Joe Lamantia.com

OCLC has caught the socially con­structed meta­data fever. A release on the OCLC site titled “User-contributed con­tent pilot” dis­cusses a pilot pro­gram to allow Open World­Cat users to add pub­licly vis­i­ble meta­data, in the form of reviews and descrip­tive details, to exist­ing records.
This looks the lat­est step in the wave of explo­ration of meth­ods and mod­els for putting socially con­structed meta­data into prac­tice that’s play­ing out in pub­lic. (Is this nec­es­sar­ily done in pub­lic? I’m curi­ous to hear thoughts on how this might be done with closed or cloaked com­mu­ni­ties, like IBM’s intranet).
Broadly, it looks like a wide vari­ety of enti­ties are fol­low­ing the stan­dard new prod­uct or ser­vice devel­op­ment cycle with regards to socially con­structed meta­data. A sim­pli­fied ver­sion of this cycle is:
1. Con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion, tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment
2. Prod­uct devel­op­ment
3. Intro­duc­tion to mar­ket
4. Mar­ket Accep­tance and growth
5. Ongo­ing Mar­ket as con­ven­tional prod­uct
A quick review of known social book­mark­ing / tag­ging ven­tures dis­trib­uted over a num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions sup­ports the idea that each exper­i­ment is at one of these stages.
Some visu­al­iza­tions of devel­op­ment and pro­to­type cycles are avail­able here, and here.
Where’s it headed? I think we’ll see at least forms forms or appli­ca­tions of socially con­structed meta­data sta­bi­lize and become pub­licly rec­og­nized and accepted in the near future, with more on the way that will sur­prise every­one. Those four are:
1. Fee for ser­vices mod­els, pay­ing for access to pre­mium qual­ity pools of col­lec­tively man­aged infor­ma­tion under pro­fes­sional (paid) edi­to­r­ial cus­tody. OCLC could adopt this model.
2. Non-commercial com­mu­nity dri­ven pools of social knowl­edge. This might be delicio.us.
3. Deploy­ment as an enabler or attribute of other prod­uct / ser­vice mod­els. Flickr is an exam­ple of this per­haps.
4. Pub­licly free but com­mer­cial­ized infor­ma­tion min­ing oper­a­tions, deriv­ing sal­able value from for­mal­iz­ing the seman­tic rela­tion­ships between peo­ple, groups, and infor­ma­tion objects. TagCloud.com might fall into this group, or maybe Clouda­li­cious.
5. Some­thing very inno­v­a­tive I will wish I’d thought of when it’s released.
Excerpts from the OCLC release:
“As of Octo­ber 9, 2005, Open World­Cat users are able to add their own con­tent to author­i­ta­tive World­Cat infor­ma­tion about library-held titles. Avail­able under the Details and Reviews tabs, this func­tion­al­ity per­mits those who have located library items through Open World­Cat to return to the inter­face and add eval­u­a­tive con­tent.“
“User-contributed con­tent will help extend the OCLC cat­a­loging coöper­a­tive to include non-cataloging library pro­fes­sion­als and — more impor­tantly — patrons. Their shared par­tic­i­pa­tion in World­Cat con­tent cre­ation and man­age­ment could fos­ter a larger sense of library-centered com­mu­nity and gen­er­ate more inter­est in library resources.”