Tagging the catalog

Finally, and briefly, I want to look at an example of what I have been waiting through this whole blog project to see. The University of Michigan Library integrates tagging into its catalog. To navigate to this tool from the homepage, all you have to do is a search (say, a keyword search for “fudge”), and scroll to the bottom of the entry page for the tag cloud. At the bottom, there will either be a cloud of tags or a message inviting you to click to be the first to add a tag. In multiple entries, I found that there were no tags yet.

Another way to find the tagging tool, is to go to the “I need to find…” section, and choose a category. The category page has a tagging tab (conveniently “branded” with a store tag icon). I chose “All tags” from this drop-down menu, which took me to the MTagger page. This page displays all used tags in a cloud but also has an alphabetical tag browsing option. This alphabetical option, would increase usability for the user new to tagging and tag clouds. I was able to find an entry that did have tags by navigating to it from the tag cloud.

Another helpful tool that the library has added to each entry is the user descriptions. Users can add personal descriptions about the item and share them on the OPAC. The tagging and the user descriptions (which don’t seem to be searchable, but would still be helpful when doing research) add to the value of the existing classification and taxonomies.  Given that both tools are fairly young, I also had a hard time finding any entries that already have user descriptions.  I do think that this will catch on, though.  I would definitely use it, and it would be easy for a user new to the tool to figure out, since it is just like adding a quick comment, and works with the regular library login.

The library does have RSS feeds, so the tagging is not alone in the UM Libraries “Web 2.0″ world. I think that tagging fits in with any library that has an OPAC on its website. Tagging in the catalog just allows the users to add (and access) another dimension of search capability. I would definitely make use of searching through tags (once there were more entries tagged), but alongside my use of the traditional cataloging tools, keywords, LCSHs, classification, and taxonomies.

As my blog concludes, I feel I’ve learned a lot about what is currently going on in libraries to address changes in technology and to incorporate burgeoning “Web 2.0″ tools. I’m not sure I’ve become a lasting blogger but I have found some new blogs to add to my personal feeds. I’ll be keeping my eye on updates that mention tagging and social bookmarking in the library.

A fresh look at the library homepage

The Robert Goldwater Library of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas is the first library I’ve looked at that seems to have fully embraced the changing face of technology. The library’s homepage is actually the Robert Goldwater Library Online Resource, a blog. This format allows the homepage for the library to be updated easily and regularly, and to include comments, trackback and other blog features. This site, with all its peripheral features, epitomizes the current prospects of “Web 2.0.”

One reason I think that the Robert Goldwater Library turns the idea of the library homepage on its head is that the OPAC is not the main feature. All of the other libraries I have looked at here (and indeed every library homepage I’ve ever seen) focuses on the catalog, searching, and collection access as its main purpose. Links to library events, library news, services, blogs, etc., are secondary in some way. If there is is a search bar anywhere on a library homepage, you can usually guess that it will search the catalog and not the web (unless is specifically says otherwise). For the Goldwater Library homepage, there is a link to the catalogs, but it is below the links to the Goldwater Library Wiki, the goldwaterlibrary’s del.icio.us page, and the Robert Goldwater Library’s flickr photostream.

The catalog is listed under the category of “Goldwater Library Resources” with these other tools. This seems to put it on the same level as these other tools. This seems both astute and self-fulfilling. Internet users are using “Web 2.0″ tools alongside, and instead of searching the library catalog. Because the tools are right there with the catalog, they will be used more frequently. For users who are unfamiliar with the blog format, the homepage would be fairly easy to navigate. The catalog link may take a bit to find, but once found, the user could use the catalog as she or he would any other OPAC.

The goldwaterlibrary’s del.icio.us page categorizes the list of tags. This is a handy feature since the actual site links on del.icio.us are ordered temporally. After doing a keyword search in the catalog (yes, “fudge”), I found that the entries do not have a link to add the finding to del.icio.us. The catalog is surprisingly “Web 2.0″-free, in fact. The same issues of usability for new users that I’ve mentioned in previous posts (MIT post, K-State post) would be an issue here, too. The classification of the tags might help a new user to understand their purpose or at least their organization.

