Review 1- Users collaboration in websites

Web 2.0 differs from Web1.0. Web 2.0 brings the internet in to next generation which users can participate in a website, as well as contribute the data or through tagging, comments, rating and review. It is easy to form a community around the Web.

At the beginning of the article, author listed some excellent example of Web2.0 concept such as eBay, Wikipedia, Blogger, Amazon and Google.
This article talked about how library using of Web2.0 as a library services. National Library of Australia took two services as gateways to resources that meet the needs of their clientele. These two services are PictureAustralia and Australia Dancing.

PictureAustralia began in 1998 and now provides access to over million pictures. It aimed to let users search online pictorial collections. This service allows users to be built up relationship with the website interfaces. Users upload their images to PictureAustralia groups. National Library then harvests the photos and thumbnails and adds them to PcitureAustralia. Author pointed out that the projects increased the incentive of the users to take pictures with contribution to PictureAustralia. Users can add tags to pictures to identified subject of the picture which then assists other users in finding images when searching. Due to successful of PictureAustralia project, some institutions likes Powerhouse Museum refer to PictureAustralia to start experimenting with tagging their tagging collections

Australia Dancing is another service federated directory of resources held in Australian collections that are contains biographical material about Australian dancers. Author had used comprehensive passages to describe Australia Dancing. But studying himself, author gave a good example of comparison with Wikipedia.

At the end of the article, author raised the point “Biographies-killer data”. In the Web2.0 world, every user can contribute any information to the website in results that bulks of information flood in the website. In order to maintain and provide access to authoritative biographical information, National Library has been toying with the idea if repurposing and extending the Australian Name Authority File.

The shortcomings I discovered is the major topic of the articles was not been clearly presented. In the beginning of the articles, author told us what is meant of Web2.0 and the Internet as platform. Although author use two services as example to demonstrate how web2.0 affect library services, authors did not provide clearly presentation it and did not present how the service benefits to users. In additional, this article is a study of author himself and lack of evaluation to support his points. As author said ‘the project has not been widely promted yet and so I can’t say very much more about its outcomes’ (Pearce 2006). It is suggest comparing two examples to other services of their type. It can strongly to proof and demonstrate the view of point.

To conclude, Author used a two example to present how to use Web 2.0 technologies to create new library services to users. Picture Australia is successful to rise users’ interesting and build up a communication between libraries and users. However, the Australia Dancing project seems unsuccessful because it was not widely promoted to users. A successful project to users not only based on the new technologies, but also based on the trust of users and their collaboration.




Reference List
Pearce, J. (2006) User collaboration in websites. Retrieved August 25, 2009 from http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2006/jpearce1.html