Social Bookmarking in Libraries

Library 2.0 is much more than adding a blog to the library website, it’s a
philosophy of service built on three components: constant change, participatory
service and mindful evaluation. Involving users in planning new and improved
library services, breaking down barriers to participation and recognizing the
need to assess process and ‘what we’ve always done’ are important factors as
well.

This is not just about using free digital content to sell physical goods. It's
an acknowledgment that what you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a
publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing
something that the customer/reader/fan wants.

Google and other aggregators haven't stolen any value from the creators of the
content they are aggregating -- they have done what intermediaries have always
done, which is create new value based on doing for customers what those
customers cannot or do not want to do themselves -- the service of sorting
through all that content to find the thing that solves their problem.

Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users' attention back to
the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the
work of creators that they believe fans will connect with.

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

The “OCLC Top 1000” list presents the top
works most widely held by libraries. First published
in the fall of 2004, the list was most recently updated
in 2005. The list reflects true classics and
canonical works of western culture. The list also
shows the extent to which libraries strive to meet
the needs of their readers, by offering books in high
demand in any given year. The list contains
classic works such as the Bible, utilitarian
works such as the U.S. Census and
also popular works such as Tom Brokaw’s
Greatest Generation.

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.

Some journals publish an electronic table of contents for the most recent issue.
You can browse all the recent articles in these journals just as if they were on your bookshelf.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.^[1]

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.

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.