Book Review, Everything is Miscellaneous
Ok. Anyone who has been online in the past 5 years should know everything in this book. In particular for Librarians out there this should be old hat. However I can see how this wouldn't jive with some. Essentially the role of the Librarian is to de-miscellaneous the world of information. The term meta-data is used heavily in the book.
Some time a few years ago a group of Librarians and others interested got together to develop a set of standardized metadata called the Dublin Core. The goals of Dublin core (if I am not mistaken) was to create a rock solid set of metadata definitions that could describe 'documents'. Documents in the broadest sense of the word. The whole project was interesting but I don't think it makes quite the same interest as what Mr. Weinberger talks about. Essentially he describes the open tagging of FLICKR and Delicious and creating folksonomies and knowledge with the resulting *mass* of information.
The best example I have seen of this in action is the Library of Congress FLICKR project. Basically LoC digitized a huge quantity of photos and opened it up to citizens of the world to tag stuff. The end result is an interesting global knowledge base of the results.
The traditional gate keeper approach to librarianship is quickly becoming obsolete. The miscellania that is created by users as they interact with documents and knowledge is not being capitalized on in the Library realm. Reading this book should make it clear as to why that is needed and what benefits can come from it.
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