Commonplace Book Memo

Commonplace Book

| January 6, 2018

On this day, I learned the importance of this essential library service: Commonplace book. Along with Ms. Kim and volunteer translator Mr. Cho, we worked together and glued sleeves on the inside cover of several newly purchased material ranging from books on astronomy to children's picture books and stuffed them with blank notes. The note has a designated spot for book barcode, date of registration, and most importantly, a section for patrons to fill in.

How is this a library service, you ask?

It is a chance for patrons of the library to have their voices heard and to share it with others.

The idea behind commonplace allows for an opportunity for information sharing. Patrons including children are welcome to write down keywords from the book that stood out to them, opinions, and recommendations - a form of social tagging in written form. Librarians pay close attention to the keywords, recommendations, and thoughts of the patrons. They consider the shared information when making decisions in collection development processes as well as keyword implementation of keyword tagging in the bibliographic records, thus allowing for better catalog search retrieval.