LIS 9763

Hello eveyone. This week I have been inspired by our readings to think what are libraries all about? What is the purpose of a library and what does a library do?  Well...I think that libraries serve a similar function to social software; libraries bring together an organization of information for people to use, contribute to, and collaborate over; social software (particularly Bookmarking and tagging abilities) also provide a forum for people to share, communicate, and organize information.  This is why I think social Boomarking is an excellent concept to incorporate into a libarary setting.  

Doing the readings for this week opened my eyes to some of the vast benefits of applications like del.icio.us.  I am new to the bookmarking and tagging thing, so you'll all have to bare with me, but I didn't realize that del.icio.us allowed users to edit other people's tags for their bookmarks when they find websites or articles that are related to some within their own collection but do not indicate the link.  It is for this reason that Roland Piquepaille's article helped me to see how powerful bookmarking & tagging could be in a library!  I think that a library-user community could benefit enormously from havning del.ici.us offerred on a portion of their library's website.  In a space such as this users could present information to the community at large that they themselves have researched and found to be relevant enough to share with others.  This could not only be an excellent way to share websites for academic subject matter, but it could open an entire world for offerring a forum of discussion on issues of intellectual property rights, the evolving roles of librarians, career openings in the information field, etc.  Perhaps nutr.itios.us could be used and therefore provide a list of tags previously used for other bookmarks in order to aid users to assign consistent thematic tags across the collection-this sounds a lot like subject headings to me!  

According to Joshua Porter social bookmarking, particularly del.icio.us is "amazingly popular," well why not harness the popularity of tools like del.icio.us in libraries in an effort to meet the needs and evolving learning styles/communication styles of their users.  Del.icio.us could be used to create subject guides, offer news releases, and provide outside articles to indicate the currency of the library's collection and their awareness of important issues in their community.  The possible applications for knowledge that can be gained through del.icio.us seem endless, or at least endless to the point that users decide to take it.

However, in the midst of this discussion, I do wonder with the expanding organizational capabilities of bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, are librarians, comparitively speaking, still providing "value added" services to their users?  Is there an advantage to having trained information professions organizing information, opposed to "amatures" like the general public?  I think that social bookmarking is a powerful tool and that it could contribute to library professional's knowledge base and help them to provide applicable resources to their users.  However, I do also feel that if left totally unmonitored on a library website bookmarks could easily start to appear in a library's domain that are not particularly relevant to users.  Although this may not appear to be an overly large problem to most, to a librarian this could be a big problem, because they are supposed to represent an institution that is founded on accurate, current, and organized information resources.

So, while using del.icio.us as tool on library websites is a "yummy" idea, I think that there is still plenty of room for librarians to offer "value added" services, such as monitoring the information present on their website to ensure that it is accurate, current, and representative of the library's core values.