steve.

Not strictly library-related, but here’s a little tidbit, just for fun …. 

“steve” is the Art Museum Social Tagging Project. A “collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art”, its aim is to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content.  Participation is open to anyone with a contribution to make to developing collective knowledge, regardless of whether they work in a museum. From their “About” page ….

“Together, working within steve, we hope to learn more about how to improve access to museum collections. We’ve realized that what people remember about a work of art often isn’t described in museum collections documentation, and are aware that the vocabulary of museum professionals (curators and registrars) isn’t always that of the general public. We want to explore user-contributed terminology, collected on the Web, as a way to address these gaps. User-created descriptions could provide museums with missing subject-based information for their collections databases and make our on-line resources more useful.”

The project originally started in small part due to cost; professional specialist cataloguing can prove to be prohibitive to the budgets of small museums.  However, the originators of the project recognized that people see different things.  By allowing users to describe the collections in their own words, it may open them up to others.I also can’t help but think that maybe the project itself can be viewed as a form of art – a commentary on access to individual understanding by way of social collaboration.  Any thoughts?

LibraryThing for Libraries: Los Gatos Public Library

Officially launched in 2006, LibraryThing is an online service that enables individuals to catalog their books, tag them, share recommendations, and post reviews.  In the wake of its popularity – it currently has over 21 million books catalogued by its members – it recently launched LibraryThing for Libraries, which delivers the same basic services as their original version, but adapted for library use.  According to the LibraryThing’s Thingology Blog, LibraryThing for Libraries is composed of a series of widgets designed to enhance library catalogs with the same data and functionality as the original LibraryThing.  All this, with only a few added lines of HTML.

Los Gatos Public Library (LGPL) brought LibraryThing for Libraries online earlier this year.  There is no direct link to the service, because none is needed; it integrates seamlessly with the library’s existing OPAC to create a display of the traditional catalog metadata, including LCHC subject headings, while also providing the applications that LibraryThing users have come to love.  For 75% of the items (neither the library website nor their blog specify for what reasons that remaining 25% were left out), the catalog record will appear like a standard Dynix display, with added LibraryThing user-supplied tags and recommendations.  In this sample page, beneath the holdings information is a tag cloud and Similar Books listing.  The tag cloud is dynamic, and clicking on ie. crime will open a window that displays a list of all other books in the catalog also tagged as “crime”, a list of tags related to crime (ie. crime fiction, detective, etc.), and any related editions or translations of the work in question – information that is not always linked easily through freestanding library OPACs. 

LibraryThing for Libraries is under continual development, as new features are brought online.  While it appears that users have input in supplying the original tags to LibraryThing before it is published, creation of new tags at the moment rests with the OPAC staff.  Soon to come are user reviews, user tagging, and user ratings: features that will allow patrons to achieve a collaborative relationship with the information that is currently missing (personally, I’m waiting to see the popular anti-recommendations feature).

Nashville Public Library

The Teen Web at the Nashville Public Library (NPL) is another example of a public library which uses del.icio.us to good effect.  This time, the focus is on their teenage user group, and 146 items on 60 tags relevant to their community demographic – everything from abuse to homework to manga – are bookmarked for patrons.  As with the Thunder Bay Regional Library (see blog entry here), users cannot link sites themselves to the NPL del.icio.us network, although following the tags will act as a springboard to the wider community tags for information. 

According to the article Sept/Oct 2007 issue of Library Technology Reports on Tagging & Social Bookmarking [link], they opted to use del.icio.us for three reasons:  
 
1)  It invites participation.  Teen library staff  have some control over the Teen Web and can manage links.  Teen users can also participate by suggesting good sites to be tagged for the NPL account.
2)  It organizes links based on tags.  Users can find sites easily based on key terms without having to navigate through unwieldy lists or categories.
3)  It allows the NPL to tag sections of the Teen Web so that it’s available through del.icio.us, not just through the library website.

Access is appears to be through the library’s Teen Web page, and can be executed in one of two ways: through the “Teen Web Links on Del.icio.us” link which connects you to the NPL’s main del.icio.us page, or by subject via the tag cloud immediately underneath the link.  Again, you don’t need to be a member of the library to access the information remotely, but you do need to have a del.icio.us account.