The library’s flickr photostream is also heavily classified. Some categories only contain one image. The images range photos of pieces in the gallery’s collection, to photos of crews in the process of setting up exhibits, to photos from art openings and events. A new user to flickr would have a fairly easy time navigating the site since the images are put in well-labeled categories, and are titled in descriptive, plain language. Since the only real purpose of the flickr photostream seems to be to store, make available, and tag museum photos, the only real purpose to the user would be to browse or search the photos for interest or research. This can easily be done with the help of the categories and titles.

I would use the del.icio.us account that the library has set up to access the sites that the library (and staff) think are relevant to the field and the collections. I would also browse the flickr site, although not likely for the purpose of tagging photos. I like the idea of revisioning the library homepage. It seems that the web hasn’t even been around long enough for libraries to be too attached to the way homepages are being done. Maybe it’s time to rethink.

PennTags, folksonomies, social bookmarking

I don’t think I can talk about tagging and social bookmarking in libraries without looking at PennTags. PennTags is a project of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. According to the “About” page at the PennTags site:

PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources. Members of the Penn Community can collect and maintain URLs, links to journal articles, and records in Franklin, our online catalog and VCat, our online video catalog. Once these resources are compiled, you can organize them by assigning tags (free-text keywords) and/or by grouping them into projects, according to your specific preferences. PennTags can also be used collaboratively, because it acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits of the Penn community, and can help you find topics and users related to your own favorite online resources.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am not usually impressed by the options that OPACs give me for saving selected records. I have been praising the del.icio.us option in the OPAC as a much better way to handle those records I want to save to refer to later (especially the electronic ones). Now, I’ve come up with a complaint about del.icio.us on this front. It has surfaced as a result of my new love for the (still progressing) PennTags.

With del.icio.us, I can save sites to my account and tag them for later searches, so that I can (hopefully) find them again when I need them. Mostly, my sites for a given research project would be lumped together in a temporal chunk, but what if I do a little research now, a little more in a week or so, switch to another assignment for a week, then return to my research? My sites for that one project will be sprinkled among any other sites I’ve tagged in the intervening weeks. Why? Because del.icio.us orders my sites by the most to least recently tagged. There is currently no way to categorize my tags or order them alphabetically or (gasp) classify them is some way for later browsing. del.icio.us seems to be all search and no browse.

I’m starting to think that this clump of sites I’d tagged may have contributed to my getting overwhelmed with the process so many many months ago, and giving up. Now I’m looking at PennTags. It has solved this problem. Sort of.

PennTags invites users to tag sites and resources in folders called, projects. The projects are classifications of sorts. They are categories given to the group of sites by the user. The problem would arise if I have a different idea of what your category means than you do, but, let’s face it, that’s the same problem we have with traditional classification, subject headings, categories. I can browse in projects that seem to be similar to my topic of research. This browsing is what sets PennTags apart for me.

In a contribution (“PennTags – When card catalogs meet tags“) to the collaborative blog, Many-to-Many, David Weinberger explains:

Integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy) instantaneously provides the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

My guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don’t have to change something in order to change it. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, as the folksonomy supplements it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for “recipes” takes you to the “cuisine” category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here’s the tag cloud for the node you’re browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair.

Weinberger nails what I find so exciting about the phenomenon of tagging. There are, of course, possibilities for corruption, or sub-par terms, but those can be ignored. With the tag cloud, those anomalies will be the small print that we can choose to ignore. As with the del.icio.us example, tagging and the resulting folksonomies do not do well to completely replace existing taxonomies and classification systems, but it does a good job of complementing them.

What about the findability and usability of PennTags? Starting from the Penn Libraries homepage, there is a link directly to the PennTags site. In a quick keyword search through the catalog (good old “fudge”), and the entry includes a link at the bottom to add to PennTags. Once at the PennTags site, you can browse, alphabetically, by project, by tag, or by user (if you happen to know that a user is learned in an area you are researching, perhaps). Clicking on a tagged site will take you (in a new window, yay) to the record or the resource at Penn Libraries (or to the site if it is an external website). As Weinberger mentions, you are then free to use the traditional classification and taxonomies offered by the catalog.

