Well, this is the last blog post – a reflection on the course – and I’ll structure it around some of the questions Amanda gave us.

Has your view of social software changed since starting this course? If so, how?

Absolutely.  On a simple level, I certainly know more about it and that is a good thing.  I think a lot of librarians (and people in general) are quick to dismiss social software tools without really understanding them.  I think you really need to engage with something before you can pass judgement and this course has allowed me to do that.  I said something similar in my blog for my Digital History course and – to quote myself – “I am, by nature, a late adopter or maybe even what the Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve calls a “laggard”. I still don’t own a cell phone or a laptop. Though I love photography, I didn’t start shooting digital until about 2 years ago (now I wouldn’t go back if you paid me). My first inclination isn’t to grab the newest technology out there; the real, personal benefits of a new technology have to be demonstrated to me before I will get onboard. But as John Unsworth has said ‘it is… important to engage with the new, if you are going to effectively produce, analyze, or even object to it’”.   What was great about this class is that it allowed us to play with the technology and just as importantly – think about it in a library context.  Yes, this or that social software tool is interesting or exciting but will it work in a library?  Amanda referred to this poster above on her own blog and I love its sentiment (and its bold graphic statement, too) and think it especially needs to be applied to new technologies.  If you click on the image, it will take you to The Usable Library (a site created by Aaron Schmidt and Amanda)

Of all the social tools we’ve reviewed this term, what are your “favourite” tools for libraries and why? What would you consider to be the low-hanging fruit, i.e. the tools that could be implemented easily and with the greatest impact?

I thought “Yes, I think I’m going to use that” about two tools: Facebook and Twitter.  Now these were both tools I have a little experience with, but I had not looked at them from a library perspective.  In the case of Facebook, I’m not inclined to use it on an institutional level (although I could be convinced) but an individual level.  Facebook is where undergraduates spend a huge amount of their time and I think allowing myself to be contacted on there (not actively friending students, but being open to connecting with them) is a great idea.

I did my major project in this class on Twitter and academic libraries.  I’ve already apologized to Amanda for how long my paper got, but that was because I found it so interesting I just couldn’t stop exploring.  I looked, first, at how academic libraries are using Twitter and then I did a test study to see if I thought Western could use the tool to connect with its users.  I was thinking of posting the essay online, but it got so long I thought I’d just summarize what I found here.

I read the tweets from 32 academic libraries over the period January 1 to March 31 of this year.   Most academic libraries are using Twitter to push out information – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Yale Science Libraries (@yalescilib), which never sent an @ tweet to anyone, has over 2,000 followers, so they are clearly pushing out what people think is interesting information.  But I was curious to find libraries that were really connecting with their users and potentially even doing reference work online.  Only about a third of my completely non-scientific sample were doing so.  I emailed those libraries and very generously all but two emailed me back and answered my questions about how they build community on Twitter.  The simple answer: they work on it.  They have the philosophy that web 2.0 tools are for conversations and they try to foster conversations with users (mostly undergraduates) by sending tweets directed at them, following them and their conversations and jumping when they can help and even answering reference questions through Twitter.  One of my favourite examples was a student asking for information from a series of other ‘people’ on Twitter – three were his friends and one was the library (@pollaklibrary).  I just loved this example because it seemed to demonstrate that the library’s efforts to put on a human face and be seen as a friendly, approachable source of information had succeeded.

Then I took a look at Western.  Through a number of means, I found 47 users of Western Libraries who were actively tweeting in the period of January 1 to March 31 of this year and I read all their tweets.  What I found was that there would have been opportunity to engage with students by responding to suggestions/complaints, comments about the library and tweets that would have allowed the library to refer students to resources or services.  There were no opportunities for real reference, but I believe that if the library spent some time building community they would find that students would approach them through this medium for ready reference and maybe even research help.

How has the distance ed. experience been for you?

It’s been great.  I especially liked Amanda’s introductory video and weekly slideshows.  One of the dangers in an online course is that no one in the class (let alone the prof) seems real and present and through that introductory video and her weekly slideshows, Amanda made herself real and present to us.  In another distance course I took, the professor had us meet over two Fridays and two Saturdays on campus, which was fine for me, but some people who were out on co-op had to drive from Ottawa to London twice.  I know the prof did it to make us feel more real to each other (and it worked) but it sort of defeated the purpose of a distance course.  To my mind, there is nothing that beats a seminar-style classroom experience, but I think this course (which sidestepped agonizingly painful systems like WebCT) is probably the gold standard for distance courses.

