I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Jensen's piece, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, published in The Chronicle on June 15. This is one of the best articles I've read about metrics that can be applied to social scholarship.

Jensen, Director of Web Communications at the National Academies, anticipates a future in which several activities of scholarship, many of which utilize the tools of Web 2.0, will define the future of scholarly authority. He calls this "Authority 3.0." He comes up with seventeen possible metrics. It's a great read.

These ideas advance other ideas out there about the profound changes coming to scholarship and scholarly publishing in the coming years. Among other things, I'm reminded of Dario Taraborelli's notions of soft peer review, a collection of metrics that can be derived when social tools are used in scholarship.

I've been trying to sort all this out in terms of scholarly content on the one hand, and authority-producing metadata about this content on the other. It's a challenging exercise and probably, to some extent, a futile one.

Consider this. (Both lists below are illustrative, not comprehensive.)

Content

• Books and articles, openly accessible at least pre- and/or post-publication for now
• Wiki pages and their edits, especially as wikis become important platforms for scholarly publishing
• Blog postings, both as commentary on other works and as a scholar's forum for exploring ideas
• Comments, debates on blogs and in other social forums
• Annotations and reviews, such as those possible in the new scholarly journal that George Siemens is developing

Some of the above illustrates what I sometimes think of as the value of chatter. This encompasses discussions, reviews, edits, etc. that gather around scholarship and scholarly works. I like using the word "chatter" since it's been given such a negative connotation, e.g., the chattering classes and the chattering of the blogosphere. I'm hoping that social scholarship will bring a positive meaning to the notion of chatter. So I'm doing my part to elevate the connotation of this word!

Metadata

• Social bookmarking
• Semantic labeling (tags)
• Linking
• Downloading, viewing
• Ranking, voting
• Excerpts and citations in various venues, including Web spaces
• Prestige of bookmarkers, taggers, linkers, downloaders, citers, etc.

I like to think of this metadata, from which measures of authority can be derived, as representing the value of use.

What I really like about Jensen's scenario is its blending of these two categories. He muddies the water beautifully. For example, one of his metrics of Authority 3.0 is Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Another is Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. So while - in my view - blog essays and discussions constitute valuable and valid content contributions to scholarship, these activities also become key measures of authority based on the quantity of participants' activities and the nature of the chatter/use related to these activities by others, and the chatter/use relating to their contributions and activities, and so on. It will be fascinating to watch this get figured out.

We're seeing the early stages of this scenario today. This is why I think it's so important that we academic librarians educate ourselves about social scholarship so that we can educate our students in turn. It isn't enough to tell students that there is little authority on the Web compared with peer-reviewed journals and leave it at that. Social scholarship, and its metrics, will grow in impact. This is a great time to engage in what lies ahead.