Social Bookmarking in Libraries

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.

The MLibrary 2.0 Forum Series will explore new directions for access and services with regard to issues such as library 2.0, social networking, and the future of searching. The Series includes a range of activities, from presentations to interactive workshops. It is our goal to provide the theoretical framework and practical skills that will enable us as an organization to begin incorporating MLibrary 2.0 concepts into our services.