userslib.com

This morning is our kickoff event for the MLibrary2.0 program.

The first speaker is Peter Morville who spoke about findability and how we need to expand on the idea of usability to findability.

“Can users find our website, can they find their way around our website, can they find what they need despite our website”

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” So how do we deal with our massive findability issues? We can’t leave it to microsoft or google. Its up to the librarians -this ain’t your mama’s metadata! There’s an explosion of metadata on the web with tons of sites and services that let users generate their own content (wikipedia, flickr, delicous, etc.) So we need to find ways to make the old (cataloging) and the new (tagging) work together – bring taxonomies and folksonomies together. Etsy is good example of using these two techniques.

Guided navigation is also something we should be paying more attention to. Remember berrypicking from library school? NCSU and other schools have started incorporating faceted browsing into their catalogs. The basic idea here is to help the patrons find things they didn’t know they needed to find.