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 …