I am new to PennTags. I know how social bookmarking normally works and I’m pretty tech saavy compared to some. Yet, I had a hard time finding any information on the PennTags site to help me get started. I actually gave up trying to find any kind of help menu and decided to see what the site said about the project itself. This plan brought me to click on “about” at the top right corner of the homepage. Ahhhhh…the help area. For some reason, the help and getting started information in under “about.” Weird because once you click on “about”, the page title says you are at “PennTags/help“. Go figure.

The new user might be confused by the about-help issue, and by the tag cloud at the top of the homepage. Once the help area is tracked down, it gives comprehensive instructions for using PennTags and for starting new projects. Going through the instructions might be more than a new user is looking to do while researching through the catalog. I’m pretty sure that if I’d clicked on the “Add to PennTags” at the bottom of a catalog entry without prior knowledge, I would have taken only look at the homepage and closed the tab. It doesn’t present itself as a user-friendly tool for new users, especially those unfamiliar with social bookmarking in general.

That said, knowing what I know, I would use PennTags if I went to PennU. I like the way it can organize multiple projects of research. I like the possibilities it holds for the future as well. I think a great many of us will have our eye on where the project goes over the coming years.

Hennepin County Library steps up

The Hennepin County Library uses the flickr photostream differently than the Library of Congress or the NCSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center do. (See my previous post on the NCSU for more on what I think of their use of flickr). Once again, after searching through various areas of the entire Library website, I can find no mention of the flickr photostream and no link to the photostream itself. I find this very frustrating. I only know about the flickr project because Susie gave a link to it in her WebCT module for Web 2.0. Otherwise, I’d never find it. It makes me wonder what other interesting, interactive tools that the Hennepin County Library is using that I can’t find from their site.

Even though I never would have found the flickr collection without outside information, I’m intrigued by the way the library is using this tool. Rather than uploading photos from the library’s collection of images (assuming that there even is one), it has uploaded photos of events that involve the Hennepin County Library in some way. There are photos of various officials associated with the library and its parent associations, photos of events supported by the library in the community, photos of author visits, and many more.

Looking through the photostream, it seems that the purpose of it is to compile photos that the library might use for the media in one organized place that is accessible to multiple staff members whenever it’s needed. The purpose does not seem to be to make this photostream available to all library users. This explains why there are no links to (and no mention of) flickr on the library site. Click on the screenshot for a link to the page and take a look at some of the photos that the HCL has made available.

It is interesting to see the library staff using flickr internally as a way to organize promotional materials. I think that some of the photos here would be of interest to the users. Perhaps the library could put a link to the flickr photostream in the “Events” area of the site, making only those photos that it wishes to share in that way public. I think it would be a benefit to the library community to have an accessible record of the events that its library has contributed to.

The HCL Bookspace is an interesting collaborative space for library staff and users. The Bookspace is accessed from the homepage through a prominent link in the top-of-page tabs. The homepage for the Bookspace boasts a lot of information about books in the library, featured booklists, book clubs, author information, and more. What I find interesting on the social software front are the readers’ lists.

Similarly to the reviews at the EPL (as discussed in a previous post), these are lists created and updated by users. According to the HCL eNews page, only one year after the inception of the personal profiles feature for readers’ lists, the feature boasted, “more than 400 reader-contributed book lists, 12,000 comments and 90 profiles.” It is clearly a popular tool on the site. Each book on the lists is linked to its catalog entry, but there is no link available to other readers’ lists that contain that same book. I would use this service of the library for book selection. I’m impressed that there is a separate teen readers’ list area, although I wonder if there would be more crossover of books on these and the adult lists than warrants the separation. I think a reviewing, or book selection tool like this one fits right in with any library website that has an OPAC and a significant online presence. If users are commonly using the library from the web, these library community services should exist there as much as they do in the physical library itself.

The readers’ lists could be improved by (once again, I plug the use of tags in the library) adding a tagging feature. The users could tag the books in their lists and then these tags could be used to link the different lists of different users. Links connecting all users who have added a given book to their lists would also improve the service.

For users who are new to the service, very little computer literacy would be necessary to understand the user-friendly navigation. The format is in a list that can be easily understood. The creation of one’s own list requires no more than a library login.

