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.