I’d like to thank Amanda for a great learning experience which challenged my assumptions and encouraged me to develop my thinking about social software tools in libraries.

Thoughts on Cognitive Surplus from Clay Shirky

I love talks like Clay Shirky’s given at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2008.  Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admire his ability to synthesize examples into an overarching theory.  Shirky believes that since World War II we have come to live in a world of greater leisure time, but our addiction to television has been masking a huge cognitive surplus created by that leisure time.  This cognitive surplus can be accessed through a new type of media – that which includes the user in not only consumption, but production and sharing.  His ideas reflected many of the (then) new ideas that Amanda introduced us to early in the course, and it’s great to hear about it again now that we’ve had time to experience some of the tools that are making this happen.  Shirky’s examples were interesting, but I think I have even a better one.  Jane McGonigal’s article Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming is a fascinating study of what the collective can do when it’s motivated and it uses its free time to do something rather than just being a passive consumer of media output.  It’s a long article, but I guarantee that it’s not boring and you will be amazed at the process she describes.

Take Risks

Again, it might be the time of the semester (or the time of the degree – I will be finished my MLIS next Friday), but Kathy Sierra’s Death by Risk Aversion resonated with me on both a personal and professional level.  Those of us who are graduating are finding that there are very few entry-level jobs out there (at least in academic libraries as that’s where I am looking) and one of the possible stances to take in this kind of situation is to play it safe, but Sierra’s point that “if you’re not doing something that someone hates, it’s probably mediocre” was timely for me.  Playing it safe (following what everyone says you should do or trying to make yourself generically appealing to all employers) is a quick road to a job where you’ll find frustration and a lack of fit.  Taking a risk in this situation involves sitting tight, gathering new experiences (through volunteering or self-directed learning) and waiting for the job to come along where you know you can shine – where your skills will be put to work meeting needs.

The Market is Speaking

Though it was directed more at for-profit companies, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles and David Weinberger’s article, 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto, has some vital information for libraries.  Their first point, that markets are conversations, of course reflects the growth of social software and the ability of the user to interact with, evaluate, compare and then tell everyone what they think of a company or product.  For my major project in this class I am looking at how academic libraries are using Twitter not just to push out information, but to connect with users.  A few libraries are doing just as Locke et al. suggest – “getting a sense of humour” and “sounding human” as they interact with users online.  This is a risky business, since users might not be comfortable with a kind of proactive (the negative term would be invasive) library presence on Twitter, but I have to admire these libraries for really trying.  They are taking risks and in at least one instance I found a student who included his university library among a list of people (the rest were his friends) he was asking for help, which means that the library, through dint of hard work and effort at making connections online is addressing point #85: “When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

Reality

All the readings were hopeful and I feel optimistic at what can be done with some of these tools (I will outline my own social software toolbox next week in my reflection blog) but the reality is that many academic libraries are still very traditional.  Implementing some of these ideas may be a slower process than we all might hope but with a combination of sensitivity to the corporate culture and a little risk-taking, I think that our generation of academic librarians will be making huge positive changes in libraries.

In 7 Things you Should Know About RSS it was pointed out that it is almost impossible to gauge the impact that the syndication of materials through RSS feeds is having because it is very difficult to track the usage of RSS feeds.  I know when I add a feed to my Bloglines reader, it will tell me how many subscribers there are to that feed, but I’m sure that is only those who subscribe through Bloglines.  As we know, there are many other feed readers out there.  As librarians we want to measure the impact we’re having but this is an area where we cannot yet do that in a quantifiable way.

I liked some of the uses for RSS feeds outlined by Randy Reichardt in Success Story: RSS Moves into the Mainstream at the University of Alberta Libraries.  A professor getting an entire list of new books at the library would be quickly put off, but the fact that he or she could limit their feed to the second level of an LC classification is a great feature.  The worst thing we could do is add to people’s information overload.  We need to, as Reichardt did, allow customization so that people can get just the information they need.  This leads me to the intriguing idea of Yahoo! Pipes .  I know that Amena has given them a try and Amanda has warned us that they can be tricky, but idea behind them is so exciting to me.  Customization is the weapon we can use against information overload!

