Ask not what your library can do for you, ask what you can do for your library. Paraphrased from President Kennedy’s inaugural address, 1961
Although the ALA Bill of Rights in Figure 2.1 asserts that libraries are forums for information and ideas, we have seen that libraries are really providers of services and users are consumers of resources. Most libraries offer little scope for users to contribute content or metadata. However, many Web sites have shown that offering users a more active role in collection development can yield startling benefits.
Even before the advent of the Web, some were suggesting that user-supplied data might begin to address the information overload we all experience. Of course, librarians traditionally discourage patrons from adding value to paper materials (or defacing them, as librarians tend to see it). Neither did librarians permit users to add their own cards to the card catalog. However, with digital content, readers can choose whether to access the original version or a user-enhanced one, because user contributions are stored separately from the original content and can be combined or viewed separately as the occasion demands. An example application of this is illustrated in Section 12.2 (Design pattern 5) where a user can augment a sheet music digital library with "post-it" style annotations.
Most digital library systems are still conceived of as read-only repositories, where users are consumers rather than contributors. But the much-heralded Web 2.0 revolution’s aim is to harness social effects and to create Web applications that improve as more people use them. In library terms, this requires a change of mindset from creating information for patrons’ use to creating an initial structure that patrons can supplement. Thus, libraries can evolve from exclusive suppliers of information that users consume into a partnership where both the library and its users supply material.
What kind of information could users supply? Here are some ideas.
Annotations
Many readers add notes in the margins of their books: to highlight important points, to make links with another concept (in another book), or to disagree with the printed text. The annotations may be personal, but they do not have to be: they could be shared with other readers. Some people might prefer annotated books over clean ones—particularly if they respect the annotator’s opinion on the topic.
Keywords
A special form of annotation is the addition of keywords or tags. Keywords are terms that provide a useful summary of important topics associated with a document and can be used in a digital library to enhance searching and browsing. Keywords and tags build bridges between the documents and the user’s vocabulary and also create new associations between documents—just as traditional author-assigned keywords do.
Ratings
Ratings are another special kind of annotation: they are a quantitative assessment on a particular scale, usually numeric. We are familiar with ratings for all kinds of everyday goods and services, from films to laptops to airline food. Ratings are easy to add to a document, and numeric ones lend themselves to computational processing, such as averaging and sorting. Amazon and other e-commerce sites use ratings to enhance their display of search results, and, together with usage data, to personalize results for individual users.
Corrections
Users can also supply error reports, signaling to the librarians that something is wrong with the collection. This can be as simple as a single click marking a piece of metadata as inaccurate—perhaps a typo in the author’s name. For error correction, the user interface must allow users to flag errors easily, and the interface must be backed up by an infrastructure that summarizes the feedback and communicates it to librarians. Most digital libraries do not allow users to contribute in this manner, missing out on a potentially valuable source of quality improvement.
New documents
Finally, users can, in principle, add new documents, although collection development is usually regarded as a role that needs to be performed, or at least moderated, by a trained librarian. Many Web technologies have allowed unstructured and unmoderated groups of documents to proliferate on the Internet. However, there is a middle ground between a read-only library and a chaotic user-supplied document dump.
A common example of user-initiated document submission integrated with librarian oversight is the institutional repository discussed in Section 2.1, and demonstrated later in two worked examples (Sections 7.6 and 11.6). As with annotations and ratings, user-initiated document submission relies on digital library software to support both users and librarians in expanding the collection.
Partial and fluid documents
As mentioned in Section 1.2, in the first half of the 20th century, both H. G. Wells and Vannevar Bush prophesied the emergence of new and all-encompassing forms of libraries. Both foresaw user contributions as the key to creating and maintaining such structures.
The most striking example of user contributions on the Web (or anywhere else) is the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia contains 10 million articles in 250 different languages. The English-language version contains 2.5 million articles totaling around 1 billion words (in 2008). Debates flare up about the quality of the articles and the reliability of the content, but Wikipedia has become a valued reference source for many Web users.
From its inception, the project offered a unique, entirely open, collaborative editing process, scaffolded by then-new wiki software for group Web-site building, and it is fascinating to see how things have flourished under this regime. Wikipedia has effectively enabled the entire world to become a panel of experts, authors, and reviewers—contributing under their own name, or, if they wish, anonymously.
Wikipedia’s growth is astonishing: the acquisition of 1 billion words in seven years requires the addition of an average 400,000 words, or about five full-length novels, per day. One key reason for this growth is the absence of technical barriers: if you can view an article in a Web browser, then you can change it (all you need to do is to click the edit button at the top of the screen). Another advantage is that users can make incremental changes. An edit can add (or delete) large amounts of text or a single character. Text that is deleted is not removed from the system: it can be easily reinstated.
Figure 2.8 shows the beginning of the Wikipedia article Library. Its revision history shows that it was created on 9 November 2001 in the form of a short note (which, in fact, bears little relationship to the current version) and has been edited about 1500 times since then. Recent edits have added new links and new entries to lists, have indicated possible vandalism and its reversal, have corrected spelling mistakes, etc.
Wikipedia is very much a community effort. Each article has a discussion page that provides a forum for debate about how it might be criticized, improved, or extended in the future. The discussion page for Library is almost as long as the article itself and contains the following observations, among many others:
Libraries can also be found in churches, prisons, hotels etc. Should there be any mention of this?
Daniel C. Boyer 20:38, 10 Nov 2003
Libraries can be found in many places, and articles should be written and linked. A wiki article on libraries can never be more of a summary, and will always be expandable.
DGG 04:18, 11 September 2006
Wikipedia will never be finished. While this means that anyone can corrupt articles by adding untrue or irrelevant statements, and nefarious users can even vandalize them, it also means that the information can be augmented whenever the world changes. Contrast this with books, which are potentially out of date before they are printed.
Therefore, the fluidity of Wikipedia articles contrasts with the fixity of traditional library materials. User involvement in knowledge creation and distribution is arguably a vitally important innovation.
Figure 2.8: Wikipedia article Library
And user involvement requires the role of the digital librarian to expand again, to provide an infrastructure for knowledge production, rather than merely preserving existing content.
