Using Social Networking Tags in a Library Setting, a Presentation given at Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon on 7/9/08 by Keith Kisser
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Social Networking Tags have become a widely used method for people to keep track of websites and web content. Tags also have the potential to provide an alternate method of providing access to the library. This is creating a major shift in the perception of libraries as a place that is not just where books are kept, but as a hub where you can go to get online and find whatever it is you are looking for. Librarians need to be able to meet the needs of this changing attitude towards information. One way that web 2.0 technology allows us to do this is with user-based classification and organization. Tags provide a familiar point of reference for using the OPAC, allowing users to become accustomed to relating tags to subject headings.
Tags are based on Folksonomy, which is “The practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.” Tags are how people organize data on a personal level, in contrast to traditional subject indexing, as done in the library setting. Tags are a level of metadata generated not by experts but by creators and consumers of content. Usually, tags are made up of freely chosen keywords instead of controlled vocabulary.
Currently, the Web is in transition. It used to be that the library was a point of access to the Internet. That is, the Web was just one of the services that the library offered, and often times, one not given any special place or priority. This was web 1.0. The slow days. The dial-up days. The days of newsgroups and chat rooms and really slow email.
Today, we have Web 2.0. There are no longer any solid barriers between a service provider and the user. It used to be that the Web had content. Today, the Web is content. Nonlinear. Nonphysical. Broadband. BitTorrent. YouTube.
And there is a lot of it. Millions of websites. Wikipedia has over 10 million articles. Youtube has over 3 Billion videos shared by 79 Million members. Sure, a lot of it is Lolcats and Eddie Izzard clips but some of it is academic blogs and original research. When you find these needles in an infinite haystack, how do you organize them? With Tags.
Everyone who does anything online for any length of time uses Tags. It’s an easy way to keep track of your favorite websites and content across multiple platforms. And that’s the point. Tags are flexible, allow people to share content with others and access their content from anywhere. And notice it’s their content. Even if they did not have a hand in physically creating it, they have made it theirs by customizing it and commenting on it. Content is now a shared, collaborative thing. Not just a commodity created by one person and bought by another.
Del.icio.us is a Web tool that allows users to tag websites and online content according to their own wants and needs. Del.icio.us uses Tags which can be collected in bundles, which organize lists of Tags into general groups.
A library could have one account used by all the librarians and staff, allowing them to collect useful resources and gather them together in course specific Bundles.
Another useful service is LibraryThing, which allows people to catalog their personal library using Tags and allows for users to rate and review their books, like on Amazon.com. Bibliographic data is drawn from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress and more than 680 libraries worldwide. LibraryThing incorporates Library-style records with Social Networking content such as reviews, tags and book swapping. LibraryThing also offers a service integrating Tags into your library OPAC. This service is affordable, easy to plug into existing web catalogs and expands subject heading access points to users both in LibraryThing and in the OPAC.
Another useful service for libraries to consider is Flickr, which lets people organize, share and print their photos online. Flickr also uses tags and allows comments for individual photos. Users have a lot of flexibility in creating collections of up to 200 images. This is easier then creating a custom built digital library and much easier to maintain, update and manage.
Flickr is useful for libraries because people like pictures. Having an image to relate to goes a long way to making the library catalog more user-friendly.
Flickr is also a great example of Crowdsourcing, “taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.”
Recently, the Library of Congress put more than 3,000 images from their collection of historic photos on Flickr. People all over the world are contributing comments, aiding the Library of Congress by contributing information about the images. Recently, George Eastman’s House has done the same, and put over 200 historical pictures on Flickr, including several hand colored autochromes.
In an academic library, this can provide wider exposure to little-used collections and can allow for faculty, staff, students and the general public to contribute additional information in comments. It can also promote the libraries collections and bring more people into the library.
Not everyone is a cataloger – this is a good thing. Tagging online content creates a familiarity with the concept of cataloging, using collections, OPACs and libraries. Using tags teaches people how to use an organizational system, relating it to familiar systems they use every day. They also allow patrons a way to contribute to the collection in a way that highlights how they use the catalog, allowing librarians to adapt this information to how we structure the library’s interface and making the OPAC more user-friendly.
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