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.

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.