CCS News

APRIL 8, 2011

FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
BiblioCommons regarding review of input - Recently BC shared with us their policies on reviewing patron input, tagging, etc. Here is what we learned.

We have almost 800,000 registered users, so that [reviewing input] would require an army of people. But philosophically, it's not something we're inclined towards (and we've been advised that censoring comments is a First Amendment issue.) The flagging system is designed for the community to police itself, and this has worked pretty well so far. Some stats:
·Items with 1 flag = 587
·Items with 2 flags = 46
·Items with 3 flags (removed) = 53
Many of the single flags we see are frivolous. The most common complaint in flags is typos or bad grammar. Counting only content that is currently public, this flagging activity was recorded against about:
1. 100,000 tags
2. 80,000 comments
3. 7,000 other pieces of free text content (summaries, quotations, content advisories)
4. 23,000 lists

We do look at everything that is flagged. If we found something that clearly violates the terms of service (typically, profanity), we usually alert the library, or we just flag it ourselves.

Since it is not possible to flag a username… , we send emails to patrons with such usernames saying that the name violates the terms of service, and asking them to change the name within a few days. If they don't, we delete the account, and we mark the barcode as child, so it's not possible to create a username or add content (the email we send lays out these ramifications). We have also removed a few tags that fell into the same category.

Please note that this is USER COMMENTS, not use of the FEEDBACK tab!


And there you have it for this week; short and sweet!

CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:

Wed., 4/13, 10:00, CCS: Executive Committee

Thur., 4/14. 9:30, Lake Villa: ILL