sociaLISe

Blogging holiday for this week.

While I enjoyed going through the list of items tagged with LIS9763 here are some issues that I had with the exercise:

Number of Tags
There are times when the title of the link gave me little insight into the content and this is where tags would come in and save the day. But if the user had only given the item one or two tags (LIS9763 and socialmedia) then it was pretty much back to square one. Luckily, as a class we understand the relevance of the tag ‘LIS9763′ but a random Delicious user would probably not find it very informative. It seemed that adding three to six tags was the way to go in order to adequately classify the information.

Compound “Words”
Compound words and hypenated words are a nightmare! Sadly I had to use them as well because that’s the only way Delicious would let us tag items. And it makes sense when you’re doing it, because you don’t have any other options, but, again, I’m thinking of someone ‘browsing’ through Delicious – how likely is it that he/she will be looking for ’21stcenturylibrarian’? The only reason I ended up using it was because it was a suggested tag; had it not been suggested I wouldn’t have considered using it as a keyword/tag.

I like Rules! (Sometimes…)
Tagging is really arbitrary and while I was occasionally puzzled at some of the tags I came across, I had more issues when I was trying to tag my bookmarks. Library vs. libraries? Librarian vs. librarians vs. librarianship? Internet vs. web vs. interweb? Tips vs. advice? Howto vs. tutorial? I know that tagging is a personal activity (at first) but it’s also a social activity so I wanted my tags to sound relevant to other users. And I’m sure that at the end of the day it won’t have a significant impact on the world of social bookmarking whether I use the singular or plural form, or a synonym – but I like rules and guidelines.

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Ultimately, I found crowdsourcing useful for seeing what other people are looking at and what they consider to be useful and relevant. In the case of this assignment it was particularly easy because we all used a common tag but had we not done so I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have come across anyone else’s bookmarks (anyone currently in LIS9763) because there are just so many ways to tag an item.

ETA
My favourite feature was the ability to see how many other people had also bookmarked a particular link as it gauged a link’s popularity/relevance/ease of searchability. It was also a little disheartening at times to learn that I wasn’t the first person to come across an awesome tidbit of information, but, hey, we’re all here to share, right?

After doing the readings and having worked on our group project here are a couple of (random) thoughts:

- This isn’t specific to social bookmarking; it’s more of a social software observation: tech skills matter. Take a look at our group blog post, in particular our issues with making our social bookmarking site, well, social. And if you haven’t had the chance to look at the Corrado and Fredrick article then check it out. It’s full of great tips but at the same time it’s a little daunting when MySQL and PHP and CSS keep coming up. There’s no rule that says that we’ve got to be familiar with various platforms and software, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we were? Web 2.0 has helped make things easier for the less technically inclined (*points at self*) and has helped level the playing field (to some extent) but I don’t want to get complacent when it comes to the techy part of techological things…

- I’m no cataloguer but I’ve got a secret love for controlled vocabulary. At times this made the project more challenging, and maybe even a little frustrating, so it was important to keep re-reading Mercado’s words:

This gives you an opportunity to observe a user-based classification, and learn what your users think your data is about, and possibly using that to your advantage to, say, improve your classification, or study how the patron mind works.

Searching by tags is really not that different from keyword searching. I love keyword searches, and natural language search functions – so why am I poo poohing user created tags? Probably because I’m still green enough to be snooty about such things. But we’ve got to keep reminding ourselves that it’s all about the user; if they can’t find or access information on their terms then what’s the point of all the work that we’re doing?

The Goal

Our group wanted to create a subject guide on Black Canadian History that would be both easy to keep up-to-date and which would involve the larger community of a public library system. We decided that a social bookmarking tool would satisfy both these criteria. We chose to use Delicious as our underlying social bookmarking site for a number of reasons: it is well-known, so our patrons who have used social bookmarking before would probably already be comfortable with it, and it is generally easy to use. We wanted our prototype to look like the webpage of a public library, so we embedded our Delicious page into a mock-up of a library webpage we created using NetVibes. Interestingly, a number of libraries such as Central Medical Library at the University Center Goningen and Dublin City Public Library are actually using NetVibes to host their sites.

Our Library and Our Audience

Our library, which we called The Large Metropolitan Cosmopolitan Public Library (LMCPL), was modelled after the Toronto Public Library, as system which has a very large and diverse community. The audience for our social bookmarking subject guide would be the whole community but we really wanted to get the Black community involved in contributing to a subject guide that would reflect their experiences and give them access to sites to learn about their history in Canada, and their role in the making of Canadian history

Our Process

Because our group was spread out geographically (two people in Toronto, one in Waterloo and one in London) we ended up using some social software tools to bring this project together. We met a number of times online in a Meebo chat room we created for our group and we edited this blog post as a group in Google Docs.

