LS589 – Week 7 blog post: Mini-Mizer & Literature Map

In going over my classmates’ presentations for the top 10 applications school librarians should know, it referenced Lego Movie Maker, an Apple app that allows users to create a stop-motion movie. As a Lego-lover, I was naturally intrigued. That eventually led me to the Reasonably Clever website, where they accurately succeeded in their goal of “Wasting your workday since some point in 1995.” The site offers several Mini-Mizer options, where you can create a free Lego version of yourself to use as an avatar or headshot. Here is mine:

So what does this have to do with Web 3.0 and 4.0 from the class readings this week? Well, it’s just one more way that librarians (and others) are using technology to communicate and interact with users and the web. If Library 3.0 is an expansion of Library 2.0 – where librarians need to find ways to connect to and create relationships with library patrons – then everything works together to create a “web of meaning” rather than a web of links. 

Our readings this week focused on the differences between Library 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and beyond, and how librarians have to keep up by adopting new technological tools and approaches to serve the communities where they and their users live, since most of this no longer needs to take place in a physical environment.

In going over all the Diigo sites and applications shared by my classmates, I thought about the new-to-me discovery of Literature Map. Literature Map is an online interactive, user-contributed literature recommendation system based on how users “like” authors – the more people who like an author and another author, the closer together these two authors move on the visual map. It’s a different tool for readers’ advisory that has surprisingly accurate results based on the authors my co-workers and I enjoy. Here's an example of how it is presented:

Even though Literature Map isn’t new and shiny, like the AR and VR we read about last week, it is one way librarians can use the principles of Library 3.0 to show that libraries are intelligent and can draw together diverse information sources to quickly find personalized and organized answers.