How do I?

Social Bookmarking and Tagging

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Social bookmarking and tagging is growing in importance as more libraries integrate this tool for users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. Social bookmarking and tagging is bridging the gap between the library’s selective control over information and their users’ need for quick and easy internet research.

With social bookmarking, users are able to save links to web pages that they wish to recall or share with others, and depending on the service feature functionality, can be saved publicly, privately, shared only with certain networks, people or groups, or a mix of public and private. Those who have permission can view these bookmarks by category or tags, through a search engine, or chronologically.

Some common bookmarking and tagging applications are blogs, websites, research articles, amongst others. As these services have evolved and grown in popularity, library users and researchers have benefited from additional features such as bookmark comments and ratings, web feeds for lists of bookmarks including organized by tags, bookmark import and export from browsers, bookmark emailing and web annotation.

Why Bookmark and Tag?
At one time librarians could control the content in their collections until the internet changed the face of research, with a new generation of ‘googlers’ who could easily access in some cases, non-peer reviewed publications that had not met the librarian’s meticulous approval. Now, thanks to bookmarking service companies such as Del.icio.us, librarians are once again empowered to tag selected and suitable material, and immediately post it with important points and comments on content to guide the user, ensuring users obtain the best results from their research.

One key advantage of social bookmarking and tagging is increased participation for both library users and staff, not only allowing less techie librarians to once again have a say in what users are seeing and using in their research, but also allowing more than one librarian to edit a web page (rather than one static web page).

Tagging allows staff who may use multiple computers or who travel to easily add links, tags, and/or comments to relevant student assignment topics and/or current news articles that can be especially useful to students. Tag bundles enable the librarians to organize and arrange tags into bundles by the Dewey classification, or by discipline, genre, format, country, language and time period. Also, RSS feeds are available for every account, tag and account/tag combination.

Social Bookmarking and Tagging tools have helped libraries meet the challenge of overcoming gaps in library and internet research through improved accessibility of credible library materials and the introduction to new tools such as subject guides. Not only has social bookmarking and tagging helped to save users time in their research, but also help libraries to evolve to ensure the material users are researching is credible and of high quality.