Another article on ease of use, Melissa Rethlefsen’s video of how to add RSS feeds to library websites, made the process seem very simple.  The promise of Web 2.0 technology is that it should be simple to use.  Sometimes that is true, but often it is not.  This is a case in which is seems it might be.

In Programming Skills Could Transform Librarians’ Roles, David Stuart tells us we need to not only be familiar with new technologies, but that we need to go beyond that and learn programming skills.  Either I haven’t taken the right technology courses, or the MLIS program has not yet bought into this idea because this is not a skill that I am going to possess by the time I finish this program (in a few weeks time).  My philosophy has been that I want to learn how things work and what is possible so that I can interact with the IT department at my library in an intelligent way.  I will know what is possible, but not have to do it myself.  Now, it’s debatable if I’ve achieved that skill, but that is still a far cry from what Stuart is advocating.

One of the things that was interesting about this week’s readings was that one of the drivers for institutions to use cloud computing is cost reduction.  7 Things You Should Know about Cloud Computing and Library Cloud Atlas: A Guide to Cloud Computing and Storage both mention that there are savings to be had for institutions that “rent” applications or space rather than spend large amounts of capital.  Some of the examples were of very small institutions, but I believe in this economy, large institutions should be interested in this, too (though their cost savings might not be so large).  These ideas were all new to me, but very intriguing.

Some of the articles brought up the major issues around cloud computing which, I think, might mean that we aren’t “quite there yet”.  In 7 Things they mentioned “concerns about privacy, security, data integrity, intellectual property manage­ment, audit trails, and other issues.”  Other readings also mention these issues and those are pretty serious issues!  One of the speakers in What is Cloud Computing? also mentioned the issue of bandwidth – you need a significant amount of it to move all your work to the clouds.  So, all in all, it might be a little while before all these things are worked out and we can all feel comfortable in the clouds.

This leads us to libraries.  How does cloud computing affect what we’re doing?  We will obviously need to provide “the fastest connections [we] can, and security measures that do not block access to what users want”, according to Michael Stephens.  And, on the related topic of mobile computing, we also need to encourage our users to access the library in ways that they are already using (texting, mobile websites).  I liked Steve Kolwich’s point that “college libraries should not be picky about how they are willing to communicate with students” – we should just be excited that they want to contact us at all rather than doing a Google search.

The Big Caveat

There are some caveats to using social networking tools in an academic library and the main one, I think, is to be very careful about the potential perception that students might have that you are “invading their space”.  At the OLA Superconference last week I went to a talk about Reference at Guelph-Humber and how they tried roving reference in the Learning Commons.  They did not get a good response at all.  In fact, one librarian said that when she was sitting at a table with students, one of their friends came up and said, “What is SHE doing here?”  I don’t think it would feel any different to students if we forced ourselves (with the best of intentions, of course) on them in another space they feel is their own: Facebook.  In Crossing Boundaries, Anne Hewitt and Andrea Forte found that one third of the students they surveyed did not believe faculty should have a presence on Facebook.  Now you might argue that librarians are different from faculty (they are not involved in evaluating coursework, only in helping), but I think we should be aware of this concern and it should shape how we plan to use these tools.

Popularity

A number of articles pointed out how popular Facebook and other social networking sites are.  We have to know that that is where our students (as academic librarians) are spending a great deal of their time.  As an article in Educause, quoted in Reaching Students with Facebook: Data & Best Practices stated, this technology has captivated our students and because of that, exploration of what they enjoy about it will allow us to incorporate such captivating material in our approaches to them.  Of course, here, too, is a caveat – it’s can’t be lame and done, as Amanda said, without authenticity.

Promotion

Promotion is going to be the key, if we want to avoid students feeling that we are invading their space.  Librarians at Penn State promoted their Facebook presence during subject-specific library instruction sessions: “the librarian explicitly stated that he often provided reference and research assistance via Facebook.”  By simply using Facebook as another way that students can contact you (albeit one on which they spend a lot of time and with which they are very comfortable) students can remain in control.  In this article (Reaching Students with Facebook: Data & Best Practices) the authors specifically said that they did not recommend friending students on Facebook: instead “let them decide when and where they need you.”

It’s What You Do With It

The last word goes to Meredith Farkas from her Libraries in Social Networking Software: “I do not think that there is anything inherently ‘cool’ or useful about having a profile on these sites. Just like any social software tool, it’s what you do with it that matters. And many libraries aren’t really doing anything with their profiles.”  This could be the motto of this class.  All these tools have huge possibility for utility, but we should be very wary of using them just because they are the new, shiny thing.

