A number of people have been curious about the type of reception aadl.org’s social OPAC would get. I would say that it has been very well received by our community with a moderate level of participation.

I just snapped this screenshot about five minutes ago of our tag cloud. As you can see, a real cloud is emerging. But let’s look at stats for a second.

As far as tagging is concerned, 330 tags have been entered. 97 catalog items have been tagged with 245 distinct tags. 27 people have put tags into our catalog.

Stats for reviews are a little smaller, probably because reviewing an items demands a greater time investment on the part of the user. As of now, 21 reviews have been placed on 21 items by 16 people (4 of whom are staff members). That’s about an average of 9 per day. I expect that will pick up as more users become aware of this service.

Of course, compared to a high-traffic social web site like Flickr, these stats are unimpressive, but for a single library, I think they are promising.

Library web site users tend to cross a wider spectrum of computer literacy, so the whole concept of reviewing and tagging may be completely alien to a lot of aadl.org’s visitors. We’re in a little bit of uncharted territory here, so I’ll be sure to do a number of updates as time goes on.