If you love your information, set it free
From PLN
If you love your information, set it free
by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest June 2007
This brief article in Harvard Business Review is especially relevant for today’s libraries, and it’s free!
Customers would rather go to Web sites that aggregate product information than to individual, separate company pages. That’s because aggregated information has added value. Some companies are surprised that they actually benefit from having their information pooled. Their presence in the marketplace is broadened and the cost of providing information to users is lowered. And the aggregator drives “business” back to the source organization.
According to the author, the key to all this is metadata. It’s what drives the aggregation.
(Of course, WorldCat.org is a great example of this for libraries. Yet another example is the work being done by the University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives unit to integrate the UW Libraries Digital Collections into students’ information workflow by inserting links into Wikipedia. Since only 2% of college and university students begin searching for information at an individual library’s web site, the UW group believes it is “incumbent upon Librarians to look for new ways to reach out to our users where they begin their information search.” If you haven’t already read about the UW project, check out the article in D-Lib Magazine. In my humble opinion, libraries nationally--and internationally--need to collaborate to link Wikipedia and library materials. Here’s a great rant about this and about the need for libraries to edit Wikipedia entries from Jeff Pomerantz, a faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science if you want to read more!)
(David Weinberger, “If you love your information, set it free,” Harvard Business Review, June 2007. Free! Just click on the link)
