Results tagged “storytelling” from WorldCat Blog

A recent discussion with Matt Goldner, product and technology advocate here at OCLC, reminded me of my favorite quote from the wonderful movie "Big Fish."

Matt described to me a workshop he conducted where he discussed what librarians and patrons believe to be most important in information discovery:

• Librarians are interested in the metadata because that's what they use to locate the item a patron needs. This is important when you and I are standing in front of them asking for help. Perfect metadata helps the librarians help us faster.
• Us patrons, and Web users, are more interested in discovering what is out there because in many cases we haven't figured out exactly what to ask for. We use search engines and keywords to locate things. Then we use reviews, tags and user comments to evaluate whether the things we've found will really help us. (Which is why reviews, tags and comments are often called evaluative content.)

If we were standing in a library or in a live chat, a librarian would ask us all the right questions and suggest the resources most likely to provide what we need. Without having that librarian there to evaluate our needs and apply their expertise, we're left trying to determine quality and appropriateness on our own.

And that's where I started thinking about Big Fish. Albert Finney's character, Ed Bloom, is a salesman and a storyteller while his son, Will, is a reporter for United Press International. Albert delivers the movie's climatic phrase in a subtle moment by saying that his son can't tell a story well because he would give you "all of the facts and none of the flavor."

That strikes me as an important difference between metadata and evaluative content. Mind you, I'm not talking about the librarians. They can provide all the flavor you want. But when you remove the person--the storyteller--and it is just you and your computer, the facts just aren't enough. We need some flavor, some context to help us evaluate the information and to make it useful.

I cornered Matt the other day because I'm re-reading an old article, "Collaborative Tagging as a Knowledge Organisation and Resource Discovery Tool" (Library Review V. 55; No. 5, 2006). The authors, George Macgregor and Emma McCulloch, discuss the pros and cons of tagging and controlled vocabularies. While they clearly favor the controlled vocabularies of the library world, they allow that tagging is a means for "exploring exhaustive subject areas before formal exploration."

Tags and evaluative content provide the context, the flavor, we need to help us zero in on what we're really looking for. Nothing beats a good reference interview by a librarian, but when it is just me and my computer, evaluative content works very well. And that's why I love working on WorldCat.org. We're bringing more and more evaluative content to the site to help Web users discover some of the flavor of what libraries have to offer.

Jennie Stapp, who is the digital library director of the Montana State Library, posted a comment on my previous blog entry. I thought it would be better to respond to her comment in another post because I wanted to link to a number of Web pages.

Jennie connected my blog post to her state library's marketing campaign: What's Your Story. The Web site for the campaign sounds interesting. I'd love to hear some of the stories they get.

While reading her comment, I thought about where all of these stories come from and where we find them. I assume Montana's What's Your Story campaign will collect the stories on their site, but I also wonder about aggregating stories from other sites.

Without rereading David Lanke's writing on libraries as community conversations, I'm in danger of "steeling" his ideas. That is not my intent, but I will blunder on.... I'm wondering how many stories are taking place on Flickr or YouTube or some blog somewhere. These stories too are interesting to our neighbors, which is to say library patrons.

So I dug a little into library content and into the Web's social content. Using WorldCat I unearthed photos of the interior of the First National Bank of Glasgow, Montana circa 1910. Then I did a quick search on Flickr for Glasgow images. And I found this great video on YouTube: glasgow high school cell phone survey. There's a lot of stories on the Related Videos section of of that page too.

I think it would be fascinating to see these types of stories on the Leisure and Recreation section of the What's Your Story site.

My local library is more than a gallery, where I go to look at stuff; it is a museum where I go to make sense of stuff. Just as an archived photo collection or a family's personal papers can help me learn about life in Glasgow, MT; so can that YouTube video.

I know I am touching on issues of collection maintenance (how libraries decide what they are going to buy and keep) and staff time. Should the limited resources of our neighborhood libraries be spent making sense of what's on YouTube and Flickr as well as what is on their shelves and in their article and journal databases?

