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.

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.