The Library Geek

This week, the class activities for the LIBR 246 class of Prof. Faires involves getting familiar with social bookmarking and tagging. Every student has to open an account on deli.icio.us, search for Web 2.0-related resources on the said site, tag and create a feed for it for our Facebook or blog, explore other sites tagged with LIBR246 and write a post about the experience. Each student also tried Library Thing, a social bookmarking site that involves books instead of websites and got to try image tagging via the ESP game and tagging museum objects using “Steve Tagger“. The  final activity involves doing a comparison of two social bookmarking sites based on Farkas’ criteria found on pages 145-146, on Social Software in Libraries.

After reading the Farkas chapter on social bookmarking, watching the Common Craft video, and reading the article by Kroski I proceeded to explore del.icio.us.  This is a post on my experiences using del.icio.us as an information source.

Two aspects of social bookmarking makes it a Web 2.0 technology: it is web-based, the use of folksonomies, and being able to share, as well as, look at other people’s tagged sites. Bookmarks are nothing new on the Web and anyone who has been online for more than a decade is familiar with the browser functionality that allows a user to save a link of the web pages visited online on your computer. Social bookmarks take this functionality in the realm of Web 2.0 when it freed it from the shackles of a single computer. Del.icio.us and similar Web application allowed the user to save these visited pages not on the computer but within the application once one creates an account. This form of cloud computing, wherein your data does not reside on a single hardware but on the web has the benefit of having access to all your saved pages on any computer as long as it has internet access.  Aside from cloud computing, these social bookmarking applications also allowed the user to tag the pages with words that would best describe the page to them, rather than limiting them to saving it under one category.  And then these tags and tags made by others may be shared within that web application’s community giving the user access to similar pages similarly tagged and therefore leads to resources involving the subject of said tag.

Creating an account on del.icio.us only required the usual basic information of name and email address and takes just a few seconds. I also downloaded the del.icio.us extension for Firefox and activated it. What it does is provide the functionalities and options for the Firefox browser like ability to keep copies of the recently added sites on the browser, a button on the address bar to make adding tags easier, and open a side bar on the browser to show tags you made in your account and the pages added.

The activity involves searching within del.icio.us for Web 2.0 or class-related sites taking advantage of what sites tagged by del.icio.us community. This can be accomplished by other searching by tag word and then searching other tags done by users who made tags on said tag word.  For example you can search for those that tagged a site as web2.0 and also make Boolean searches by adding the operator “and.” Then you look at the first user who tagged the page as such and then look at what other pages tagged by that user. By searching through this method one can already come up with great examples of the topic you are searching. In our activity, the class was able asked to add at least three Web 2.0-related topics and tag it with libr246. Almost every student tagged more than three pages and with everyone contributing a page that involves the topic the class was able to come up with a good mix of blogs, reviews, how-to articles, web 2.0 tools, and analyses on Web 2.0 technologies. I subscribed to a RSS feed of sites tagged as libr246 and added it to my blog.

So how useful is del.icio.us or social bookmarks as a source for information? I would say that it can be used as a tool to complement other information retrieval systems or strategies, but not to the extent of replacing it altogether. The leads or results one gets emanate from the wisdom of the crowds, or those similarly tagging the same sites will be able to provide good recommendations on said topics.  It definitely provides leads to other data objects or sites in this case and can be used for a focus search using Boolean operators, but it does not give that sense of completeness that you get when you are searching on the wider Web. I guess this is more of a perception and lack of exposure to social bookmarks on my part. Having said that I could still see uses for this Web 2.0 tool for a library student or a librarian, for example, one can create a RSS feed subscription of sites tagged as children resources, or whatever topic one is interested in and get updates via the feeds of what other users are tagging as such.  Another use is for collaboration within a specific group.  A group of information professionals can create a group and share information and leads via tags they designate on sites or web pages. Educators can use it to come up with online reading list or libraries with online subject guides as suggested by Kroski in her article on Social tools of Web 2.0 that appeared on Choice Reviews Online.  In closing, my experience in using del.icio.us showed me how social bookmarking web applications does not only provide the flexibility of cloud computing, but can also be a valuable information source and collaboration tool for today’s information professional or everyday user.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.