Bibliophibious

In view of the recent LC report and the growing move toward open source software for catalogs, do you have any thoughts on how social cataloging might fit into the mix?
Jezmynne Westcott: I prefer something like “Catalog, 2.0″ over “social cataloging” as I think, with the exchange and sharing of MARC records across libraries for years now, we’ve already been “socially cataloging.” But getting back to your question, I think this will become more commonplace. 2.0 concepts like tagging, community reviews, and rating items involves the user and gives them a feeling of engagement and ownership with the content. Isn’t this what we want? Our users to feel engaged in our resources? Feel ownership of our community collections? I would love to see library catalogs with streams of discussions and comments about the materials, like you see with online forums. I would love to see the rating of books and tagging of items to pair natural language descriptors to the LCSH. As a web user, I’ve come to expect these things in the sites I use, and I feel our users should expect them from us, as well. Additionally, with the movement towards defining “active” collections in a local setting and other collections in page-able repositories, the context the community provides will prove helpful for us and them in determining what is useful and valuable.