Social bookmarking/tagging

From IPL Wiki

Social bookmarking is used to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Tagging is a capability incorporated into many websites as a feature that helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.

Contents 1 About 2 How does it work? 3 Best Practices 4 IPL examples 5 Hands on Activity 6 Articles about 7 Feedback and Prize Drawing

About

Social bookmarks can be created from sites around the web and with metadata ("data about data") added to these links. This information can include additional descriptions, comments and tags. The resulting list of bookmarks, organized by the tags applied, are then publicly available for other users of the social bookmarking site to discover.

With earlier methods of bookmarking, people would organize their bookmarks of online resources using folders in the Web browser. However, this was not necessarily an efficient way of organizing since people may have needed to save a resource that was relevant to a number of categories, thereby saving the bookmarked online resource in a number of different folders. Social bookmarking makes it easier for people to not only organize information and categorize resources, but also make social connections with other people who may be interested in the topics or subjects that they have tagged and bookmarked for themselves (Doctor, V., 2007).

The following Common Craft video includes a short introduction to the concept of social bookmarking, using Delicious as the example.

Users "tag" items (web pages, videos, photos and other media) with descriptive words or phrases. Although the act of tagging something may be for individual purposes -- such as categorizing recipes collected from various websites -- the end result is an additional layer of metadata, allowing subsequent visitors to discover content via searches of all tags that have been contributed.

Organizing electronic content this way is not new, but the collaborative form of this process has been given the name “tagging.” Traditionally, such categorizing was either performed by an authority, such as a librarian, or else derived from the material provided by the authors of the documents (Rowley 1995). In contrast, collaborative tagging is the practice of allowing anyone to attach keywords or tags to content (Golder, S. & Huberman, B., 2005).

Examples of services for social bookmarking and tagging include:

• Delicious http://delicious.com/
• Connotea http://www.connotea.org/
• Diigo http://www.diigo.com/

How does it work?

These services are designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser, which means that you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere. There are several ways to add a bookmark.

You can manually create a bookmark by clicking "Save a new bookmark" on the top right of most pages (delicious). You can do it by saving a link to a web page for the reference and it will, wherever possible, recognize the reference and automatically add in the bibliographic information for you (connotea). You can also install a browser add-on. With some services, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you (diigo).

An example using "scriptlets" or "bookmarklets":

The screenshot below shows, to the right of the Gmail link, three bookmarklet links for popular social bookmarking sites:

As you browse the web or conducts targeted searches, you can use the bookmarklet to save sites and pages that you would like to refer to later. Use as much or little additional metadata and tags as you would like. Remember, tags are descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks to help you organize and remember them. You can usually add as many tags to a bookmark as you like. In the screenshot below, the Diigo service's bookmarklet has launched a floating toolbar that includes the bookmark capability. A user need only enter some optional additional metadata, including tags, to save the bookmark:

After creating a bookmark list, which can be added to gradually over time, you -- or others -- can access the bookmark list and navigate it either chronologically or alphabetically. You can also share your bookmarks with others using add-ons, bookmarklets, or from the website. Bookmarks can also be explored by tags, and tag exploration can be used to branch to other users' bookmarks on the same topics.

Best Practices

Library Delicious tag collections:

• Stanford's Delicious tag cloud.
• North Metro Technical College's Delicious Tags related to students' courses of study.
• Hubbell Library's Delicious Tags
• Alameda County Library's Delicious Tags
• Dublin City Public Libraries Delicious Tags

There is a larger list of Libraries sharing sets of links from the Library Success Best Practices Wiki

Libraries sharing sets of links

Library Connotea tag collections:

• Bracken Health Sciences Library's collection
• Duke University Library's collection

Library Diigo bookmark collections:

• SUNY Library Association Working Group for Information Literacy collection
• University of Michigan - Flint Thompson Library collection

Social Bookmarks on Tagging

• Delicious's list of pages and sites tagged with tagging.
• Diigo's list of pages and sites tagged with tagging.

IPL examples

• IPL on Delicious Check out our bookmarks and tags.

• IPL on Connotea The IPL's reference articles and links.

Hands on Activity

Go to Delicious, Connotea or Diigo, and create your own user account.

Activity 1: Delicious

Once you have created an account, save a bookmark. You can do this manually or install a bookmarklet. When saving or editing a bookmark, there is a field for tags. In this field, enter as many tags as you would like, each separated by a space. At the bottom of the form you may notice lists of tags. Popular tags are what other people have tagged this page as, and Recommended tags are a combination of tags you have already used and tags that other people have used.

Once you've added and tagged bookmarks, add a person to your network. You can select add a user to network from the top right of your network page and then type their username, or you can visit their bookmarks page and select the Add to my Network link at the top right of that page.

Activity 2: Connotea

After signing up for an account, set up your browser for one-click access to Connotea. Now you can start saving references by saving a link to a web page for the reference. Connotea will, wherever possible, recognize the reference and automatically add in the bibliographic information for you. Next, assign tags or keywords to your references. You can choose any tags you like, and each reference can have as many tags as you like.

Next, create a group. The Create a new group link in your tool box will take you to a form for creating a group and adding users to it. Groups can be either public or private.

Activity 3: Diigo

Once you've joined Diigo, install the Diigo toolbar or add the diigolet to your toolbar. Now start annotating, archiving and organizing information and sites. Highlight text and attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. Organize by tags or lists.

Next, share your annotated pages with your followers on Diigo or elsewhere. Use "Annotated links" to share your "diigoed" pages.

You can also use Diigo and Connotea's Group capabilities to join forces with other individuals at your organization to create a unified social bookmark list.

After creating your own bookmark collection and sharing it with your organization's group, explore the tags you've created. See how those tags have been used by other site users. Discover additional resources for your tags of interest to add to your own bookmark list.

Articles about

Berger, P., & Trexler, S. (2007). Social Bookmarking: Locate, Tag and Collaborate. Information Searcher. 17(3), 1, 3-5.

Connotea tools [web document]. London, UK: Nature Publishing Group, 2007. [rev. 18 Oct 2007; cited 29 Oct 2007]. <http://www.connotea.org/ wiki/ConnoteaTools>.

Connotea's list of pages and sites tagged with tagging.

Ding, Y. et al. (2009). Perspectives on social tagging. Journal for American Society for Information Science and Technology. 60(12), 2388-2401.

Doctor, V. A. (2007). History Of Social Bookmarking. Retrieved from EzineArticles: http://ezinearticles.com/?History-Of-Social-Bookmarking&id=598765

Golder, S. & Huberman, B. (2005). The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0508082v1

Hammond, T. et al. (2005). Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review. DLib. 11(4). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html.

Paperella, M. et al. (2009). Using DIIGO: Why John and Jane will eResearch. The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). Retrieved from http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/CETL/docs/DiigoBestPracticeForHigherEducation.pdf

Feedback and Prize Drawing

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