I say “appears to be” because the two routes are somewhat misleading.  While the cloud tags are links to genuine online resources, the “Teen Web Links on Del.icio.us” brings you to NPL’s del.icio.us account main tag page, where the “web links” by topic are actually digital representations of print resources in the NPL’s catalogue, not web resources which is what I certainly expected from the title of the link.  As a user, I would consider this to be more valuable than having two different paths to the same set of information bookmarks; however, I would recommend that the link from the Teen Web page be changed in order to more accurately reflect the type of information that users will find.

Since a few of the libraries I’ve discussed here have used del.icio.us or del.icio.us-like features, here’s a link to a good resource from Jason Griffey at the University of Tennessee: Making Your Library del.icio.us: Social Bookmarking in the Stacks.

Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School has launched a social bookmarking site called H20 Playlist. Working off the same idea as del.icio.us, the Harvard Playlist offers a series of links to books, course materials, articles and other resources related to the Center’s area of intellectual information. As one of the developers observed to Bill Ives in his Intranetstoday.com article, Intranet Social Bookmarking: Playing Tag Behind the Firewall, “Playlists provide a tool optimized to enable the sharing of ordered lists of information. It was designed with enough features to be useful and not too many to make it difficult to used by busy professionals”.

Playlists differ in concept from common social bookmarking applications in the structure and range of options they can offer. Users can include headings and subheadings for their Playlists, order links to reflect changing priorities (instead of chronological order), and create multiple Playlists. According to the article above, this flexibility has made it immensely popular with the Center’s users.

The H20 Playlists are a step beyond the traditional social tagging methods most of us are familiar with (side note: how wrong does it seem to use the word “traditional” when referring to something that’s been around for less than 5 years?!). The easy-to-navigate format displays the name of the playlist (ie. “UDL and Web 2.0: Confronting the Drunk Librarian”), the name of the Playlist’s creator, the tags (ie. folksonomy, education, disabilities, etc.), and an annotation of the resources (ie. “What kinds of disabilities are reinforced, and what new disabilities emerge with the adoption of the Web 2.0 philosophy?”). Selecting a Playlist pulls up a page with resources arranged by subheading and an influence ranking, and selecting a tag results in a list of all Playlists using the tag.

A Playlist seems to remain under the control of its creator, at least with the H20 playlists; there are tutorials on how to create a new Playlist, but nothing on adding to an existing one. For this reason, they can’t be considered to be true social bookmarking tools in the collaborative sense. They have undisputed value in their capacity to make available valuable information to whomever wants it, however. All links seem to be openly accessible to all, not just users within the immediate community, and the only restriction is with creating the Playlists themselves. Of the three references that I randomly selected from the Playlist, only one was easily retrievable through UBC’s system; the other two may fall into the area of “gray literature”, a resource area of which the bringing to light is one of the benefits of social bookmarking.

Thunder Bay Public Library

The Thunder Bay Public Library (TBPL) is an example of a public library that uses del.icio.us tags on its website in order to allow its users to bookmark and organize online sites for its patrons.  Existing as part of a two-pronged approach to digital information organization, users can either select from online resources that library staff have identified and organized by subject on the Internet Links page, or they can click through to the same information to their del.icio.us Tag Cloud page.  This last step does not deliver any new information at this stage that the patron would not be able to obtain through the main Internet Links page.  However, they are then able to connect to all the del.icio.us items tagged by the broader user community, not just by those resources tagged by the TBPL network.

Unlike some library websites, there’s a nice little introduction to the concept of social bookmarking and tags right on the page above the tag cloud, something I’m sure is appreciated by those unfamiliar with the concept.  However, finding the tag cloud page from the TBPL main webpage took some doing as it’s not promoted anywhere.  For those familiar with websites, it’s a relatively simple matter to find the path for Virtual Collection – Internet Links – Del.icio.us Tag Cloud.  However, users who would benefit from the tag classifications – perhaps those who also experience some difficulty with the traditional library classifications – may be the same people who would have trouble navigating this far.  Once the user does make it to the right page, a del.icio.us tag list is displayed in a cloud format on the page.  This comprehensive list includes all the tags – not just the most popular ones – and its inclusivity makes it easy to navigate.  Clicking on the ie. Genealogy tag brings you right to TBPL’s del.icio.us account page; anyone can access this remotely in order to view the links.

