Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking places people, not data, at the centre of the Internet. By linking people with each other, social software creates communities. 

Tagging is crucial to the success of social software. To tag, users apply key words or tags describing the content of a website. Tagging is similar to meta-tags that were used in the early 1990s. Sites such as Del.icio.us. now provide a central page to search for tagged articles. Because these sites are tagged in everyday language, they are more easily searched by untrained people. Tagged sites also have an advantage in that at least one person has already viewed the contents and believes they are worthwhile. Furthermore, people are savier today and it is more difficult to mislead them about the content of a websie.

Librarians are accustomed to searching controlled vocabulary such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). However, these subject headings can be complex. For example, history students may search for information on the Wars of the Roses yet few of them, even non-specialist reference librarians, would know that Great Britain -- History -- Wars of the Roses, 1455-1485 is the LCSH. However, if items were tagged in common language, they would be easily found though problems may arise as users may find sites devoted to an unrelated novel and movie.  Conversely, a group of people wanting to create a common knowledge base can use a unique tag and then search for their resources using the unique tag. This is essentially what we are doing with our LIS9763 tagging project on Del.icio.us. I believe these bookmarks will prove useful for us as we search for information to use in our final projects.  

Case Studies

 The Buley and Lupton libraries provide two examples of unobtrusive ways to incorporate tagging in a library’s web page. By using tagging and RSS, the library creates a list of sites of interest. By using an RSS service such as Feed2JS, the list is automatically updated and incorporated into the library’s website.  

The Seldovia Public Library uses tagging to provide links to information regarding new acquisitions to its patrons. Because the Seldovia library is an all-volunteer library in Alaska, tagging may be employed by the library because of a lack of staff trained in traditional cataloguing methods.

The PennTags project is an outstanding use of social software and tagging to providing information on a variety of topics for users. Perhaps because of rising fuel prices, “transportation” is a popular subject for tagging. Thus, social bookmarking websites provide a snapshot of what is on the collective minds of users. Social bookmarking challenges the traditional Library of Congress methods of organizing information. As librarians we should teach patrons about the advantages and disadvantages of both systems and encourage them to use both when searching for information.