Dinah Sanders of Metagrrrrl is the moderator.

Liz Lawley: Her mission is to convince people that librarians are relevant to IT.

Cynthia Hill is a librarian for Sun.

Tanya Rabourn is an info architect with MetLife.

Jon Udell is the InfoWorld blogger. He’s here because of his “library lookup” project, which is very cool. It’s a bookmarklet that will show you if a book you’re looking at on the Web is available in your local library. (The URL of the page you’re on has to have an ISBN in the url.) It requires no integration effort on the part of the library.

Hill says that librarians know how to authenticate information, which makes them valuable behind the corporate firewall.

Liz: Libraries are brick and mortar reputation management systems. She recommends del.icio.us, a shared bookmark system. She points to the emergence of shared vocabularies for talking ’bout stuff there. Librarians are good at managing controlled vocabularies.

Rabourn: Librarians used to be intermediaries. Now the end users are doing the searching.

Sanders: Libraries are starting to catalog web sites the way they catalog books. Just that something is cataloged gives it a certain weight.

Liz: Tanya said something about “information-seeking behavior.” One of the things that’s fascinating to me about del.icio.us is that it’s an emergent vocabulary. We can see how people are describing information. That’s an unusual opportunity.

Jon: You can see this in dmoz also.

Liz: Dmoz is different. Del.icio.us allows an emergence in which you have multiple views of things and then you can refine them.

Liz: Libraries have over-invested in proprietary IT. And our user licenses often prevent us from hacking them, making them less useful.

Jon: And there are other reasons to go to the library. It’s an interesting social space.

Liz: Our library took a page from Borders. You can even get food. And now people hang out there to talk.

Hill: People come to libraries also because they’re stable and they’re neutral.

Dinah: Could libraries become a magazine, aggregating local sites?

Liz: Libraries need to allow annotation. I want to be able to see the notes my colleagues have left. Libraries have been very reluctant to allow users to supply content.

Liz: Libraries are in trouble. In general they’ve done a very bad job of adopting to new technology.

Jon: I discovered my weblog was censored by one of the net nannies. Initially I thought it didn’t matter but it does because libraries are required to use net nannies.

Q: I can get recommendations from Amazon, also. What do librarians that makes them better at it?

A: That we’re not doing it to take money out of your pocket. Also, we can localize it.

Dinah recommends www.theshiftedlibrarian.com as a blog about libraries.

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