I’m Larissa, a first-year student in the MLIS program at UBC. This blog has been created to fulfill the requirements for Assignment #3 (Social Software) for LIBR 500.
Social tagging is becoming increasingly prevalent in library environments. The ability to categorize new information through a folksonomic-approach has value in the collaboration between the users that create the classifications, often in ways that serve to bring information to light. Tagging can allow us access to information we might not normally find through users with common interests, and it can help us to organize and catalogue our own resource in ways that make sense to us, not to whomever designed a particular system in the first place.
In upcoming posts, I will talk about social bookmarking (tagging) and the pros and cons, then we’ll take a look at some specific libraries that use social bookmarking tools and see how they have applied them. If we have time at the end, we’ll finish up with a couple of related non-library institutions, just for fun. After that … well, we’ll see where the winds of change blow us, shall we?
header image: original British Library Reading Room, now the Great Court, British Museum (London). http://flickr.com/photos/sifter/370775225/
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