Workers See Social Networking Risk to Personal and Corporate Security

Workers See Social Networking Risk to Personal and Corporate Security.

This article discusses the perceptions of organizations in the UK and their employees about the potential risks of using social networking within a corporate environment.  The major perceived risks, unsurprisingly, are:

• Potential leakage of sensitive information
• Unintentional upload of Trojans or viruses to employees’ computers
• Increased targeting of individuals who are associated with the company for social engineering attacks
• Individuals falling prey to fraudulent scams

Employees believe that organizations need to provide clear guidelines and policies pertaining to the use of social networking sites within the corporate environment.  This is a point I make countless times in my Records Management class; it’s rather astonishing how many organizations do not, in fact, have such guidelines and policies, and are often in the position of closing the proverbial barn doors after the cows have already escaped.

Amazon steps up social media efforts

Amazon steps up social media efforts | Reuters.

This article discusses Amazon’s latest effort to increase its social media presence.  It’s rather ironic, given that Amazon was an early adopter of social features such as user tagging, reviews and ratings; in fact, Amazon has been one of the models for my research into the use of social features in library catalogues (admittedly, not in the same league as LibraryThing).  The article suggests that Amazon has not made full use of these features; yes, clients can post content to the records, but they cannot interact with one another, exchange wish lists, interests, and so forth, which is what I’ve been advocating that library catalogues should allow people to do.  Whether such communications will be outsourced, so to speak, via Facebook and Twitter, as is the case with Kindle, remains to be seen.

Online AquaBrowser Tutorial | The Cataloguing Librarian

My research partner at Halifax Public Libraries, Laurel Tarulli, has created the following tutorial for the use of AquaBrowser: Online AquaBrowser Tutorial | The Cataloguing Librarian.  Laurie and I are investigating how people use the social discovery systems AquaBrowser and BiblioCommons.  One of the challenges is to engage people in using the social features of these systems, such as posting tags, ratings, and reviews.  It will be interesting to hear people’s feedback on this tutorial, especially since the next phase in our research will be to study people’s motivations for using (or not) these social applications.

Scotland bound

I’ll be heading to Glasgow on Tuesday to give a paper at the 9th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems workshops, as part of the 2010 ECDL conference. I’ll be presenting on the preliminary results of the research I’m conducting with my research partner, Laurel Tarulli (Halifax Public Libraries) on the log analysis data we’ve compiled from the AquaBrowser (Halifax Public Library) and BiblioCommons (Edmonton Public Library) social discovery from June-August. Since we haven’t yet collected all the data, I’ll be talking only about general observations we’ve made so far, as detailed data analysis will take place over the next two months. I’ll post the slides once they are published officially.

While in Glasgow, I’ll be meeting with two of my former SIM students, who now work in Scotland. It is, indeed, a small world.

Helping people build their own libraries

A few years ago, Dan Chudnov summarized his mission as a librarian in one simple statement: “Help people build their own libraries.” I think this statement summarizes nicely my research interests into social discovery tools. For the past five years or so, I’ve been arguing that library catalogues need to be more dynamic and have the potential to be an environment where people can interact with each other and library staff, and discuss and share their reading, listening, viewing, etc., interests, via social tools such as tagging and posting reviews. Social discovery tools have the potential to foster a sense of community amongst library clients. My local public library serves clients that are scattered over a municipality that includes urban, suburban, and rural areas. Not all residents of this municipality are fortunate enough to have easy and close access to a library branch; a number of these residents cannot visit easily their local library because of health, limited mobility, lack of available and convenient transportation, and so forth. From a cataloguing perspective, client tags allow me to determine the extent to which my assigned LC headings reflect the language of the client, as well as their perception of the content of the item. Tags can not only complement the descriptions offered by the LC subject headings, but allow the expression of the the different cultural perspectives of the community, which is particularly important in Canada, where cultural pluarity is an essential and encouraged aspect of our society.