According to Pew internet and American life study, 28% of Americans have tagged internet content. This has led to a growth in popularity of sites like delicious and digg. The internet is growing at an extreme pace. It would be impossible for librarians to catalogue every site on the internet. Essentially, social bookmarking is the closest we have come to applying cataloguing principles to internet resources. Instead of a trained professional going out into the internet and applying subject headings, we are getting everyday users of the internet to do it themselves. Social tagging is allows ordinary people to do the job once reserved for trained professionals.
Delicious is one of the most common social bookmarking sites. It is different from personal internet bookmarking because not only does it allow users to bookmark websites, but it also allows them to group these bookmarks for personal use. Delicious allows its users an interactivity that personal internet bookmarking does not allow. There are many tags that can be used to describe a website, there is even a tag for web 2.0. When a tag is searched by a user, delicious automatically provides similar tags for the user.
Delicious was very easy to sign up for. It requires filling in just a few fields. The most difficult part of the registration process was trying to figure out the coded letters and numbers. A great feature of delicious is that once you are registered you can import your existing bookmarks to delicious. There are so many tags that can be applied to web sites, and it's nice knowing that there is a place on the web where I can organize web sites of interest to me and share them with others. Another great feature is that once you upload a website to be bookmarked delicious will suggest tags to apply to the site. So far I have been using delicious to store websites I have come across that are useful for me for future posts. This way I have an easy way to access them in the future. I have only saved just a few sites, you can view the few sites I have saved on my delicious page. I like that when you bookmark a site delicious tells you how many other people have bookmarked that site. Then you can go and look at what the people who have bookmarked the same site as you have also bookmarked. Delicious can be linked to blogs and your tags can be displayed, the only problem is that it requires you to manually go into the code in your blog and insert it.
The nice thing about delicious is that a library is able to set up an account through delicious, and can bookmark web pages they think may be of interest to their patrons. These bookmarks can be tagged based on subject or audience. This is a great way to point patrons to resources that may be useful. It also gives the patron an idea of what to expect when they go to the websites because of the tags and short description that can be applied to the bookmarked website. A library can bookmark sites with delicious, then extract the data from their delicious account to display on their personal web pages. While the process of creating and maintaining a delicious site, is not difficult, and could be done by anyone, extracting this data to place on a personal website requires some programming skills (Darby, Andrew; Gilmour, Ron). If this is too complex, Will Richardson gave a good idea. Apply a unique tag to a bookmarked page along with the regular tags, so users will know what has been tagged by a teacher or the library (Taming the beast : social bookmarking).
Another social bookmarking site is citeulike. Like delicious I had never used citeulike before either. It is not as flashy as delicious, but for a student it could come in very handy. Citeulike allows its users to bookmark and store scholarly papers from the web. Like delicious papers can be tagged and shared with other users. Citeulike is a great resource for academic libraries to promote. It allows users to view papers others have already found, and it can create a bibliography for its user. In addition to encouraging academic library patrons to use the library catalogue for their research, citeulike can be promoted as another place to begin research before asking a librarian for help. Citeulike and delicious would work well in conjunction with each other. Delicious can bookmark the non-academic websites, and citeulike can bookmark the academic papers. The problem is that using multiple social bookmarking sites could get confusing. According to 20 tips to define and manage your social networks, it is important to use only one social bookmarking site. This way users do not have to search through multiple sites to find their bookmark.
Penn State University's library has combined the functions of delicious and citeulike on their library website for their students. This takes the confusion out of where you have placed your bookmarks, everything can be stored in one location. Penn State University has created Penntags, which takes bookmarking technology and applies it to a university library setting. Penntags allows users to bookmark internet resources, online journal articles, materials from the catalogue and videos from their video catalogue. These bookmarks can then be tagged and placed into categories based on subject or course. Like delicious Penntags allows users to search tags, so there is an interactivity between users. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds so whenever a certain tag is applied to an item they are notified via RSS feed (What is Penntags?). The appeal of both delicious and Penntags is that they are both very easy to use, and their capabilities far exceed those of traditional internet bookmarking.
Why should libraries follow the lead of Penn State university and allow their users to bookmark library resources? According to Tom Steele, internet users are beginning to expect a level of interactivity on the internet. These expectations do not change when a user enters a library site. Allowing users to tag is helpful for libraries because on top of the controlled vocabulary typical of a library, it also allows users to assign tags that may not be part of a controlled vocabulary.
Social bookmarking is a fantastic technology that places the power in the hands of the user, but this is also a problem with the technology. Synonyms can be problematic, as it is unlikely that the user will think to add all the words with the same meaning. Plurality is a similar problem. Users may also not distinguish between a word that has the same meanings (Tom Steele). These are issues that result from users tagging items, but librarians can make these mistakes too. In the end, the benefit of social bookmarking to everyone who takes advantage it, far outweighs the few negative results that can occur.
Tutorial: Adding Delicious Data to Your Library Website. Darby, Andrew; Gilmour, Ron. Information Technology & Libraries, Jun2009, Vol. 28 Issue 2, p100-103, 4p, 2 bw
The new cooperative cataloging. Steele, Tom. Library Hi Tech, 2009, Vol. 27 Issue 1, p68-77, 10p
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I like the idea of having a social bookmarking site for academic materials and then one for more personal materials, but it is definitely understandable how that could become overwhelming.
ReplyDeleteThe interactivity involved in social tagging is the most important aspect of the technology. I think that by having users play a part in the tagging of items, it can actually help lead people to information they may not have otherwise discovered (because they weren't thinking of a particular concept in a certain way). This can also be a disadvantage of social bookmarking, as you mentioned with the synonyms and plurality.