Week 7: Social bookmarking and tagging

Social bookmarking and tagging were completely new to me prior to this course. When I started bookmarking and tagging a few weeks ago, I couldn't help feeling that it was a very individual activity, despite knowing that everyone else in the class could see what I tagged. I liked the idea of being able to store and label my bookmarks in an easily accessible place either from work or at home - and I think it's pretty neat to see the trends in my tagging over time (I think this is one of my favorite things about tagging). It was also really interesting to keep up with items that others had tagged through the lis9763 RSS feed. Despite viewing these tagged items from others, it was only while completing the readings for this week that I truly understood the public, and very social, nature of bookmarking and tagging.

The more I think about social bookmarking and tagging, the more I imagine a sort of "sub-web" of information that people are finding valuable. The fact that anyone would take the extra moment required to tag an item tells me that it may be interesting to look at. The key to making this work is participation (yet again!). As some of the authors this week pointed out, the more participation from people, the more value we can get out of tagging collectively. I wondered to myself (as I have many times while we've been examining the different social software tools), as librarians how can we get people to participate in our web 2.0 initiatives? Just because we are excited about it, it doesn't necessarily mean our users will be.

I think the idea of "self-interested personal information management" is key (so maybe my feeling of bookmarking and tagging as a very individual activity wasn't too far from the truth!). We create our own systems of organizing information, and since others can access it, they too can benefit from it (and vice versa). With this perspective, while we mostly contribute for our own interest/pleasure, we are aware that it may benefit others as well, creating an additional motivation to participate.

One way I think that social bookmarking and tagging could work well in a library is in creating general interest or subject guides in the vein of Lupton Library. It would be amazing to incorporate a tag cloud like the one on the PennTags website (I love tag clouds - I thought Wordle was really cool, although it was just an image). Harnessing the knowledge and personal interests of users could create a wonderful (and dynamic) source of information, photos, and blog postings.

Another benefit of creating a general interest or subject guide (and I'm thinking of my workplace in particular) is that it would reduce the number of emails that go back and forth sending a link to a news item and saying "Have you seen this?". It could greatly simplify the means of sharing information while creating a trail of sites that we have been referring to.

Another interesting way to use tagging would be on an intranet to help organize documents. In this scenario (and in others, like tagging in an OPAC) I agree with the idea that tags should be supplemental and not a replacement for more structured classifications systems and methods of organization. Tags can even help to guide the more formal classification in areas where categories aren't as clear since tags are articulated by the users themselves. The main issue I see, however, is in ambiguity of terminology. It's kind of a tough balance, because the point is to use the language that people are using, but that language could be all over the place. I think the hope is that trends of certain terms and ideas will emerge and be used over and over again and become "key" terms over time. Being consistent with my own tags is something I've found pretty challenging when posting to del.icio.us!