Social Bookmarking
Submitted by missyvandusen on Wed, 2007-02-21 21:32.
Write a blog post on your impressions of social bookmarking and how you think it could be used in libraries.
I think social bookmarking is a great idea. Oftentimes, as a new librarian, I will not know where to start in my quest for professional literature and information. That's when it would be helpful to talk with veteran librarians about the types of resources they turn to. Much like a blogroll, social bookmarking allows you see who bookmarked a page similar to the one you did. You are then able to see what other types of resources they have bookmarked; ones you could add to your own list. The only problem I see in all of this is the fact that if we do too much social bookmarking or blogrolling, we run the risk of getting one sided opinions about topics. Or we have nothing new to share with our colleagues because we all belong to the same rss feed or have read all the same web sites and blogs. I know this is highly unlikely due to the enormous amount of information out there, but still it's something to think about. I noticed that there were other librarian type del.icio.us users who had bookmarked the same sources as me.
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del.icio.us group think...an
del.icio.us group think...an interesting idea, and frankly, probably not that far-fetched. Blog group think is a well-documented (or at least discussed) problem in library land, but so far I haven't heard anyone else suggest that del.icio.us could provoke the same problems.
I include several people in my del.icio.us network outside the library realm as one way to combat this. You never know who will dig up what! And, I have noticed several non-library people in my "fan" network, which is always surprising--maybe it bodes well for the heterogeneity of library del.icio.us users in the future.
Fred Stutzman had an interesting post on Unit Structures a while ago about the long tail of del.icio.us users' tags. He writes, "The tail of our playlists, del.icio.us links, etc are the weak ties of our identity, but they may be the most real, honest and revelatory part of our identity that we share online."
So, maybe group think isn't a problem at all. Maybe those long tail del.icio.us posts are enough to keep del.icio.us fresh and conversation interesting.
One of the benefits of
One of the benefits of group-think-ish-ness in social bookmarking, though, is that you can see what sites appear to be important or useful to librarians. My del.icio.us library is mostly a curricular collection to be used by me students and faculty, so I'm always glad to find sites that other librarians have decided are valuable resources. (Then I use the RSS feeds from del.icio.us to help me create my online research guides, such as this page linked from my Art & Art History guide to image collections online.)
But I'd never thought of the possible constricting that might happen when linking becomes a popularity contest... interesting.
This is not such a bad thing
This is not such a bad thing - nor is it necessarily all that new. We have used things like best book lists and read-alikes for years without qualms. Why should we feel any differently about using social bookmarking to help narrow the immense realm of online information to those items most likely to be relevant for us or our users?