However, Beth Gallaway brought up an excellent point via her twitter:  “If they [tags] are standardized it becomes a formal taxonomy … Which is the opposite of a folksonomy.”

And isn’t one of the great things about social media the folksonomy – a chance to see what comes out of the various minds on the internet, to allow people to search and categorize in all sorts of ways?  It doesn’t take up real estate to tag both “teen culture” and “emo” so why not?  Who know what connections can be made if we leave the field open?

The session I went to this morning was on Library 2.0. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, “we have Helene ( Blowers with us now in Columbus, Ohio, we don’t need to hear other folks talk about this.” Not true! It’s not going to be a reality for CML unless we all hop on that same train, my friends!

Points I gleaned:

• Design for uncertainty – you never know what is going to happen, and you should be ready to shift if needed to better serve the customers
• Keep experimenting! There is no right or wrong, there is just experimentation – if it works do it more, if it doesn’t work, try the next idea.
• In Boston they have Youtube vids of teens booktalking – on their website!
• Learning 2.0 is amazing (GO HELENE!)
• Web-based activity (i.e. on a teen website the library runs) is higher when it’s associated with a program.
• “Reminder me later” feature on their events calendar. They can program themselves to get a reminder 3 days before the event is going to take place.
• Michael Stephens is really as much fun in person as his blog would indicate.
• Speak in a human voice – remember that your customers will respond to this better than to another lecture.
• Circ staff is blogging about books for customers – and they’re sending circ staff to Book
• Expo to help them! They’re our front line – if they don’t know about the books, and they’re the ones who are known, we’re losing and opportunity.
• The library should be transparent, meaning we should allow comment in the catalog, etc.
• Throw out the culture of being perfect.
• Aim to satisfy the hearts of your customers.
• Learn to learn.
• Adapt to change.
• Scan the horizon.

Ideas I had while listening:

• Start a FlickR site where kids and adults and staff can post pictures of library events.
• Start a “1000 readers” project where we get a series of photos of people – maybe all reading the same book? Maybe each reading their fave. Why not even maybe use those things for our promotions? Our customers using the library!
• Stop worrying about controling the content of library blogs, and just let it go.
• If you haven’t read it yet, go read Tame the Web’s post on the library that disallows MySpace and Facebook. Pay particular attention to the comments – there is a good discussion going.