Social Intelligence

I think I am throughly addicted to social bookmarking and tagging of new websites. I initially signed in to Delicious to complete my assignment, but then got side tracked searching for various related topics. I was amazed at how easily time slipped away while exploring  this site. I found material on babyboomers, seniors, and social networking for my final project. Then I looked to see what variety there was in social networking sites and from there I checked out a variety of sites for volunteering and home stay holidays.
Eventually I looked at all the sites tagged with LIS9763 and realized that I might have got off track with my tags as I concentrated on social software, but I had not always linked to sites that described library applications for social software. After exploring the sites tagged with LIS9763 I  went back and changed some of my tagging and went looking for more library related sites that also applied to our class.

Today for the first time I communicated with one of my colleagues outside library school on a wiki. I am trying to broaden my horizons, but it is easy to get off track and wander into unrelated topics.  I believe this sort of exploring  needs to be quickly added to the “favourite file” then I must redirect for the sake of timing.

I feel that social bookmarking has a lot of value for researchers and reference librarians as part of the search has been completed already. Being able to keep bookmarks on the web means that no matter what computer I log into I will be able to access them as long as I have an internet connection.

I like the idea of importing links directly into a blog from a social bookmarking site, but have not tried it yet. I have been reading Meredith G. Farkas’ book, Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication and Community Online this week.   It sounds like some of the other social bookmarking sites have interesting applications that allow you to track a site’s viability so that your links do not die when you go back to them at a later date or at least you are notified if they require updating. It was also mentioned that one could set up rss feeds for particular tags so that when new sites were tagged you would be notified.

The reality is that like any technology, social bookmarking sites are not completely foolproof and just as cataloguers  can come up with different tags for the same item so can anyone else.  When “see also records” work well they can redirect a searcher using a redundant term to an alternative, but the reality is that you often end up either getting no results or limited results if you enter the wrong term into a library catalogue or database. I am not convinced this is a problem only common to social taggers.