All in all, once you reach the tag cloud (and sorry to keep harping on that, but it seems like it could be a real concern), it’s great; the information is comprehensive (470 items in about 140 tags) and easy to steer your way through.  While not fully collaborative within the TBPL framework itself, it does provide the stepping stone to the broader del.icio.us information community.

I just have my concerns about new users finding it ….

Blogging for a Good Book: Williamsburg Regional Library

The librarians at Williamsburg Regional Library (WRL) use bookmarking tags in their daily blog, Blogging for a Good Book, which recommends a book (and sometimes a film) each day, and provides plot synopsis and a brief review.  The blog – which launched in April 2007 – is another incarnation of their Looking for a Good Book reader’s service, and the intent appears to be to take the concept of a library book club to a technological platform.  The site is extremely user-friendly and patron-focused, with a Subscribe tab at the top which lets you join to receive a notice through a new aggregator when a new review is added.

Comments are posted – and encouraged – by readers, although I trolled through the last few weeks, and comments seem to be a bit sparse (though I’m sure readership is higher than comments indicate).  Navigation to the library site is easy from the blog, as the site has a WRL button that links directly to it.  However, the blog itself is not promoted from the library main page, and users have to browse through their way through Information Resources/Readers and Books in order to find the link.

These entries are tagged by the staff member writing the post, normally with three to four tags that are largely thematic.  For example, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street  – which I really need to read before I see the movie – is tagged for Books, Dark humor, Horror and Jennifer’s Picks.  Each blog entry also provides the direct link to the WRL catalog for the reviewed book, which can let users know the status of the item.  The list of tag categories is displayed on the right-hand side of the screen, and is comprehensive – currently about 75 strong, and growing.

There was only one aspect of the site that I found to be confusing.  By selecting ie. Dark Humor from the Categories list in the sidebar, it brings up a list of all the BFGB entries that this blog has tagged as belong to that category.  BUT.  Clicking on the Dark Humor tag that is located at the bottom of the post brings up a list of all the entries *in WordPress* that belong to that category.  If that’s what you’re looking for, then I suppose this is a perfect setup.  But for newcomers to WordPress who may assume that the sidebar tags and the within-the-post tags lead to the same place, it could be confusing.
I really appreciated that you can look up all the books in a certain staff member’s Picks; if readers find that they like one book posted by a certain staff and agreed with his/her evaluation of it, they can see all the posts tagged within the staff’s Picks.  It’s not collaborative in the broader sense – control remains within the library staff group and there is no availability for users to add their own tags – but it is an effective example of social bookmarking as information sharing.  One benefit to this managed access is that the tag list remains streamlined, with none of the duplication that can occur when a wider user group has access.

PennTags: University of Pennsylvania Public Library

A high-profile instance of libraries using tagging is PennTags at the University of Pennsylvania Library. Developed for the academic community and launched in 2006, PennTags allows users to tag and annotate items catalogued within the U Penn Library OPAC with their own user-defined tags, in much the same was as del.icio.us functions.

As David Weinberger points out in his blog entry, this function of integrated tagging provides the ability for structured browsing through the library catalogue, with jumping-off points based on folksonomy tags created by its users. Apparently, a link at the bottom reading “Add to PennTags” makes it easy to perform. Unfortunately, this can’t be done without a U Penn login, but Mark Phillipson’s Clayfox blog provides a screen shot of a catalogue page with tag references and some behind-the-scenes details as to how it works (note that this blog posting dates to June 2006, and some changes to PennTags may have been made since).

The “project folders” on the right-hand side of the page are highly practical; they let users add to and view groups of tags that were used for specific projects, and there are a LOT – anything from “Venous Thrombosis in Children” to “A Clockwork Orange”. Some tags are more prolific than others, but on the whole it’s admirably complete. The next time I need information on “Databases and Article Indexes”, I’m going to check out the 83 items that users have tagged within that project folder.

The link to the PennTags site is difficult to find from the main Library site, as it is buried in the Toolbox at the bottom of the page. And once you’re at the PennTags site, there’s no easy link to help you get back; this is fine if you use your back button, but not for any students who may bookmark the site itself. I am assuming that most students are aware of the idea behind PennTags by now and need no explanation of what it is, which is why the link goes directly to the PennTags main page which displays no information about the application. A new user such as myself, however, would appreciate at least an easily visible “what is PennTags” or “how to get started” box in the side bar. Once you do find the about page (link to which is hidden in tiny type at the top right of the screen), it contains full user-friendly instructions.

