Upcoming ARLIS Keynote: Produsage and User-Led Curation

There haven't been many updates to this site recently, but in the meantime, the book has done very well - many thanks to everyone who's bought it and/or accessed the reading samples and other articles on this site. Keep spreading the word!

Over the next few months there are quite a few produsage-related events coming up for me, in Australia and Europe - and I'll preview a number of them over the coming weeks. The first one of these is a keynote at the biennial conference of the Arts Libraries Society Australia/New Zealand (ARLIS/ANZ) here in Brisbane on 9 October 2008.

While on the face of it, this may not be the most obvious venue for talking about user-generated content, readers of the book will know that the user-led curation of content created through produsage is a core topic in my work. This management of information and knowledge is in fact probably inextricably interwoven with the creation and development of such information in the first place - and much as content creation has turned collaborative as produsage approaches have spread, so has the management of such content also been turned over to collaborative communities. It's no surprise that social bookmarking and recommendation tools, and the folksonomies they generate, have multiplied massively over the past few years. Chapters 7 and 8 in my book are especially closely concerned with these issues.

So, as information professionals dealing with knowledge management on a daily basis, this is of direct relevance to librarians - and rather than throwing their hands in the air in despair over this influx in amateur knowledgeworkers, quite a few of them are now tapping into the collective wisdom of the crowd. In my keynote, I'll explore the possibilities for such pro-am collaboration.

All the World's a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation

With the continuing growth in user-led content creation, or produsage, comes an increase in user-led information management, organisation, tagging, classification - in short, a growing trend towards user-led curation of the digital media universe. What Mark Pesce has described as 'coolfinding' is now no longer an isolated activity conducted in small-scale networks of friends, but - through the tools of Web 2.0 - has become an organising principle for the entire Web. Specific social media spaces from del.icio.us through Flickr to the Wikipedia are leading the way, but their increased networking and interconnection is making Pierre Lévy's once utopian vision of the 'cosmopedia' appear more and more like a realisable possibility.

This presentation will outline current and future developments in the field, and consider the role that professional curators and librarians may be able to play as these trends continue.

Technorati : ARLIS 2008, conference, curation, knowledge, libraries, produsage
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