Collective Intelligence in the library

July 12th, 2004

George Por writes:

“The technological innovation of weblogs will discover its full power in the enterprise when associated with the social innovation of communities of practice. Why? When we free the creative potential of flexible constellations of communities of interest and practice, it will boost their members’ identity, mutual care and professional pride. The emerging generation of social tools can be optimized for powering up that process. When that happens, blogs graduate from personal publishing tool and become a potent enabler of collective intelligence.”

I’m becoming more interested in using weblogs as social collaboration tools, and I loved this quote. Collaborative efforts can be seen all over in the library world. Be it working together on a digitizing project, or even as simple as imterlibrary loans, we are working together towards a common goal: access to information. This is being seen with new social bookmarking tools such as De.icio.us. Not only are we creating a collection of resources, but we are doing it together. The important part is making sure that the technology is a non-issue (meaning that it doesn’t get in the way). Weblogs are perfect for this “collective intelligence” as they break down these barriers. I’ve been thinking about weblogs in the library community as moving beyond the “what’s new in our libary” weblog into a more project-oriented, working-together type effort of content delivery. My point: Get everyone involved. Why do weblogs in our libraries need to published by one or two staff members?

More on this topic as I gather more theories and read more…

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