Thank you all for your contributions to our e-forum over the last two days.
We hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. Please find below a
summary of the discussions from day 2.

We will shortly be circulating a list of the various resources mentioned
during the course of the e-forum and this will also be available on the CIG
website.

CIG eforum on social media in the cataloguing community - Day 2

Day 2 moved on from Twitter to look at recommendations for cataloguing
blogs and the use of both internal and external blogs by cataloguers.

There was interest in the use of wikis for cataloguing manuals and internal
documentation. A number of different platforms were mentioned from
participants already using wikis for cataloguing manuals and also for
collaborative working on international standards development. Other
collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox were also recommended.

The discussion returned to social tagging in catalogues. There were some
concerns about a lack of consistency in user tagging and about the need to
achieve a critical mass - something difficult for a single institution to
achieve - for tagging to be really useful. A number of research projects
and personal experiences suggested that tagging was not very popular with
academic library users in particular and that tags were often merely action
terms like "toread" or course codes. Some cataloguers queried whether tags
should be moderated and how burdensome this might be. It was pointed out
that attribution - the notion of "who said that?" - was increasingly
becoming a feature of metadata. This led to the idea of crowdsourcing,
specifically felt to be useful for more obscure subjects.

There were some concerns about privacy but also about the use of third
party tools where the user does not own their data. The existence of
information and networks in various different social media platforms was
seen as a possible "balkanisation" of the internet, which needed to be
borne in mind when using social media sites.

Concerns about the workload involved in social media use were raised again.
However, it was felt quite strongly that cataloguing staff should be
involved in any institutional social media use as much as frontline staff,
as they have different things to contribute and speak to different but
overlapping audiences. While some had encountered resistance, social media
was becoming "flavour of the month" with some library management which made
it easier to get management buy-in for such projects.

--
Céline Carty
English Cataloguing
Cambridge University Library
Cambridge CB3 9DR