It’s easy to view all the tags, and the most popular ones – used at least 75 times – are in a cloud at the top of the main page (note: you can select tags from the cloud at the top of the page to view the items within the cloud, but clicking on the individual items refers you to UPenn Library’s login page). I suspect that this “most popular” cloud isn’t dynamic, however; Business Area Studies had 625 tags when I looked at it but doesn’t appear in the cloud. As well, in keeping with the messiness inherent in any non-controlled vocabulary, there are some useless tags (such as , and &) and typos (like “ny and “library) that were clearly mistakes, and only serve to muck up the list. There were also the inevitable nyc/ny/newyork/new_york duplications, as well as some tags that appear to be identical yet appear twice (ie. beta/beta).

Besides being integrated into the library OPAC, one of the biggest benefits to PennTags is arguably the collaborative aspect. It acts as a collective repository of the academic interests of the university community, and the shared nature of tagging allows others within the community to use the tags to develop the scope of information within each. However, that collaborative aspect can be a drawback for individuals who want to maintain a level of control over what is tagged. In this case, I can certainly see students keeping their own del.icio.us or Connotea accounts in order to keep their tags containing only the items that they feel are relevant.

The good, the bad, and the ugly …

Social tagging moves away from the idea of formal classification structures based on traditional models. Instead, as the Educause Learning Initiative notes, this process provides like-minded individuals with the tools to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources. The fluidity of social bookmarking allows for a more democratized approach to information classification, and is a method to increase “findability” through the expression of the direct information need of the user.

It can also bring gray literature to light. As online resources continue to expand, much valuable information is being created by experts and scholars that cannot be accessed easily – if at all – through databases. Blog posts, podcasts, discussion forum entries, and materials not yet published can all be valuable contributions to our group store of knowledge, but if we don’t know about them, it’s useless.

Within most systems, social bookmarking can be performed by anyone with access to the system; this could mean a select group of users, or anyone with ie. a Vancouver Public Library card. Anyone can tag anything for any reason, and while this collaborative aspect is one of the biggest benefits to the tool –really, the whole point of it – it can also be a drawback. At best, a tag list could end up with a group of near-duplications based on typos, at worst it can overloaded with inappropriate tags or links created for malicious reasons. Assuming that most users who would bother to participate in collaborative bookmarking would be approaching it with honest intentions, human error can – and often – arises, resulting in imprecise lists that do not support searching or browsing efficiently.

Social Bookmarking: The Basics

It seems like you can’t turn around in the library world these days without being whacked on the head by a falling Library 2.0 anvil. Inevitably, one of these anvils has the phrase “Social Bookmarking!” stenciled all over it in big, bright, friendly letters. Yes, got it, thanks. But what is it?

In the digital world, bookmarking is a way for users to tag sites for later retrieval; the most common way this was done was by saving an URL into your Favorites on your web browser. This method worked great – until you went to use the computer lab on-campus and tried frantically to Google the link to that great article that you had found through that one site … from the link on that blog …what was it called? … the one with the cool picture of the … thing … argh! Since your Favorites were only accessible on the computer where you bookmarked them, you were out of luck when you tried to use another computer.

Enter social bookmarking. Now sites like del.icio.us and furl (among many others: see here for a recent top 20 list) allow you to bookmark websites you like, in way that lets you access those bookmarks from any computer with internet access. The sites you bookmark are marked with tags that let you choose how you want to classify your information: broad terms like “animals” and “humor”, or really narrow ones like “waystogetyourdamnpuppypottytrained” and “fijianlibraryhumor”. You can determine tag names yourself, or use ones that others have created. And it’s social because others can see your tags and what sites you’ve bookmarked, and you can see theirs.

This new way of organizing information and categorizing resources is referred to as a “folksonomy”; a taxonomy of terms that is determined by regular ‘ole folks like us. We all classify information in different ways, and social tagging allows us to access that information in ways that may have been closed to us in the past.

Next up: the pros and cons of social bookmarking …