Social bookmarking tools serve two general purposes: helping you keep track of what you've seen and showing you what you may have missed.

PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online
resources. Members of the Penn Community can collect and maintain URLs, links to journal articles,
and records in Franklin, our online catalog and VCat, our online video catalog. Once these
resources are compiled, you can organize them by assigning tags (free-text keywords) and/or by
grouping them into projects, according to your specific preferences. PennTags can also be used
collaboratively, because it acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits
of the Penn community, and can help you find topics and users related to your own favorite
online resources.


PennTags was developed by librarians at the University of Pennsylvania.

There is a revolution happening on the Internet that is alive and building momentum with each passing tag. With the advent of social software and Web 2.0, we usher in a new era of Internet order. One in which the user has the power to effect their own online experience, and contribute to others’. Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.

I used some of my break time to further delve into what’s happening with social bookmarking and tagging activity. These are interesting technologies, and I’m wondering if much exploration is taking place at academic libraries. There are a few academic librarians out there who have caught on to the use of social bookmarking software and tagging - and a few are actively promoting it on their blogs. For example, Ellyssa Kroski, a reference librarian at Columbia University, discusses tagging and folksonomies at her blog Infotangle. But at the library, not individual, level we are only beginning to explore how to exploit this technology to promote user access to resources and services.