Library clips

I’ve posted about FAQQLY in my post about expert locators, basically FAQQLY is a Question & Answer Social Network, similar to Otavo…also check out Qunu for real-time IM expert help.

Anyway, the idea before asking a question is rummaging through the knowledge base to see if any relevant content may answer or help in your quest…search, browse content tags.

You can also browse FAQQLY for people tags, just like Ziki, soon Ziki will also allow others to tag you, as well as being able to tag yourself.

FAQQLY allows for self tagging, but I only see a search function, it needs a tag cloud…this way you can find self acclaimed topic experts.

Groups

What if you could group a collective of experts on a similar topic to form a kind of mini FAQQLY?

This URL would be the one-stop place for Q&A on a certain topic…this is the next best thing to creating your own topic based Q&A service…perhaps with Ning.

Well you don’t have to as FAQQLY now allows you to join and create groups, and describe the group with tags.

I suppose you could also just sign yourself only as a group…protected visibility.

Groups have an option as public, protected (joing by approval), private (content is privy to members only, and membership by invitation).

This is something Ziki is already doing, in Ziki you tag youself, in Ziki Groups, people join a group and collectively tag the group.

NOTE: Ziki is not a Q&A service, it is a social network personal content manager.

Findability I’d like to see:

- Browse recent, popular questions or answers
- Search/Browse name of person
- Search/Browse people tags (tag cloud)
- Search/Browse content tags (tag cloud)
- Search/Browse group names
- Search/Browse group tags (tag cloud)
- Search/Browse people tags within a group (tag cloud)
- Search/Browse content tags within a group (tag cloud)

Enhancements

At the moment you can view the group knowledge base by topic tag or simply ask the group a question…you can also view the members of a group and ask the member a question directly.
But at the moment you have to click on each member to see their tags, ie. what they specialise in.

So besides the group tag cloud, I’d also like to see another tag cloud, ie. all the personal (group member) tags in one cloud…and also a personal tag cloud next to the thumbnail of each member.

The problem is that if you bypass the group and ask a member a question directly in their user space, then this will not be included in the group knowledge base…there could be a way for a member to re-direct or re-publish a Q&A in the group space.

The good thing is that you could view the aggregated personal tag cloud for the group or view one person’s tag cloud via a member thumbnail, and ask the right question to the right person, this is even more essential if there is IM communication in the future.

Another feature would be for an individual to re-direct a question they were asked in their own user space to a group member.

More

On second thought groups still aren’t quite like creating your own mini FAQQLY, I’m thinking the library blogosphere could get together and create a Reference Library FAQQLY, within this you could create groups eg. engineering reference, business reference, medical reference, etc…

I was going to create a Reference Library group, I guess the tags would separate the content by topic, the problem is that I don’t want to be alerted business questions if I’m an engineering librarian.

Anyway I have decided to create an Engineering Librarian’s FAQ, I’m no expert as I’m the first to ask a question.

Who can I invite to answer a question or join the group, I don’t think any Library blog lists are broken down into topics, but I know a few lists:

DMOZ - Top: Reference: Libraries: Library and Information Science: Weblogs
Yahoo! - Directory > Reference > Libraries > Weblogs
PubSub - The Librarian List
Libdex - Library weblogs
LISfeeds
Blogging Libraries Wiki

Here are some science related library blogs:

GSU Library - Science News
Confessions of a Science Librarian
STLQ
Christina’s Library Rant
Information Overlord
DU Library - Engineering Resources
Eng Lib
Science Library Blog (Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Geology/Environmental Studies)
Science Library Pad
Really Simple Sidi
SD Librarian
Rowland Institute Library Blog
SciLib
ISEL Update
from your science librarian’s desk

[ADDED 18/08/06: I guess what I like about these Q&A services is that instead of using email to ask questions, we are using a public space. The benefit is that instead of asking one person, you are instead asking the world at large, allowing more chance to gain an answer.
Also these transactions are tagged and documented so they can be of help to others that may be asking the same or similar question.

Form what I understand in Otavo you are asking a question to no-one in particular, you are asking the world at large…people can follow the recent stream of lists/questions. Whereas in FAQQLY it seems you need to direct a question to an individual, and there isn’t an overall FAQQLY recent stream, this is a lacking feature, or perhaps it is designed as a more person to person service. The group feature opens this up a little as when you ask a question, all people in the group will be alerted.]

To create feeds for sites that don’t have their own native feeds I use Ponyfish…basically this scrapes the HTML content of the page, you can do some manual tuning so it scrapes the right type of content structure…see more scrapers here.

Another option called Feeds2.be came to me from 3spots, it’s the same thing but you don’t build it yourself, you first check if the feed you want to make it already available, otherwise you put in a request for it to be created.

For an RSS Toolkit check out one of the many lists kept by 3spots.

Create a recent posts widget for your blog with Timelines…difference is that they are shown in a timeline.

Clicking on a title will pop up a small box where you can read the whole post with the help of scrollbars, otherwise you can click to see the actual post.

[via 3spots]