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.
