Anyway- as I talked about my course this week I was surprised to learn that she was already familiar with many of the curation tools. You will probably be shocked to learn, as I was, that librarians in their capacity as information technology experts have already recognized that the wealth of information provided by the internet requires content curation. The issue that librarians have been grappling with is which is the best curation tool for education
There are numerous contenders, many of which have already been explored by the cohort including Pinterest, Storify and Symbaloo and new curation tools are appearing all the time. This is a problem for librarians because they would like to be able to collaborate easily with their colleagues and share resources but at present there is no consensus as to which curation tool should be used.
Pinterest seems to be the most popular at the moment, but she likened it to the early days of search engines before Google became dominate, when people also used Yahoo, Altavista or Lycos. If you asked people in 2000 to pick which search engine would eventually become the favourite, I am sure the majority of respondents would have said Yahoo would rule the internet.
Now, you might be wondering as I did why librarians can’t use more than one. She pointed out that the whole point of curation tools was to make it quick and easy to find relevant information when you needed it. If you are going to start curating information on a variety of tools, you are complicating the process significantly and before long you need an indexing tool to help you remember where you stored the link. Alternatively, using multiple tools to curate the same information is needlessly time consuming and redundant.
At the same time, the librarians agree that it would be in everyone’s best interest to come to a consensus on a tool in order to more easily share resources between schools and school districts. Everyone is quite passionate about their favourite and keen to push it forward as the logical choice for consensus, but the opinions of these professionals are varied. Debates have been heated and even resulted in librarian fist fights (which are like regular fist fights except there is no punching- just a series of disapproving looks and stony silences).
In exchange for providing me with all this infotech inside information, I promised her that that I would consult the cohort to see which tools they found most useful for curation. I would invite you to leave your response in the comments section below.