We, the WorldCat bloggers, tend to think about libraries a lot. We read about libraries. We visit libraries as professionals. We talk to librarians. Many times we are working for librarians here at OCLC. We do things that help libraries help you, the library patron. We spend a lot of time thinking about libraries.

I'm reading a book right now; it is not about libraries but about storytelling. I just came across a simple, two word sentence that made me think critically about what I'm doing on WorldCat.org. And what I'm doing on WorldCat.org is helping to build better list tools, better profiles and helping to introduce new capabilities like tagging, reviews and ratings.

Right now you might be asking: So what? And that's the sentence I came across when reading Storytelling in Organizations. "So what?" What does it mean to build a Web site that lets people find things in tens of thousands of libraries around the world? What story will make people care about what we are doing here?

There's the obvious: We're making information even more accessible than it already is. But I don't think that's the Big Idea, and I don't think that is a compelling story.

David Lankes, a librarian, has talked and written about how a library is really involved in a conversation with the people that visit it, that is it's patrons ... you. The conversation revolves around the things you read, watch and listen to. The conversation takes place in many ways, what you talk about over dinner, in your school or at work. This is, admittedly, an over simplified perspective of David's deep body of work; but it serves me well in thinking about libraries as an integral part of our communities.

So when we talk about the tings we read and watch and listen to, we create new relevance to these things we find in libraries. Each time you tell someone about the CD you checked out from the library you provide new context for that library.

The Web is great for telling stories and having conversations. The Web amplifies these conversations. You stories can grow by just sharing a list of things that help you complete a project or learn a new skill or just past some time.

That's my "So what?" I come to work to help build things that help other people share their experiences and interests. Does that seem far fetched? Take a look at a few of my lists. I think you'll understand a little about my story. If that story has any relevance to your own, we might be able to start a conversation.

(I can't publish this without at least a nod to Ministry's 'So What'.)

A couple weeks ago I attended a LibraryCamp at the Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, IN. Before you ask: No. We did not sleep at the library.

A bunch of librarians and library types and a wannabe or two (like me) got together to talk about how we use libraries and how libraries can do better at meeting your needs. It was much more fun than you might expect. At least for us wannebe's. ACPL did a great job and drew a lot of interesting people.

Anyway, I sort of facilitated a session on gaming in the library. I say "sort of" because I'm not a great facilitator, and I'm not a big gamer. Most of the people showed up at the session to play Guitar Hero or Rock Band so we didn't talk about gaming all that much. But I did talk to a few librarians who are responsible for their library's young adult and/or children's collections.

The conversation reminded all of us of the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series, which in turn reminds me of the old text-based adventure computer games I played back in 1984 and 85. (Type "N" to go north. Don't type "F" for forward because you'll fall through the porch. Type "R" to run from the werewolf when you do fall through the porch. That sort of thing.)

This all came back to me the other day when my son, who is in third grade, came home with two CYOA books. He's very excited about reading these books. This from the boy who begs me to play Myst with him. (I still haven't finished the original Myst. I told you, I'm not a big gamer.)

Our library has a lot of computer games that kids can check out, and the library has a few machines for the kids to play CD-ROM games like The Magic School Bus. But right now the CYOA book series is the most exciting thing to my son. Why?

I think Captain Planet summed it up for the Mellennial Generation: "The power is yours!" Just like in gaming! Whether it is the old Castle Quest or Spore, you can make choices and discover the outcomes.

So just how different is gaming from the CYOA series? You have fewer choices, but all narrative structures have boundaries. The medium is different, but not much different from games of yore. The book is 'single player,' or is it? You are still making choices and discovering outcomes when you read a CYOA book. I think that is what excited my son. It's a different narrative experience, but you still get a sense of influence as the events unfold.

Often times we struggle to keep our kids interested in reading and to limit their screen time. As Janet Murray suggests in Hamlet on the Holodeck, we should look back to older forms of storytelling and consider how those formats influence the next.

Maybe I'll introduce my sons to my old Hypercard stacks.

BTW: Using the new tagging feature on WorldCat.org, I added "Choose Your Own Adventure" to a few of the CYOA books available in our local library. Tag some yourself so we can gather all of these.