The Living Library

This was a seriously underappreciated event.  It was a chance to ‘check out’ a human book from the Career Centre for a half an hour.  This was you could talk to a library CEO, an academic librarian or a children’s librarian and ask them anything about their careers or current jobs.  I was lucky enough to ‘check out’ Jane Dysart (of Dysart and Jones consulting), Kim Silk (the Data Librarian at Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School at the University of Toronto) and Amanda (our fearless leader).  They were all incredibly open about their careers and about prospects in academic and special libraries.

Networking

This sort of segues from the previous paragraph: the conference is a great place to get to know librarians in an area that interests you.  Most of us are either a bit sceptical or a bit nervous (or both) about the idea of networking.  If you fit into this category you should go to one of the opening events: The Art of Networking (Wednesday evening).  It’s a nice, gentle way to get started talking to new people at the conference and the OLA Board of Directors is in attendance, so you can meet them, too.  As for the rest of the conference, I found everyone to be very friendly and receptive to someone just about to graduate with their MLIS.  It made ‘networking’ almost painless.  The “Meet the Employer” session on Saturday morning was also a great chance to talk to librarians and human resource professionals from a number of academic and public libraries.

The Zen of Picking Sessions

In a conference with 251 different sessions, you will really be spoiled for choice.  Even by being ruthless I found that in most time slots I had 3 sessions I wanted to go to.  When I finally made my decision, I’d worry that there was a better session somewhere else that I was missing.  My solution: stay put and get as much as I could out of the session I chose.  Maybe this is more about life than about the Superconference, but there is something to be learned in every one of these sessions and if you try to do everything, you are sure to miss it.

Folksonomies – their benefits

Aside from some of the obvious benefits of folksonomies (one is mentioned above and others have been discussed in previous posts), some of the readings showed me new or more subtle benefits.  Liz Lawley in Social Consequences of Social Tagging explained how tagging is better for browsing (and serendipitous discoveries) than for finding: “browsing the system and its interlinked related tag sets is wonderful for finding things unexpectedly in a general area.”  This was interesting because I had been bemoaning the fact that folksonomies would not allow users to locate the best resources the way traditional cataloguing would.  But now I realize that that is like saying that a wrench doesn’t work as well for hammering in nails as a hammer does.  Folksonomies can help you find items, but they are really most appropriate for serendipitous browsing.

I thoroughly enjoyed What is Social Cataloging? the video of Tim Spalding speaking at LIANZA.  I had heard about LibraryThing but haven’t used it and he did a wonderful job of outlining some of the incredible benefits (from giving access to the library of Thomas Jefferson, to connecting with other people who share you reading interests) of his system.  Now, I hesitate to say that all this is due to folksonomies – more, I think should be attributed to Spalding’s vision and ability to see the new applications for social cataloguing.  I found his opinions about OCLC interesting – and agree that public libraries should be striving to be indexed in Google since that is where people are looking for information anyway.

Folksonomies – for the Web

I had mentioned in a previous post that when confronted with the huge, amorphous mass of the Internet, folksonomies are just about the only appropriate way of organizing information.  This idea was echoed in Adam Mathes’ Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata and by Emanuele Quintarelli in Folksonomies: power to the people who describes the information produced by the Net as “an enormous, ever-changing, time-sensitive, not-clearly defined corpus of items”.  When put like that, which cataloguer would want to try to apply LCSH to that?  Quintarelli says that “Well-designed metadata is better than folksonomies on traditional axes of comparison.”  This is what I believe.  The popularity of folksonomies and tagging on the Net is not going to stop librarians from using LCSH.  He goes on, however, to make this emphatic point which I think may have been missing from my (and other’s people’s) analysis of which system is ‘better’: “it does not matter whether we ‘accept’ folksonomies, because we are not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of Web publishing makes the mass amateurization of cataloguing a forced move. Folksonomies are a trade-off between traditional structured centralized classification and no classification or metadata at all. And they are the best we actually have.”

Folksonomies – for academic libraries?

