Week 5: Social Bookmarking

This week’s topic is social bookmarking.

Perhaps the best feature of social bookmarking websites is the ability to organize them with tags. If you’ve ever used a subject heading in a library catalog, a descriptor in a database, or even written names or places on the back of a photograph, you’re already familiar with tagging! A tag is just a keyword or term, and tagging is the process of assigning or associating them to something. We usually talk about tagging with online content like websites, digital photos (e.g., on Flickr), or blog posts, but the concept is the same as your handwritten notes on the family snapshots.

Tags are completely unstructured and freeform. You choose terms that are meaningful for you, so if “cooking” makes more sense to you than “cookery”, you’re free to use it! Tagging also lets you combine terms any way you want, so your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe might be tagged:

• cooking chocolate or
• baking chocolate_chips or
• chocolatechip cookies or
• yummy_recipes

You get to decide. Just bear in mind that tags are often separated by spaces, so chocolate_chip_cookies and ChocolateChipCookies are both one tag, while chocolate chip cookies is three tags. Makes for creative spelling, spacing, and capitalization.

This week, we’re exploring a popular website that uses tagging: del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a site that lets you save and organize links to web content. It’s sort of like the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” folders in Firefox or Internet Explorer, only better. With del.icio.us, you never have to remember which computer you saved that link on. So if you’re going from work to home, or to different computers around the library, all of your bookmarks are always available.

Before we continue, let’s watch another great video from the people at Common Craft:

Anyone who’s applied Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) knows that there are pages (and pages and pages…) of rules for how it is to be used. You are also required to use the exact terms specified. With a structured system like LCSH, the rules are essential to keep everyone using it consistently (more or less). LCSH is a taxonomy, a professionally developed system in which a controlled vocabulary is used to categorize materials.

A folksonomy is like a taxonomy, but without all the rules. Folksonomies grow from the tags that users apply on bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. As you add bookmarks to del.icio.us or photos to Flickr, you see the tags that other users have associated with similar items. You might even like some of them and decide to apply the tag to your own bookmarks.

Folksonomies are not hierarchical, meaning they lack the “Broader Term, Narrower Term, Related Term” structure often seen in taxonomies. Also, because they do not use a controlled vocabulary, terms can change quickly, there can be multiple tags for the same concept (library, libraries), and the same tag may be used for different concepts (try searching “cookies” in del.icio.us…).

del.icio.us lets you see the bookmarks that other users have added and how they are tagged (though you have the option not to share your bookmarks). This open sharing of links is called social bookmarking. As bookmarks are added and tagged, a folksonomy emerges. Just as you might click a subject heading in the online catalog to see what the library has on a particular topic, clicking a tag in del.icio.us shows you all the bookmarks with that tag. And in the same way that using a subject heading can narrow a catalog search, using a folksonomy tag can save you from sorting through 2 million Google hits by showing you what other people have found useful on that topic.

Before we get to this week’s activities, check out some articles on how libraries are using this technology. Be sure to include your thoughts on these ideas on your blog post for this week:

• Libraries using delicious, melange blog
• Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us, Library Journal
• Library Subject Guides Using Del.icio.us, Swiss Army Librarian

Activity #1

Search del.icio.us for something you’re interested in. Check out some of the tags people have used for that topic. Try the same search in Google or another Internet search engine. In your blog, tell us what you thought! How do the results compare? Were there any that you didn’t expect? Did you find any tags that were confusing or especially useful?

Activity #2

I’ve set up a delicious account for the library. Go to del.icio.us and login using “oaktonlibrary” (without the quotes) as the username. I will email everyone with the password. If you don’t receive an email from me, please let me know or ask a colleague for the password. Contribute at least two websites to this account by clicking on the “post” link at the top of the page. Be sure to tag the websites you add. On your blog, share your thoughts on how libraries can use delicious to serve their users.

Activity #3 (Optional)

If you are feeling ambitious, set up your own account on del.icio.us. Add a few websites and add your own tags to each of your links. Try sharing your delicious tags on your blog’s sidebar.

Further Reading (optional):

• 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking (pdf), Educause Learning Initiative
• The Brave New World of Social Bookmarking: Everything You Always Wanted to Know But Were Too Afraid to Ask (PDF), Amanda Etches-Johnson.
• Talking with Talis: the Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang. [This is a podcast – something to listen to for a change!]