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.
