Tagging and social bookmarking are taking libraryland by storm because there are so many ways these tools can be used by librarians to offer better service to their patrons.
Although there is a bit of controversy about using tagging in library catalogs — authority files exist for a reason, you know — the potential exists for using tagging to make searching easier, more intuitive, and especially important from a library 2.0 perspective, more collaborative and interactive for our users. Users sometimes think about books in ways entirely different from catalogers — why not allow them to look up books by the subject headings of their choice? I’ll talk about this more when I explore Library Thing, where people tag books in all kinds of creative and unusual (yet effective) ways.
Tagging doesn’t have to be limited to the catalog. As a reference librarian, I tend to think of these tools from the perspective of the day-to-day doings of the Info Services Department. In this respect, both the tagging and social bookmarking elements of del.icio.us could prove to be invaluable.
My department has 2 computers at the service desk that have years worth of useful bookmarks on them. However, over time the 2 desks have ceased to have consistent pages marked and the wording of the bookmarks is sometimes slightly different. Also, the bookmarks are created by all members of the staff, each one approaching the topic at hand a little differently. For example, we got enough patrons asking about the Lakewood Township Residential Assistance Program that someone finally bookmarked the site www.ltrap.org. The site was bookmarked under “Lakewood – Housing” on one computer and “LTRAP” on another. To make matters more confusing, patrons usually asked for the information by referring to the site as “Section 8″. When I first started, I always had the hardest time finding the bookmark since I was always looking for “Section 8″ or “housing”. If I was on the wrong computer, I wouldn’t find it.
I bookmarked this site in my del.icio.us account: del.icio.us/eleanorblogs. I was able to tag it as “Lakewood”, “housing”, “ltrap” and “section8″. Searching any of those four words will bring up the site. How much easier would it have been for me to be using a site like this, rather than inconsistent bookmarks? And what will happen when one of those 2 computers goes kaput? We’ll lose all those bookmarks when we lose the computer! If the department were to start our own del.icio.us page, we could have access from any computer to all of our sites, each one searchable by everyone’s descriptive tags.
And since del.icio.us allows for sharing, we could then advertize to our patrons a wealth of informative sites, vetted by librarians, available in one place!
From a patron perspective, del.icio.us is an extraordinarily useful tool. Here at MWOP we have a lot of people who use our computers on a regular basis, as they do not have computers at home. Always relying on public terminals, and having to use a different one each day, means you can’t keep bookmarks to organize and remember the sites you visit. With del.icio.us, you can turn any Internet terminal into your own customized computer, accessing your del.icio.us account and all your bookmarks online.
Filed under: del.icio.us, tagging