One of our group members did the initial creation of the subject guide in Delicious, much as a librarian at a public library would do. Then each of the members of the group added other sites and other tags to simulate how the community could use this tool.

The Prototype

You can see our finished project at the LMCPL Library website. Our goal was to make a compelling and attractive portal to our social bookmarking-based subject guide, to allow our patrons to interact with the subject guide right from the library’s webpage and to keep the subject guide fresh and up-to-date. We achieved only some of our goals. We believe the site we created using NetVibes is attractive, and because it has a widget which displays the list of our Delicious bookmarks, it will remain fresh as long as people add new sites (the list that appears on the page shows the most recently added bookmarks). Using Netvibes also allowed us to embed relevant videos and artwork which further enriched and widened the scope of our subject guide. The ability to leave comments also adds interactivity to the subject guide through the NetVibes portal.

Our Issues

Interactivity. The major issue (and a big disappointment to our group) was that we were not able to set things up so that our patrons could add sites and tags right from our library page. It is quite straightforward to embed a Delicious widget into NetVibes, but as it stands now, patrons would have to go to Delicious to add bookmarks or tags. This isn’t a problem if patrons have their own Delicious account where they can tag items themselves, but for us, the goal here was to establish a social bookmarking tool that was interactive and gave the patron an option to add tags and links to our existing account to centralize the information.

Since we were not about to make the user name and password of our delicious account public (for security reasons), we considered switching the project from Delicious to an open source software program like SemanticScuttle. SemanticScuttle would allow us to create a social bookmarking subject guide that would function much the way enhanced library OPACs work. Users would need to create an account and be logged on to contribute to our database of tags and bookmarks. As it stands, none of us were familiar enough with MySQL or PHP let alone had access to web space that would allow CGI scripts (UWO’s Panther web space does not allow CGIs) required to run the SemanticScuttle software. Our solution (which was only partially successful in the minds of the group members) was to tag all the sites with the tag “LMCPLBlackCanadianHistory” and to tell our users add other tags those sites and bookmark other sites with that tag (which we could then add to our Delicious list and which would then appear on our NetVibes page).

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Wonky Widgets. Some of problems were caused by NetVibes and their widgets. The widgets which seemed to solve our interactivity problem did not work as promised. As well, when you click on any of the hyperlinks in a widget, it brings up the link inside the widget itself, instead of in a separate window.

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Browser Compatibility. While our library website looks great in Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, the widgets for the Delicious bookmarks and the tag cloud do not appear when the page is accessed in Google Chrome.

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Authority. We, as a group, created a list of sites that we thought were useful, authoritative and current but we realized that once we opened up the our social bookmarking account to our patrons, our subject guide would become a mixture and include sites that were not necessarily as authoritative as we, as librarians, might like. But this, of course, is the nature of social bookmarking and any social activity. The benefits of this social bookmarking is that the addition of tags would personalize subjects and bookmarks for our patrons.

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Folksonomies in Social Bookmarking sites. Another issue we had was in naming our tags. On Delicious (like most social bookmarking sites) you can only use one-word tags. So, when we were trying to express a complicated concept such as Black Canadian History we used the tag BlackCanadianHistory, but we quickly realized that our community might use tags such as BlackHistory, CanadianBlackHistory and any number of variations of our original tag. This gets right at the heart of some of the issues of using folksonomies versus using controlled vocabulary. One member of our group is doing cataloguing work in her co-op, so it seemed natural that she would have concerns with it, but we all found that, like proper librarians, we felt a little uncomfortable with the free-for-all nature of folksonomies. Although our tags might not necessarily harmonize with other tags that general Delicious users might have chosen for this subject matter, when tagging in Delicious, previous tag words show up as you type in the letters. This at least helps maintain some level of consistency in word choices, although it hardly solves the problem of the lack of controlled vocabulary.

Another issue is related to the order that the bookmarks appear on the Delicious account. The bookmarks appear according to the order that they were bookmarked. Although the reader can click a particular tag from the list on the right side of the screen in Delicious and those particular tagged bookmarks will come up, there does not appear to be a way to organize the bookmarks once they are input other than by date of bookmarking or by popularity. Assuming that the patron wants to peruse the bookmarks, and we now have 41, they do not appear in any logical or pre-arranged order. We understand that we could have used tag bundles to group the tags on our page, but they will still appear randomly (last tagged) in the widget in NetVibes, not in the order they would usually appear in a subject guide (general to specific).

