Introduction

Online collaboration and interaction, self-publishing, personalized categorization and sharing of content: these are all hallmarks of our internet exchanges today. More websites and online services are building on these activities and encouraging their users to add their own content or highlight useful or quality resources.

This paper is an exploration into the issues surrounding the rise of recommendation and review services and whether they're of benefit to library users in online academic environments. Should we be taking advantage of this opportunity to build communities and conversations, or should this remain the domain of online trade and commerce? Does user-generated content add value to our resources, or does it weaken its integrity? We take a look at the review and recommendation services currently available in academic library online environments, and explore the issues involved in adding user-generated content to our resources, using research undertaken for our own pilot project entitled ‘Around the world in 80+ books’.

Why investigate user-generated content?

Reviews, recommendations and personalized categorization are all types of usergenerated content. This content is produced by the end-user or consumer, rather than the traditional sources such as copywriters, publishers and commercial content creators. A personalized perspective or review of a book is one form of user-generated content, as is writing an online journal or weblog; another is uploading music or photographs to file-sharing websites. In the wider picture this is part of the Web 2.0 architecture of participation (O'Reilly, 2005). These days almost half of adult internet users interact or read Web 2.0 sites online, from publishing blogs, posting ratings and reviews, using RSS, tagging web pages, using social networking sites, listening to podcasts and so on (Li, 2007). The development of internet technology has widened our interaction and content creation activities. As Coyle (2007, 290) notes, ‘users have become accustomed to creating content on the Web … [they] have an expectation that they will find a community at their electronic destination. They also expect to interact with their information resources, not to consume them passively.’

The expectations of our users, along with technical developments such as application programming interfaces (APIs) to import data into our resources, suggest that now is the time actively to investigate adding user-generated content to our online environments.