me, jessica & stephanie worked together on the flickr project and successfully created a new york city (dis)connection story. my part of contribution was to go visit libraries in new york city and capture every possible thing happening there. as we all know, libraries aren't just for books.
with that aim in mind, i went to nypl main building and mid-manhattan library. well, with that particular aim in mind, everything looked meaningful. libraries are certainly beyond just books. libraries mean books, dvds, database, events, classes, movies, place to rest, place to study, place to solve problems, place to escape to, place to seek silence, place to take photos, simply a good place to visit for everyone.
the following is a link to our group's project.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35856484@N06/sets/72157614956904409/
speaking of flickr, this was my first exposure. thank you, professor! for getting me out of digital illiteracy day by day. little by little i got the taste of 'tagging', and the power of medium that enables people to catalog/classify/organize thier own (visual) information and share them with other people. there is no intimidating aacr, marc21, dublin core, etc involved. instead, each individual uses their own discretion and make information organization and retrieval as easy and practical as possible. it surely reflects the concept of collective intelligence and democratization of information. flickr, indeed, is one of the pioneering examples, but not the only one. we heard of libraything.com, where one can classify their own book for her/his own convenience. all these movements or phenomena are truly revolutionary. rather than following sets of rules set by so-called establishement, people experiment and experience 'information' in every possible way.
it's democratic and entertaining!
it seem a bit too early to jump to a conclution on the full potential of tagging, and if i'm not wrong, it's only active in 'grass-root' level as of now. whether it'll stay there or move to a next level, something i can't predict for now, is hard to know.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It was fun working with you digitally!
ReplyDeleteI agree about the meaningfulness of everything that a library contains, offers, stands for, when you're looking at it with the right eyes. I have some students who are utterly uninterested in the public library, and the stigma against them in a certain age and population kind of blows my mind. More and more students (and people, in general), though, are vocal about their use of and love for the libraries we are so lucky to have scattered throughout the city. Or maybe that's just what I'm noticing, now that I'm paying close attention to the library world. :)
I think that the full potential of tagging will be met when we figure out the best way to govern the whole process--namely, making it consistent...ish.