Social Bookmarking Group Project; Part 1; Introduction

By Amy Thorne, Andrea Cameron, Grant O’Grady, and Pauline Dewan

We have created a social bookmarking resource to be used internally by librarians who answer reader’s advisory questions in a public library. Please check out our prototype at Furl. Our login name is: team_tagging. Our password is ilovefims. Also check out our other group posts about the prototype. And don’t miss the one that we include as instructions for librarians using the Furl site.

Why would librarians want to use social bookmarking?

One of the newest trends within public libraries is the active promotion of reader’s advisory services. With the marked decline in reference questions, librarians are turning their attention to fiction and marketing themselves as advisors and experts in the field. No matter how much any single librarian reads, he/she can never keep up with the diverse reading tastes of patrons. With the vast number of novels published, it is imperative for reader’s advisory specialists to collaborate with other librarians, drawing upon one other’s knowledge of individual books and genres.

Librarians use online tools such as What Do I Read Next? or Novelist to find books in different categories but these tools have two drawbacks. These resources target a global market and do not reflect the local reading interests of patrons. The books they discuss may or may not be available locally. Secondly, the categories they use are sweeping ones. If a patron comes into a library looking for an adventure novel, there are many types of adventure novels from which to choose. Within this category are subgenres such as spy novels, political intrigue and terrorism books, thrillers, survival stories, and naval adventures, to name a few.

With our social bookmarking site, librarians first categorize each book under a topic heading such as adventure (or another genre.) They then tag books with keywords that specify a subgenre. But even subgenres are not always specific enough to match readers with the type of book they want. Some patrons are interested in survival stories set in Australia, or mystery novels that feature amateur detectives who are women. Joyce G. Saricks, in her Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library examines the various appeal factors that readers look for in books, factors such as pacing, the frame of the novel, the types of characters, and storylines. Readers’ advisors trained to ask readers questions about such appeal factors can record these elements in the keyword section. Because Furl has full-text searching, librarians can look for books within their own holdings by searching, for example, for westerns set in Wyoming that are about sheepmen. There is also a star rating which helps direct readers to good books. Our tool will draw upon the collective knowledge of librarians