanger last month launched a new collaborative venture, Citizendium, as the credible alternative to Wikipedia.  Citizendium’s web site includes only articles that carry the names of their authors along with a “seal of approval” from experts that oversee such contributions. Still in its early stages of development and relatively small in its content (as of April 30, there were 1,700 articles), Citizendium is yet another experiment in the world wide web of information that tries to assert itself for its credibility and usefulness.  However, only time will tell if Citizendium develops a distinct enough appeal to draw users away from Wikipedia to what it claims to be most important, a more authoritative contribution to the creation of common knowledge.  For the time being, it’s worth keeping an eye on its potential competitive edge to the much more popular, albeit controversial, Wikipedia!

Unless you took our post about feed readers to heart and are reading this blog through another interface you have probably noticed the Flickr photos on the right. Maybe you’ve even clicked the “more photos” link that leads to the campus library’s Flickr photo pool.

Flickr describes itself as an “online photo management and sharing application” designed to “help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them” and “enable new ways of organizing photos.” It could be described as an online photo album, but it’s much more than that. Not only can you use Flickr to share and organize your own photos, you can use it to find other people who share your interests. Find a Flickr group. Leave a comment for a friend or ask a total stranger a question. Find a picture available under a Creative Commons license to illustrate a PowerPoint or blog post. Browse the Flickr world map for photos of a place you’ve never been.

So, if you haven’t already, meet the folks who work in the library. Join the Campus Library Flickr group and post your own photos of the library, or just check out all the photos tagged “campuslibrary” for inspiration. We’d love to see the library through your eyes.

I’ve been meaning to read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring for a long time; perhaps the Rachel Carson Online Book Club will provide the motivation I need. Over the next nine months, authors, professors, scientists, and other Rachel Carson experts will moderate weekly discussions about Carson’s life and her work. Folks like Linda Lear, a Carson biographer, John Elder, a literature professor at Middlebury College, and Cindy VanDover, a marine biologist will pose questions and participate in discussions. Titles to be discussed include Silent Spring, Lost Woods, and The Edge of the Sea, among other works both by and about Carson.

Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss blogs (and other social software like wikis or MySpace) as low quality or a waste of time. The Rachel Carson Online Book Club is a great reminder of the amazing things the read/write web makes possible.

Books in our library written by Carson
Books in our library written about Carson

Thanks for coming to check out ConXn, the Campus Library’s new blog!

Great, you’re probably thinking…I like to keep up with what’s happening on campus, but this is one more thing to remember to read….

Enter the feed reader!

A feed reader (also sometimes called an aggregator) is a program that allows you to read all the blogs you like in one convenient place. Maybe you already have some blogs you like to read, blogs like InsideHigherEd, The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog, or even the Freakonomics Blog. With a feed reader, rather than checking each blog to see if new information has been posted you can check a single website and see which of your favorite blogs have been updated since the last time you logged in. You can save favorite posts as well as email them to someone else.

Most blogs use something called “RSS” (generally said to stand for “really simple syndication”) to make the content of the blog available in other places. Feed readers are programs designed to automatically check the RSS feeds of blogs you select to see if there’s anything new available. If there is, the feed reader allows you to read the new content right from the reader–no need to check multiple websites.

In addition to blog feeds, you may be able to read the tables of contents for your favorite journals or even find out when new, relevant articles are added to your favorite databases–rss feeds are popping up everywhere!

Wondering how to get started? First you’ll need to sign up for a (free) feed reader subscription. There are plenty of options out there, but here are a few suggestions. I use Bloglines, a free web-based feed reader, with no complaints. Google is in the game with the Google Reader, and NewsGator offers another popular reader.

Once you have your reader set up, you’ll need to add some feeds! Of course you’ll want to start with ConXn–you’ll find the link to our feed to the right.

Once you start looking for feeds, you’ll notice them everywhere–often you’ll see the little orange icon shown here, but sometimes you’ll just see a link to “feeds” or even “atom” (a form of rss feed). Whatever it’s called, it will make your online life a little easier!