LIS 9763

The focus of our group project was to create an online teen community where ideas can be shared and learning can take place using a social bookmarking tool. We wanted to create a venue for teenagers to recommend books, movies, etc. to other teens and the library using tags. At the same time, librarians will use this social bookmarking tool to learn about teen interests and recommend resources, both in the library and on the web, that may be of interest to teens. For example, some teens may tag books, movies, etc. from retailers such as amazon/chapters/futureshop/etc. that they liked or wished that the library carried. Librarians might tag items in the library catalogue that they think teens will like, or recommend similar items that teens have expressed interest in (i.e. more vampire related books and DVDs, etc.).

The social bookmarking tool we decided to use for this project was delicious. (http://delicious.com/). One of the advantages of using delicious, is that it is a popular and well-known social bookmarking site and it allows librarians (and teens) to monitor updates to their tags via RSS feeds. As a part of our prototype, we created a delicious account called lis9763tagging.(http://delicious.com/lis9763tagging). All materials that we thought would be of interest to teens were tagged teenlib9763. Further tags were added so that teens can locate materials of interest.

Some examples of tags used include:
- GraphicNovels
- Books
- CDs
- Manga
- Virtualworlds

Teens will be able to find out about our delicious account from our library website, which will have a link to our delicious tags called Hypo Thetical Library Teen Tags. They can explore the tags by clicking on the Hypo Thetical Library Teen Tags link or directly through the delicious site by searching for the teenlib9763 tag. Or teens can click on a topic of interest from the tag cloud on our website. Teens can also then tag items they wish to share with library and other users by using the tag, teenlib9763, on delicious.

As stated above, the teenlib9763 tag will be monitored using RSS feeds by the librarians. When something is tagged with the teenlib9763 tag, the library staff can monitor it for content, and then tag it in the library account. This allows the tag to appear in our library's tag cloud.

The tag cloud was created using a tool from the delicious website. It is very easy to do.  First you give your tag roll or tag cloud a name. Then you choose how many tags you would like displayed and the range of the font sizes. (Remember a tag cloud communicates popularity with size) After that, you can do fun stuff like customize the colour, choose a roll or a cloud, and whether you want your tags listed alphabetically or by number. When you are all done, you copy the java script the site creates for you (out of the box above). Then you go to your website and paste the java script into the section of your html that indicates the place you want your tag cloud to appear.  

Our website:
http://publish.uwo.ca/~lhuiskam/9763/lis9763.html

To see our delicious account:
http://delicious.com/lis9763tagging
 
Group Members - Lisa Bianchetto, Lorna Huiskamp, Christine Oosterhof, Kay Sato