Week 5: Crowdsourcing – Social Bookmarking & Tagging

Learning Objectives
By the end of this week, you will:

• understand the way social bookmarking tools work.
• understand how social bookmarking and tagging applications can “crowdsource”.
• have developed your own ideas on the possible uses of social bookmarking and tagging applications in a library context.

Readings

• Social Bookmarking in Plain English, The Common Craft Show (audio + video)
• Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review, Hammond et al.
• Tagging, Lee Rainie (Pew Internet & American Life Project Memo)
• Cornucopia of the commons, John Udell
• The Del.icio.us Lesson, Joshua Porter
• Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us, Andrea Mercado
• Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides, Edward M. Corrado and Kathryn A. Frederick

Case Studies

• Buley Library Physics Subject Guide — Generated using the “link rolls” function in Delicious
• Chelmsford Public Library :: Subject Guide :: Consumer Information Resources — A subject guide partially generated using Delicious “link roll”
• PennTags — A homegrown Delicious-type tagging utility at UPenn.
• MTagger — Another homegrown tagging utility, this one from the University of Michigan
• Photos from Duke Yearlook — Duke University Archives is posting pictures from old yearbooks on Flickr.
• Photos from The Library of Congress — LoC is digitizing images from the collection and putting them on Flickr. Browse around and check out all the tags, comments and notes on the images.
• Photos from the University of Michigan — Images of/from a large digitization project at Michigan on Flickr.

Things to do this week

• View this week’s slideshow, which will be posted to the blog.
• Read the articles and explore the case studies for this week and post your thoughts & comments to your blog. The case studies for the week illustrate a range of uses for social bookmarking and tagging tools in libraries. Once you’ve explored these examples, think about some other possible uses of the format/technology in libraries and post your ideas to your blog. Don’t forget our weekly deadline for blogging is noon, Friday. Remember to check out your classmates’ posts too and respond (where appropriate) in the comments.
• Since the Crowdsourcing and Social Bookmarking assignment uses Delicious (due February 22), now is a good time to set up an account and give it a try. Add a few bookmarks using your own tags (or keywords) and explore other users’ bookmarks and tags. Feel free to blog about your discoveries and insights along the way.