I enjoyed Mangiofico's presentation today on the social life of information. His lecture shared many parallels with Shirky's article, "Ontology is Overrated." Both talked about direct contribution from users to share and gain information over the web, and how user generated information is better than categorization by the owners of the website. For example, Mangiofico mentioned that many university catalogs pay LibraryThing money to have their records linked to LibraryThing's records. This allows the university catalogs to have better dynamic social data about their books. One example of this is that while on the university catalog books typically only have a few subjects, LibraryThing's users provide much more informative tags on the many topics of each book. Linking to LibraryThing's content allows the university catalog to take advantage of this information.
I particularly enjoyed that Mangiofico showed us some of the technologies he was speaking about, Delicious, CiteULike, WorldCat, and LibraryThing. These websites are all based on user added content to enact their purpose. However, each sight has its own purpose. Delicious is used to share/bookmark/tag websites the user finds interesting. CiteULike is like Delicious, but for research papers rather than websites. WorldCat is an online category of libraries' information, and LibraryThing is the Delicious of books. One nifty thing Mangiofico showed us about WorldCat was that WorldCat's search sorted by "relevance" rates books depending on which books, journals, etc. are owned by the most libraries, and therefore are the most valued. He compared this with Duke Library's own catalog search system, which returned far less relevant results.
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Yes, that made me want to go back and look more. I like how it doesn't have to be a choice between the big bad world out there and the content that is locally vetted (like in our local library!), and that you can pick you affiliate groups.
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