Join us for an hour-long online workshop about some of the most prominent features of the dynamic web: social tagging and social bookmarking. Different services will be highlighted such as Delicious and LibraryThing. We will also show how to incorporate some of these features into your own website using widgets. There will be time for the discussion of best practices and the merit of these tools as well as some real world examples of how libraries are implementing them.
Most people are familiar with these large social networking sites. Whether or not you choose to use them for yourself, social networking is a powerful tool for keeping people connected in the online environments of today and it is not “just for fun” any more. The growing number of people joining makes keeping up with so many sites necessary (from a professional and personal viewpoint) and it can be intimidating. However there are new tools emerging that make tagging, bookmarking and cataloging the various “new stuff” simple. http://glastonbury.orange.co.uk/glastotag/ It’s hard now to separate out the various aspects of the dynamic web. While I am focusing today on social tagging, bookmarking and cataloging, none of these would be useful with out their connections to other things such as social networks or microblogs. The various levels of interaction that is occurring online today are what makes the various emerging trends into powerful tools (or in many case causes them to fail). How many people on: LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, any others? Personal use of these sites is highly variable, but the massive potential market of these social mediums is a frequent topic of discussion. Making these Web 2.0 technologies useful for a library setting is a challenge, but something which I personally find to be a lot of fun. Personal: http://kevinmichaelconnolly.com/ Library Website: http://www.library.illinois.edu/ugl/ http://www.nypl.org/voices/connect-nypl https://sites.google.com/site/putnamlis/
Social tagging utilizes the masses to “self organize” The power of integrating large online networks can be seen in obvious ways (such as viral videos, and rumors/news spreading through twitter) and more subtle ways (such as increasing presence through online marketing). (Find examples to show) Viral Video: Old Spice Craze: http://mashable.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-stats/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu-KBxOtJxs http://adland.tv/commercials/brigham-young-university-byu-new-spice-study-scholar-scholar Neil Gaiman tweets about plagiarized art: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/paperchase-forced-to-deny-it-copied-artists-work-after-twitter-backlash-1896894.html
UIUC, and most libraries, have simplified their catalog interface. The effect of Google. UIUC has also recently implemented tagging in the catalog. Allowing patrons to favorite and tag items hopefully creates a more searchable and personalized catalog. But this system has been in place for roughly a year now and from a user stand point most items I search for do not have tags. While I am unfamiliar how the back end of this tagging system works, there is an obvious need for some control over the tags, so one doesn’t end up with items tagged with unrelated information. All these social medias require time commitment in order to maintain and organize their implementation in libraries. So, if and when these integrations are made, someone needs to consider where the responsibility lies. But the benefit of having tags can be seen through the use of Library Thing. Is anyone here familiar with Library Thing? (http://www.librarything.com) It’s basically a way for you to catalog your collection online and view other collections. Then review, tag and make suggestions for various books. Many libraries have integrated information from Library Thing into their catalogs. http://www.mppl.org/