In their article, “Library 2.0: Service for the next generation library,” in Library Journal (9/1/2006), Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk mention how libraries area already changing, and how we can change libraries to improve services and keep up with the changing technology. From their article:

To increase both your library’s appeal and value to users, consider implementing customizable and participatory services. The Library 2.0 model seeks to harness our customer’s knowledge to supplement and improve library services. User comments, tags, and ratings feed user-created content back into these web sites. Ultimately, this creates a more informative product for subsequent users. Your library customers have favorite titles, authors, and genres. Allowing them to comment, write reviews, create their own tags and ratings, and share them with others through a more versatile OPAC interface will enhance your catalog. Customers want to know what their neighbors are reading, listening to, and watching. Hennepin County Library, MN, has taken this step by allowing users to comment in the catalog.

I couldn’t agree more. I think that the HCL is on its way to fully integrating “Web 2.0″ and “Library 2.0″ applications into its existing interface. Overall, I like the ways that the Hennepin County Library is using technology to make the online library experience richer for its users. However, I’m always excited to see a library catalog that is integrating tagging, and on this point, I was disappointed once again.

What’s on flickr at the NCSU Libraries?

The library at North Caroline State University, NCSU Libraries, has put photos from its Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) on flickr for people to access and tag. I started on the NCSU Libraries homepage and navigated to the Special Collections Research Center from there. Then I looked for the link (or any other information at all) that might take me to the flickr photostream. There are prominent links under “Community” from the SCRC page to the Wolfblogs and the Wolfwikis for students, staff, and faculty, but nothing mentioning the flickr project.

I would say, unless you already knew that the flickr project was there (and even if you did), you’d never find it on the NCSU Libraries site. I think it’s too bad because I think the flickr project for the digitalized images from the SCRC fits right in with the Libraries’ blogs and wikis services. Both of these are collaborative with opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to start blogs, comment on other blogs in the NCSU community, and participate in existing (or start new) wikis. It only makes sense that there would be a flickr photostream that invites tagging and further participation.

The problem I see with the flickr photostream is that with no explanation of the project on the NCSU Libraries site or the SCRC site, and none on the flickr page itself, I’m not sure what the project purpose actually is. Is the SCRC planning to add tags to their catalog for the whole collection? Is there going to be links from the flickr images to their physical place at the Libraries in the future? Does the SCRC have plans for how researchers might use this service? I can’t seem to find any answers to these questions. I like the idea of having a flickr photostream if it’s being integrated into the library’s traditional classification scheme, to complement it in some way, but this photostream seems to just stand alone. I’m not sure what purpose it’s serving.

It was big news when the Library of Congress launched their project of putting digitized archival images on flickr for the world to tag. The LC homepage has a link on it that opens a page explaining the flickr pilot project. The page includes a link directly to the flickr photostream as well as an explanation of the purposes of the project, and and invitation for public participation. This seems to make more sense to me. I know why the images are on flickr and I understand what I’m supposed to do about it. I think I’d be more likely to tag the LC images on flickr than the ones the SCRC has up. I might browse through the SCRC ones, but I wouldn’t likely bother to tag them.

One improvement to the flickr tool at the SCRC would be to add in information page on the site that explains the nature, intentions, scope of the project. Adding a link to the flickr photostream would be helpful, as well as a brief explanation of the SCRC on flickr. I’m interested to see if the SCRC is planning to do with the flickr project, if anything.

Added note:

After writing this post, I was reading through posts on “Library 2.0″ on The Ubiquitous Librarian, the blog of Brian Scott Matthews. I stumbled across his post, “Social-enabled Library Websites? The Post-It Note Concept.” Matthews outlines his suggestion for adding more interactive options to the NCSU Libraries site:

I pitched an idea last week that didn’t meet resistance, but didn’t have a big bandwagon either. Here is the gist of the story.

[...]

Basically you take your mega forum, which works like all other message boards with threaded conversations all on one page—but then also embeds select threads or topics onto appropriate web pages. Students have questions about the equipment we rent out, here is a way they can post questions, get answers, see what others have said, etc. Or what about printing or events or workshops? Everything would be more social and at least there will be an offer of interaction.

Another example: With a recent environmental display in the library, a student used a post-it note to comment about the information on the wall. We took it down, but this type of interaction would be ideal for a message board environment because individuals could have a dialogue about the display materials and it could result in a larger community discussion.

Yeah, I know there are issues with “appropriateness” and “security” and “identity” and “moderation”—that’s all to be worked out over the summer, but I think the concept is worth a shot. Imagine a pile of post it notes neatly arranged in a digital format expressing opinions and feedback relevant to the web page they are viewing… we’ll see what happens.

