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.

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.