Tag: goodreads

Frustrations of a librarian

And it’s not the usual stuff about being poor misunderstood under-utilized bits of the school / community.  No, the frustration goes much much further.  It’s about how information, knowledge, books, data, well just about anything is NOT being tagged and catalogued and made generally searchable, available.

What prompted this?  Well my inbox. I subscribe to a few blog sites that are, well let’s say prolific is an understatement.  One is the NerdyBookClub and the other is  Global Literature in Libraries Initiative  and the last is Gathering Books. And do you know what is terribly frustrating – I get behind on the reading. Terribly behind. And I know there are all sorts of ways of IFTTTing your inbox, but what I’d prefer is that theses consortia of writers (because no one human can be so prolific, so usually the blogs are written by teams) would just tag their posts, and make the tags obvious at the TOP of the blog, so that I know whether to read it now or leave it for later or just delete it.

Let’s take some examples that I’ve been reading today in a desperate attempt to tame my inbox:

GLLI: French Graphic Novels in translation – not categorised and no tags. If I’d been writing that post it would have had the tags of: French, Translation, Graphic Novels, Middle Grade at the very least. Then I’d immediately know that it’s worth a read, because I need to increase the diversity of my collection, so some French books in translation are relevant. My students love GN’s so that would have caught my interest but NOT if the tag included YA, since right now I’m in K-6

NBC: A look at expository literature: again, the only tag is the author and their twitter tag. Not enough. I needed to know that they were talking about: picture books, nonfiction, mentor texts, and that it included a booklist. 

Gathering Books: Fears etc. again a fabulous site with resources, but the layout and curation makes my head spin and spin and spin. It’s really hard to find stuff, there are so much great reviews going on, but then sometimes it’s poetry, sometimes it’s other stuff. The posts are allocated to categories, but don’t seem to be tagged, so if I wanted to see all the book reviews on grief, or death, or migration for example I wouldn’t be able to do so.

And then the HUGE question of where all this goes?  And it’s a really big question. Because we all know the problems of finding great and diverse literature. Of finding authors with a unique voice who are new and interesting and not part of the publishing machinery. Ones that aren’t institutionalised onto the same old same old top 10 lists.But why do we keep going back to those lists? Because it’s so easy.

Where are all these fabulous blogs curating their book lists? Where are the catalogues? Are they on Goodreads with a proliferation of shelves or on LibraryThings with 100s of tags and collections?  Where are the links and the connections and the overlaps? Even the ones working together (like NBC) seem to be working on their own.Their site has a store selling mugs for heavens’ sake. The list on the side is a list of their bloggers, not of the books / categories / shelves. Even the Nerdies – their awards page, is an unlinked list of books that is not tagged or categories in any way… where are the librarians? This is not a criticism of what they’re doing – they’re doing some fabulous things – it’s about how they’re doing it, and how much easier it could be for their readers / followers!

 

First questions

(a) define what social networking is (in your own words);
In my opinion there are two types of social networking – that which occurs online, and that which occurs online. In both my online and offline worlds I enjoy having disparate networks of friends and connections who define parts of who I am and how I function in the world.  These days, my online and offline social networks often intertwine.
A network is basically a group of people who are connected to you by virtue of something you have in common.  For example, I have a network of friends who I work out with at crossfit.  We see each other at workouts and at functions organised by the box, but we’re also active through Facebook where we post articles and comments and questions to each other.
On the other hand, I’m a member of LinkedIn, where I’m connected to people who I’ve worked with or come into contact with professionally – a few of them are personal friends, and some are Facebook friends, but most are not.
For many years I wrote a blog on bilingual chinese / english education.  I wrote this anonymously and over the years built up quite a following of anonymous strangers, some of whom became friends – we were united in a social network but most of us never met.
The best social networks are the ones that give you a buzz, where you’re interacting, enjoying and learning and contributing all at the same time.  Funnily enough for me that usually works when I’m one on one with someone and we’re “jamming” – not in the musical sense but in the app sense, and it’s a case of “look what cool toy I found” and seeing how we can apply it to solve real world personal or professional problems (like today).  Or when you’re trying to plan thing and you or someone knows someone who then knows someone else who would be perfect for a talk or presentation or bit of information that will complete what you’re trying to achieve.
In order to have a good social network you need to be able to both “get out there” physically and network in real life, and “be out there” hanging out where your professional peers are hanging out – whether that’s blogging, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever else the flavour of the month is.  – And if your kids aren’t doing it – it’s probably not worth spending much time on.
 In the context of this course, social networking is probably referring to the networking that happens online.  
(b) list what social networking technologies and sites you already use (for personal, work and
study purposes); and
LInkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Diigo, Blogger, Flipboard, Youtube, Evernote, Goodreads, Whatsapp, Picassa, Google+, 


(c) describe what you expect to learn from completing INF506
Keep current, maximise and optimise my time online.  Coherence between the various platforms. 

INF506 goodreads books

Having slept over the booklist for this course, I woke up bright-eyed and energised and created a Goodreads group for discussion, review and commentary on the books.  Now for a strategy to try and make this a real group and community!

Most of the books have been read and reviewed by a world-wide community of active librarians and people involved in social networking and community, so that’s already a great start!