I love this idea. I love that Matthews doesn’t get hung up on the technicalities of a proposal like this, but instead suggests what he would ideally like to see with the intentions of ironing out the details later. This is what I think librarians and other library staff need to be doing more of. We need to look at how we can improve the interactivity of library sites, how we can optimize services to library users. “Library 2.0″ and “Web 2.0″ applications are a big part of this.

Matthews’ approach of, look at what we need, see what’s out there to fill the need, then figure out how it can work for us, is great when looking at integrating things like tagging and social bookmarking (as well as other social software tools) into existing library platforms. I look forward to reading about how things get worked out over the summer over at the NCSU Libraries.

Homegrown “Web 2.0″ at the EPL

I like the idea of finding libraries in Canada that are doing interesting things with technology in the realm of social software. The Edmonton Public Library (EPL) is not (yet) making use of some of the social bookmarking or tagging sites that are already out there, but it is doing something interesting by way of collaborative, social reviewing on its very own reviews page.

In the BlogJunction post, “10 Ways to Make Your LIbrary Great in 2008: Resolution #1″ (which, by the way is “Use Technology”), Ed Rossman suggests the use of LibraryThing. He links to the Shaker Heights Public Library and its use of LibraryThing for local history and authors collections. I think that the EPL is doing something smaller (but similar) on its own site.

The Book Reviews page can be found from the homepage of the EPL by clicking on “Books” under the “Find more”, or by clicking the “Find more” tab and choosing “Books & Readers”. I think it would be helpful to have a “Book Reviews” link displayed prominently on the homepage without having to take these avenues, but I still found the reviews pretty easily. It’s hard to know how easily I would have found them, however if I didn’t already know they were there, and know what I was looking for. It seems to make sense that there would be something like the “Book Reviews” since the site has an entire set of pages dedicated to services for and about books and readers.

I looked under “Book Reviews by EPL Customers” and “Science Fiction“. (Interesting use of terminology, by the way. Not library patrons, but customers – very bookstore.) There is a thumbnail of each book reviewed (if available), a list of links to reviews on Chapters and Amazon, and the reviews. Each review includes the username of the reviewer, a rating, audience, and the review itself. If you click on the username, it brings up all reviews by that user. This function seems to be similar (if more primitive and without the tags) to the idea of keeping personal/publicized lists of favourites, like in del.icio.us or LibraryThing. I like the idea that the reviews are associated with the patron record. Something about it seems more personal. Like the reviews would mostly be coming from members of your own library community.

I’m tempted to suggest that the EPL check out LibraryThing and get on board with that, but something about the homegrown approach appeals to me. The EPL review system seems to be very well used. It’s unique to the EPL and its users. If I wanted to get the LibraryThing, or Amazon for that matter, experience, I could go there. I’m not sure I would regularly write reviews, but I would definitely read them when choosing books at the EPL.

One of the other advantages of doing a reviews service like this in-house, is that it is in a technical format that would be familiar to even novice computer users. The service is easy to understand for new users and it doesn’t require registering for a new account, or leaving the site and navigating a (possibly new) outside site. This would make this service easier for new users to grasp than something like LibraryThing or del.icio.us.

A major improvement to the reviews would be to add a tagging function. I’d like to be able to browse by tags rather than just by categories set by the library, and users’ selections. That addition would take this service from “pretty cool” to “yes! that’s it, this is really useful”.

del.icio.us and Clouds at K-State Libraries

Taking a look at the K-State Libraries homepage, I found that they have an RSS feed, but I didn’t see any evidence of the K-State Libraries blog. I even looked at the site index and searched “blog” on the site. I couldn’t find any direct and obvious links to the blog as a whole. I think this is too bad since the blog is well kept up and informative. Unfortunate that many people won’t be liable to stumble onto it, or even find it if they know about it.

Finally, I tracked it down. Under “About the Libraries” on the homepage, I clicked on “more about us…” and that took me to a page that listed “Library blogs” as a link. Whew! It’s not very simple to find, but I’m not very simple, either.  Given that the library has a blog, I wasn’t surprised to find that it is using other “Web 2.0″ technologies (and formats) as well.

