LIS 9763

Generally speaking, I am one to agree with Porter, who notes that social bookmarking and tagging is most useful as a means of organizing one’s own digital content on their terms; as he says, “personal value precedes network value.” However, I do not view bookmarking and tagging as some sort of keyword-revolution that trumps the powers of more “top-down,” static means of structuring the organization of information. That said, I have been able to step back from this point of view a bit this week and came up with a few realizations as to how social and socio-structural benefits brought by bookmarking and tagging can indeed enhance not just such things as find-ability and sharing capacity in personal online photo collections, but numerous library services as well. 
 
A few thoughts and ideas I have been knocking around include the following:

• The majority of the case study examples that showed how libraries have used the linkroll feature in Delicious appear to be very well put together and relevant/useful, making the addition of new content to subject or reference guides more inclusive and user-friendly. However, I can also see how things could easily get out of hand if no one was moderating what was tagged and added by various people. Furthermore, if there is no organization and purpose to the links (the Lupton Library example, for instance) then what’s the point? Providing links to specific needs (e.g. reference sources, subject-specific websites) makes much more sense for a library service than simply linking to “interesting” sites (though some were indeed interesting). Relevance matters!  

• In library OPACs, I think tag clouds are a potentially useful way to find things under certain popular categories (e.g., book genres), especially for people who are more visually inclined. I would most definitely never place their value over subject-headings and regular search features (e.g., basic and advanced, google-esque or Boolean), however. They are instead a visual compliment, and also an interesting way to explore how content has been categorized, either by librarians or by the public (more on that when we get more deeply into Folksonomies).

• When I first came upon Delicious, one of my initial quandaries was why there was not a Delicious Scholar website set up that allowed for bookmarking of academic sources. I was therefore sweetly surprised when I came upon sites like Connotea and citeulike. I think these are useful to anyone conducting their own research who wishes to follow certain topics or interests of a particular scholar (given they are a contributor), or explore new and/or popular topics in various research circles. Therefore, they are great tools for librarians as researchers, but also as educators working with students and faculty whom we can share these tools with.

I think a site like citeulike is also a welcome additive to the world of bibliographic software. I have not explored it to the point where I am comfortable stating whether its components are better or worse than say RefWorks or EndNote, and realize they each have their own independent strengths depending on a user’s needs. However, based on initial impressions, I think citeulike is much more valuable to those who wish to share resources with a broad audience than RefWork’s RefShare feature, for instance. (Now, if only all scholarly research was open-access. Despite the benefits of scholarly social bookmarking sites, I cannot help but feel some of these tools are rather exclusionary, especially for those interested in disciplines with fewer OA options [e.g., the social sciences and humanities], which lessens their value a bit in my view.)

• Social bookmarking is also a great addition to this course (and could be to most any course, in theory). It does encourage us to explore the literature that we and our classmates have found, share and discover common interests, learn the technology itself, and perhaps also discover a new means of compiling our own digital research materials. However, I’ll admit I have been a bit hesitant to “dive in.” There’s soo many readings tagged under LIS9763, I could never find the time to go through them all, and have not known where to begin. I think that I will find it very useful when I start collecting materials for my paper for this course, however, and look forward to contributing things I find elsewhere also in the chance that they will interest and/or assist others.

* Just as an aside, I found it questionably useless for the Rainee/ Pew piece to provide demographic information about who is tagging on the Internet without also providing analysis. It’s particularly unsettling when the researchers compare “online minorities” as one group against “whites” who they then insinuate to be the “mainstream” (see page 4). What does this imply or really tell us about anything? Perhaps I just need to find a copy of a full report explaining the findings for clarification… ? Anyway, I digress.