Social Bookmarking & Tagging

I never really understood what it meant to 'tag' something until this week. I always input words as tags for my blogs, but never truly understood why I was doing it. I found the Common Craft Show to be very useful in describing the world of social bookmarking and tagging. I now associate tagging with creating search strings to find the most accurate web pages out there. From a reference librarian's perspective, this is beneficial because you can access the previous searches people have done to arrive at an answer much quicker than doing it all on your own. Also, if you are stuck on a question, being able to examine other tags gives you a fresh perspective and opens doors to new possibilities. I also enjoyed learning from Hollenback, about the multiple add-ons out there for del.ici.ous, such as Foxylicious to add bookmarks into your browser's favourites. I was also able to check out Connotea, which displays a niche community that compiles and uses similar bookmarks. This would be very useful in a special library, where very specific web pages could be tagged and accessed quickly.

Overall, I find del.ici.ous to be a very useful tool. My favourite part about it is how it provides popular bookmarks to chose from. This way, you will never be stumped trying to think of your own. Speaking to this distance course, I find del.ici.ous very useful because we have now created a substantial class list of relevant bookmarks concerning the class material. This way, if I do not fully understand a concept and want more information, then I can just go to the class bookmarks and find the information I am seeking. The thing I like least about del.ici.ous is its inability to keep bookmarks private, if the user would like to do so. Other social bookmarking tools, such as Blinklist, have the option to keep bookmarks private. This does limit the 'social' aspect of social bookmarking, but in our instance it would be nice to have a private class list of bookmarks to access.

As for the case studies this week, I found the majoirty of them to be limited based on a lack of categorization. My favourite is the Seldovia Public Library social bookmarking system. Seldovia offers a list of categories of bookmarks, as well as popular tags, and archives of previous months bookmarks on a monthly basis. I found the 'New this Week' bookmarks page to be very useful in a public library setting, especially with the incorporation of the 'Ask the Librarian' instant messaging section on the right hand side. Most shocking of all is that Seldovia Public is a volunteer-based library. This library assessed its weakness as having shortened operation hours (based on the fact that volunteers run it) and used web 2.0 applications, such as social bookmarking, to render the library operational 24-7. Penn Tags is also useful by displaying a list popular tags on the front page, but the bookmarks are listed solely by headline and do not offer a category filter, which makes it confusing to find what you are looking for. Therefore, 'tags' and being able to categorized bookmarks by genre is an important aspect to social bookmarking, and should be utilized by libraries using web 2.0 to make their website more user-friendly, such as Seldovia Public Library did.