The blog doesn’t use tags, but they have chosen to display their categories as a cloud. I find this interesting because it is kind of the opposite of what I mentioned in my post about the MIT virtualref del.icio.us page. Where the virtualref del.icio.us page has the tags in list format, resembling the familiarity of category lists, the K-Libraries blog uses the cloud for categories, resembling tagging. I find the cloud inviting and informative in an intuitive way. I automatically know roughly how many blogs are in certain categories as compared to others by glancing at the difference in type size and boldness.  Click on the link to the blog above, or see screenshot below:

I suppose that a user who is new to the idea of tagging and tag clouds might find this format a bit bewildering. It might look more like a wordart project than a list of categories. I think that mousing over the terms, and clicking on a couple would clarify their purpose, though. It may still not be clear what the difference in type-size and boldness refers to. Either way, I like the borrowing from the tagging world for formatting traditional categories.

Looking into the OPAC (I always like to see what a keyword search for “fudge” brings up), I noticed that there is an option right in the entry to tag the item in del.icio.us. The link opens the del.icio.us login page in a new window. (Kudos on targeting it to a new window, avoiding one of my pet peeves).

I’m not a del.icio.us user. I tried when it first hit the market, but I found it too much work to keep it up. Actually, I think my issue was that I was encouraged to set up an account by a friend and fellow poet. She was looking forward to creating a small community of poets and writers who could share their links with each other and enrich each other’s lives, poetry, etc. I felt kind of stressed to keep hunting for, and tagging new and interesting literary sites. It overwhelmed me and I gave it up, never turning back, until now.

Usually, there is some sort of way on an OPAC to save the items you find. I find that you can then save them to file, print them, or email them to yourself. All of these ways seem to reformat the entries so that I find them difficult to read. I think it is so much better to be able to set up a del.icio.us account and then tag the entries in there. That way they can be organized however I want. I could also share them with other students who might benefit from my research in future assignments. I like the idea. I would use this tool if I found it in an OPAC.

The K-State Libraries seem to be concerned about adapting to new technologies with their blog and RSS feed. I wasn’t surprised to find the link to del.icio.us, given the other technologies. I would suggest also setting up a del.icio.us account for the library. I think that is a great way to add to the library’s effectiveness as a place to look for information.

Virtual Reference at MIT Libraries

The first library I’m looking at is the MIT Libraries. I was a little surprised that the libraries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology itself would not be using tagging in the library catalog already. The library catalog is an average OPAC, using MARC records, and Boolean operators for searching by Keywords, Title, Subject, and Call Number. I really wanted to find a tag cloud hiding at the bottom of the page, but no such luck.

The MIT Libraries virtual reference collection starts to get interesting to the Web 2.0 enthusiast. There are a couple of obvious links to the virtual reference collection on the Libraries’ homepage. One prominent link under the “Help Yourself” heading in the center of the page, the other alphabetically filed in the “Quicklinks” menu along the side of the page. There is a whole host of links on the virtual reference collection page of the MIT Libraries website: acronym thesauri, online reference materials, other university websites, books, associations and societies, consumer information, conversion information. What caught my eye as a social bookmarking and tagging hunter, was the link to del.icio.us tags situated visibly on the left-hand side.

After looking through MIT’s virtualref del.icio.us tags and bookmarks, I really started to wish that I’d known about this list before I started searching for materials in the LIBR 503 final group assignment. (Future SLAISers, take note. Check out the MIT virtualref del.icio.us bookmarks when you are doing your hunt for reference materials. It even has a lot of Canadian and international stuff, and all the categories from the assignment are conveniently tagged for your searching pleasure.) The list is great. It has United States and international government, statistical. and political reference sites, style guides, a site that lists colleges that have closed, merged, or changed names, a science-fiction and fantasy database, travel and weather sites, grant resources, and way more. I want to stay and browse, but with only a few days to the deadline, I must blog on.

The links to the virtual reference collection page, and the del.icio.us tags page once on that page, are fairly easy for any user to find. There doesn’t seem to be any other similar “Web 2.0″ services or tools on the site, so I was surprised to see the del.icio.us link there.  I wonder if a user who is new to del.icio.us as a tool would know to click on the “del.icio.us tags”. There is no explanation as to what del.icio.us is or what a tag is. I guess they may think that users who are into social bookmarking already will know and that those users would be the ones interested in accessing the virtual reference bookmarks in this way. But I think that if more people knew about social bookmarking, they’d get into it pretty quickly.

