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.