PRESENTATION B5

ONE SEARCH, MANY OPTIONS

Karen Stone
State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD

Social networking tools have been adopted with great enthusiasm throughout the world and are promoting richer connections between individuals. For the geographically dispersed Queensland population, these tools facilitate collaboration and interaction, encouraging engagement and the shared development of content.

The One Search initiative will bring social networking tools to the State Library of Queensland's (SLQ) environment, enabling our clients to become involved in the collections in a very tangible way.

Through these 'social spaces', clients will be able to interact with SLQ and with each other. They will be able to add their own reviews and read other clients' reviews, add tags and use tags to enhance their experience.

For these new connections to be meaningful, trustworthy and effective, State Library will be developing policies to determine how we will manage contributions - etiquette, usage limits, retention of client input. We will be making decisions on how to manage negative reviews or inappropriate comments and questioning the relationship of contributions to our collections. Should comments be retained? For how long?

Looking closely at the contributions made in these social spaces will help us to determine effective usage of client-generated knowledge and will feed into decisions on how to use tags and reviews in the various collections? Analyzing client input - what type of records are being tagged and reviewed; what kind of tags and reviews are being added - will also feed into this decision making process as well as providing potential insight into future collection building.