Should libraries host user generated content?

From LLN

Should libraries host user generated content?

Contents

This essay originally appeared, in slightly different form, as a December 3, 2007 post on the blog Librarians matter.

Note: Additional material from Leader's Digest added November 7, 2008

by Kathryn Greenhill, published February 26, 2008

We know that the nature of the web is changing from read only to read/write. Traditionally libraries have been concerned about access to reading material. Is it time to look toward access to read/write material too--not just by cataloging or linking to it, but by creating a platform for our users?

It’s disruptive

The novel--mainstay of many public library collections--only came into existence in English in 1740 with Richardson’s Pamela. A sustained fictional narrative was a new thing. I presume its success was partly due to rising literacy among those likely to consume it, but also a new mindset where fiction was accepted as content matter worth reading.

More than 150 years after the first novel, it was still a disruptive technology. American librarians were discussing what they called the “fiction problem”--which was that

people liked fiction, while many librarians regarded fiction-reading as little better than pool-playing. ("Readers’ advisory service: New directions." Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, RQ v30 n4 p503 - 18 Sum 19)

The read/write web is similarly disruptive. Just like the librarians of the 1900s didn’t want to become custodians and enablers of something they considered trivial and contrary to their “real purpose,” social networking software is viewed by many contemporary librarians in a similar way.

Our skills can be easily adapted

Librarians actually have skills that would make us very good at providing social networking platforms for our users. We have skills at evaluating information resources. Many libraries have built complex matrices to assess potential online journal subscriptions--which include technical IT factors like platform independence, compatibility with existing systems--as well as user interface, ease of access, ease of use. We often liaise with technical services or IT to get our databases working well. We have a lot of expertise as the “middle layer” between databases and users--setting it up, integrating it into existing systems, writing and giving training.

Is using other social platforms “privatizing information by stealth”?

A participant in the Victoria Public Libraries Learning 2.0 program expressed in their final post (on the deliciously named blog It’s the Queen of Darkness, pal) concerns about libraries using private internet conglomerates to store their data. I guess this covers services like Picture Australia using Flickr or subject guides created using a del.icio.us tag cloud. Quoting from that post:

Personally, my take on web 2.0 is that libraries need to get much more actively involved “from the inside” rather than whooping from the sidelines (if I can go back to my Oprah analogy, in case you missed it). I think that using all the technologies in the learning 2.0 program is a great idea, but really I think we need to move far beyond just using other companies gadgets and gizmos to and going “wow that’s pretty cool, what a nifty idea” to being the ones that are coming up with the ideas and actually inventing the gizmos.
I have said this before, but, for example, rather than encouraging everyone to use blogger, I think libraries, especially state and national libraries should be setting up their own blogging sites for their users. Where will Blogger be in 100 years? Who will be looking great grandmother Ethel’s blog from when she was a teenager? Rather than entrusting all our cultural data to corporate conglomerates, why not put it in the hands of our oldest, and most esteemed public institutions, our libraries?
Frankly, I think we need to start doing these things or we will become irrelevant and then disappear (yikes).

When would it make sense?

Obviously libraries aren’t going to try out-wiki Wikipedia or out-blog blogger, but there are times when it makes sense for someone in an organization to provide social networking platforms on behalf of the organization--and I’d argue that our skills perfectly place us to be that someone. Let's take providing blogging software for an institution for example. Here are some instances where it makes sense for an organization to self-host:

  1. If the DNS is important. If you want your users to be able to find you using the URL associated with your institution. Yes, you can associate a hosted site with your own URL, but often the network security department isn’t going to let you do that.
  2. If your clients are not charged for traffic inside a local network. At my university, students are not charged for traffic on sites within the Western Australian university network, but are for those outside. Independent hosting would force students to pay to access those sites.
  3. If it belongs on an intranet.
  4. If the organization has an ethical or statutory duty to ensure data is 100% secure and archivable.
  5. Staff are required to use a blog as part of their job--e.g., instead of a departmental newsletter. They should be able to use their existing staff authentication to author the blog and not be forced off-site.

It’s already happening

UThink: blogs at the University of Minnesota is a project where the University Libraries are using Movable Type to host and maintain blogs for their university community. I have heard on the grapevine that there are another couple of university libraries in North America planning to do the same thing.

The statistics for UThink are impressive:

  • Blogs: 5366
  • Entries: 78202
  • Comments: 104272
  • Authors: 12653

I applaud the reasons the librarians give in their answer to the FAQ Why are university libraries hosting blogs?

The Libraries have numerous goals with this project: to promote intellectual freedom, to help build communities of interest on campus, to investigate the connections between blogging and the traditional academic enterprise, and to retain the cultural memory of the institution.

Kathryn Greenhill lives in Fremantle, Western Australia and works as Emerging Technologies Specialist at Murdoch University Library. Used by permission.

Let volunteers build your organization

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest October 2008

“[U]ser contributions are fueling some of the world’s fastest-growing and most competitively advantaged organizations.” Their names are familiar—Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, eBay, Skype—but traditional industries are also tapping into this phenomenon. The concept of user contribution isn’t new, but what is new is that organizations are now creating user contribution systems—”methods for aggregating and leveraging people’s contributions or behaviors in ways that are useful to other people.”

The users can be customers, staff—whoever. Their contributions can be active or passive (e.g., Skype’s phone system is built upon the unused processing capacity of its customers’ computers). The system is the method used to aggregate contributions and make them useful (i.e., of value) to others; this value can be entertainment, membership in a community, lower prices, or information of any kind. (The article has a great little user contribution taxonomy that you should take a look at—not just for the information but also for the interesting presentation and the taxonomy itself.)

Your challenge as a leader is to learn how to spot opportunities for creating value from user-added content and to act on those opportunities, which requires that you overcome “natural organizational resistance” to relinquishing control to other people. One very common argument against user contributions is that they’re unreliable and error-ridden, but the article asks us to look at Wikipedia. The article also makes note of television’s American Idol, whose success results “in part from user ownership of results.”

(Scott Cook, “The contribution revolution: Letting volunteers build your business,” Harvard Business Review, October 2008.)

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