Say the user unfamiliar with del.icio.us clicked the link to see what it was. The user would be routed to the virtualref bookmarks on del.icio.us. Check out this screen shot from the MIT virtualref del.icio.us page or click the link above and find out.

The order of the bookmarks descends from most recently added rather than alphabetical or by category. This might be visually confusing at first to someone unfamiliar with the system, but the list of tags on the right-hand side would soon catch the user’s eye. Even if you weren’t familiar with tags, the nature of the terms listed there would make it clear what they are for pretty quickly. The terms are sorted alphabetically by default on the MIT Libraries virtualref page instead of as a tag cloud. This format would be more familiar to new users since it resembles a traditional list of categories. Clicking on a tag will bring up a list of sites that have been tagged with that term. The user can see the stats of how many others have saved that site (maybe getting a sense of how worthy it is in popular opinion), and can see that there is an option to save the site themselves. Doing this would prompt a user to login or to set up an account on del.icio.us. Maybe another dedicated social bookmarker would be born.

I would love to use this tool as a student. I am going to use it even though I don’t go to MIT. I only wish that UBC had something similar that would also link to region-specific information for students. One improvement that I think the MIT Libraries could make to the virtual reference collection service and its del.icio.us tool would be to explain more clearly what the del.icio.us tool is for new users. Perhaps there is an explanation somewhere on the site but I couldn’t find it. So, if it’s already there, they could make it more prominent so that users know how useful clicking the link could be.

By the people, for the people

Blogging is a new thing for me. I read plenty of other people’s blogs and I occasionally comment on those that my friends keep up, but I’ve never wanted to write my own. Then I started LIBR 500: Foundations of Information Technology at SLAIS.

No, the module on Web 2.0 did not convince me that I want a blog. I simply have to create one as a final assignment on social software. Fitting that the assignment about social software should be in the form of a social software tool. I can appreciate the irony. It remains to be seen whether I will appreciate the task.

I’ve chosen to focus on social bookmarking and tagging in the library world. This blog will cover a few libraries that are using social bookmarking and tagging well (or not so well as the case may be). I assume that most bloggers begin with a topic they know a lot about and go from there. For me, I’ve used social bookmarking tools, I’ve tagged, but I’m blogging about a topic that I am still learning about.

What I do know? Well, when I think about the phenomenon that is referred to as “Web 2.0″, I think of the opportunities for individuals and communities to change the information on the web for themselves. To me, social bookmarking and tagging are some of the most interesting ways that people are adding information to the web. There is so much information on the web, and it has been traditional organized by search web directories such as, Yahoo! and search engines, such as the behemoth, Google. The average person using the web couldn’t decide how to organize the information. They could only search for information in the existing systems.

For a long time, browsers have allowed us to bookmark pages we frequently use. We could rename files on our own computers and put them in whatever folders we wanted with whatever names made sense to us. We could name our photos with labels that we understood and organize them on our computers in whatever order we chose. But all of this was happening offline. And each of us was doing our own separate thing that didn’t affect or benefit anyone else’s system, let alone the systems of organizing and retrieving information on the web as a whole.

Social bookmarking and tagging are different. The whole idea of bookmarking and tagging websites in del.icio.us or uploading and tagging photos on flickr is to share not only the sites and photos but your way of categorizing them. Other searches can use the terms you’ve attached to your own and others’ additions to search. The more people adding terms, the more information (or metadata) there is about the photo or site (or book, Facebook note, library catalog entry, etc.).

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007), and the popular blog, Joho the Blog, addresses this shift to the general public applying shared and individual organizing techniques to shared information on the web. From the book:

But now we—the customers, the employees, anyone—can route around the second order. [...] We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. [...] It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and—perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so.

See full text of Chapter One of David Weinberger’s book here.

So who knows? Maybe I’ll become a blogger after all of this, or maybe I’ll become a more diligent tagger, or maybe I’ll just become a SLAIS student who is all finished with the infamous core. Whatever way it falls out, here it goes, Beth Cote’s attempt at a mini-blog.