So, we have now established that folksonomies cannot be avoided on the Net and are actually quite appropriate for that environment.  I agree with this.  The more tricky question for me is whether they are appropriate (and in what circumstances) in academic libraries.  Carol Ou in White-Paperish Thing (about distributed classification) explored one area: cataloguing of journals and decided that the benefit of getting users to tag these sources was that “it shifts that burden precisely towards a group with the greatest stake in certain resource discovery, relying on the concept that users are most likely to be willing to participate in a system that enables them to enhance their own access to those resources they themselves find most relevant.”  So, we are appealing to the personal interests of the users (somewhat following the idea that personal interest comes before community interest in successful social bookmarking enterprises such as Delicious and LibraryThing), but is there enough incentive to do this when traditional methods work ‘well enough’?  I look at the Encore system at UWO and I must admit that I have not found one item that has been tagged.  Is that because there is not enough personal incentive? Or that users feel that the catalogue of an academic library is sacrosanct compared to the Internet?  I know that no one is suggesting that academic libraries stop using LC classification or LCSH, but I just wonder about what added benefit could come from tagging in an academic library and if there is one, how we could get our users to engage in this process.

I found the actual process of tagging difficult and I realized afterwards that it was because I was trying to do two things at the same time: bookmark for myself and bookmark for others.  These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but tagging is much easier to do when you know why you are doing it.

The other issues I found with this process were ones discussed in my group project – the problem of trying to create tags for complex ideas or even for names that have more than one word (Delicious only allows single word tags) and the issues of using capital letters and plurals.  I also found that as I searched for pages and then tagged them, I (a single tagger) did not always use the same word for the same topic.  In traditional methods we worry about inter-indexer reliability, but I don’t even have interpersonal reliability!

So, there is no question that there are many issues with tagging and bookmarking on a site such as Delicious, but there is a great benefit (especially when using a common tag such as our class was doing).  As I write this post, there are 1,439 pages tagged with LIS9763.  That is an amazing number of pages and as I scrolled through them there were sites which jumped out at me and which I was curious to explore.  In determining which sites interested me I used a traditional method (title and notes) but I also looked for sites that had been bookmarked often.  This reinforced for me that though Delicious is a new and different way to find useful information it does not necessarily eclipse older methods of scanning and evaluating (and cataloguing).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

In Hammond’s article Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review it is pointed out that “to anyone familiar with top-down classification schemes, this approach [social bookmarking] could look like a fearful muddle.”  The “anyone familiar” are creators and users of traditional hierarchical classification systems – that is, us (librarians and librarians in training) among others.  Though I do see the benefits of social bookmarking, I am very aware of its drawbacks and I thoroughly believe that the hierarchical systems that we have been trained in are superior for giving access to bibliographic material (that’s why I wonder about the benefits of encouraging students to tag material in the new UWO catalogue).  But tagging and folksonomies are not being used to organize bibliographic materials (or at least they haven’t taken over from traditional classification systems) they are being used to ‘catalogue’ and ‘organize’ that great amorphous mass – the Internet.  The Internet cannot be catalogued by traditional means (I guess Yahoo tried that and look what happened to them when Google came along?).  The Internet has been created ad hoc and should be classified ad hoc.  But as Hammond says, “a free tagging approach to classification is a jumbled, hit-and-miss affair, and any system that it may throw up must be discovered, or learned, after the event” and that is where we are now: trying to understand the system that has been created.  The greatest benefit, to me, to this type of system is that it may tag material with the terms that users would actually use to find it – but as our group discovered, there are many, many ways to name the same concept.

I thought Rainie made an interesting point in Tagging: “some worry that folksonomies can be a type of ‘tyranny of the majority’, in which the prevalent group’s way of thinking about the world overwhelms the local and the quirky.”  This was interesting to me, since in the same article Rainie points out that taggers are mostly under age 40 with high levels of education and income.  They are the people determining what is noteworthy on the Internet and that is both good and bad.

I enjoyed Joshua Porter’s The Del.icio.us Lesson where he made the very good point that tagging works not because people do it for altruistic reasons, but because it will benefit them directly.  The network value only comes in when we aggregate what people have created.  Andrea Mercado, in Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us, makes a similar point: “Flickr follows a ‘desire lines’ philosophy, letting people create their own metadata, laying paths where people are walking instead of trying to lay out paths and assuming people will follow them (like, say, structured classification)”.  This, I think, should be the strategy that we take when using social software tools in libraries.  We need to make sure that we aren’t laying out the paths and hoping that people will want to walk along them, but rather letting people create the paths because they see the use in them.  After they have done that we can find a way to create a network benefit from all their work.