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Pushing our non-tech savvy patrons. We couldn’t make it easy for our patrons to add and tag bookmarks from our library webpage, so patrons would have to go to the Delicious site to do any of these things. We were worried that some of our less tech savvy patrons would just give up on such a seemingly complicated process. As well, only the first 12 bookmarks (those we added first) appear in the widget on the library webpage. Would our less savvy patrons assume that there were only 12 bookmarks in our list? Another problem uncovered here was that the overall layout of the Delicious widget makes for a cramped display. To clarify, both the website link as well as the tags are displayed in one line with only a “/” to separate website link from tag links. Will a non-tech savvy patron understand the difference between the tag and the associated link by looking at this page? It is possible for our users to access an RSS feed our Delicious bookmarks (from Delicious) so they can keep up to date with changes, but that would only be for the more tech-savvy ones. We hope that by embedding the bookmarks in our library’s NetVibes site, we’re making it as easy as possible to follow any changes (certainly that is one of the benefits of the fact that the widget in NetVibes lists the most recently added sites first).

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Longevity. As noted in the Corrado and Fredrick reading, it isn’t very likely that Delicious will disappear overnight but because it is a free, third-party service it is, however, still necessary for any library using social bookmarking to find a means of backing up this information. Our group members have shared our links via email and some of us have saved them in Word documents – while these are not necessarily the best solutions it does still ensure that we have access to the majority of our information.

For those people using Google Wave:  Is GV an attempt at a wiki? Is it a wiki?  Whatever it’s meant to be I’m not using it to it’s fullest potential – probably because I only have a handful of people in my contacts and they have little interest in playing around with it…

Fifteen years in Toronto, countless walks on Bloor Street, and I never noticed the Japan Foundation.

I had the opportunity last night to visit JFT (Japan Foundation Toronto) last night and oogle their library and “Orgamic Architecture” exhibit. If you’re interested in Japan, Japanese culture, or just interested in libraries (and I think you might be), I’d recommend stopping by 131 Bloor Street W the next time you’re in downtown Toronto.

Sadly, the library at JFT is noticing that the number of visitors are decreasing as are circulation stats so spread the word to anyone you know who’s looking to learn about Japan or maintain ties with the Japanese community in Toronto. The library is open to the public and issues library cards to anyone residing in the city for a minimum of three months. What’s the collection like? Imagine a small branch of the TPL – now imagine that the majority of the materials are in Japanese. Worry not, there’re also materials in English (fiction, non-fiction, multimedia) and French (Japanese novels translated into French). And an enviable collection of popular culture (manga, J-pop, films). Add to that mental image extremely friendly staff, a well-lit space, and comfortable seating – that’s the JFT library.

Even after doing the readings and playing around with a wiki I still don’t quite “get” them. In theory, I understand them and think that they’re pretty awesome. And Wikipedia is, for the most part, the ultimate example of a wiki in practice and I use it and admire it. But deep down I can’t get off my “information specialist’s” (to be) high horse – the thought of any and every one editing information is a bit of a nightmare to me.

Schiff’s article in The New Yorker stoked the fires of my raging doubts, so when I got to Farkas’ post I could barely handle her optimism. I can imagine her ideas being implemented and working in certain libraries, mainly academic, but my imagination hits pause when I think about wikis on public library websites – particularly the “community wiki.” Is the library website supposed to take over the roles of forums and other methods of communication? Can patrons trust the information included in such a wiki? I don’t think the website is going to become a “true community resource” just by including wikis. In order to be a true resource the website needs marketing behind it.

I know that wikis don’t have to be open to the public at large and that the role of editor is often undertaken by the librarian/library staff, but a community wiki would require the community to have access. In certain case examples, and in the course test wiki, users have to either request permission or have a certain status to be an editor. Does this extra step just serve to maintain quality control? Or does it act as a deterrent? Maybe it’s a little from column A and a little from column B… (Personally, when/if I have to wait for approval to post or comment online I usually lose interest and move on, but that’s just me.)

I’m not writing wikis off; I’m just wondering how relevant they are in public libraries. And in this era where social software usually involves instant contact/communication/results/gratification/publishing, are regulated wikis really 2.0/social?

I do, however, see wikis as productive tools for content management within an organization. Why? The goals and motivations of the users are often explicit or more clear – and in most cases, staff members are working towards a common (and defined) goal. But of course, a wiki won’t solve all problems and won’t always be the best tool; and I liked Suarez’s article for pointing that out. We need to keep reminding ourselves: the right tool for the right time/people etc.