"Blogs are essentially primary sources and can provide lively insights and perspectives not documented by traditional sources. They compare in some ways to a traditional interview, with the speaker controlling the questions. Ripe for essays and debate, blogs present not only the traditional two sides of an issue, but the potentially thousands of takes. And those takes take less time to appear than documents forced through the traditional publishing or peer review process. Blogs allow scholars and experts written opportunities to loosen their ties and engage in lively conversation."
As librarians we are detectives when searching for information, we do follow clues but the analogy of the fingerprint that the resource gives us is of real help when we need to verify what we find.
The helpsheets provided on Wikipedia would be useful for parents and students as we often hear that teachers do not want their students to use Wikipedia. Pretty useful for teachers too of course!
Putting the theory into practice
I looked critically at Library Thing using the given criteria and I found; about info, other links, help and FAQs. However it is still up to us as users to exercise our own judgement and discretion, remembering that the site is composed of input from all sorts of people. For example tags are created by each user without necessarily looking at previous tags; I noticed gentle fiction was not used as a tag for Remarkable creatures although the word and a rationale occured in more than one of the reviews. I know I'm a librarian but I do think that moderation or a controlled vocabulary would make Library Thing even more useful for people looking for their next best read.
And it's available from The Reading Experience section of the North Shore Libraries website.
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