Social Tagging for Library Science

Our next Brain Gain session will investigate the use of social tagging technology for library science.  We briefly investigated social tagging in an earlier post on social software.  Popularized by sites such as del.icio.us, which offers users the ability to share their web bookmarks by labeling them with a personalized set of descriptor "tags", and Flickr, which allows users to share and find photos via tagging, this phenomenon is part of a larger "social software" movement that empowers users to organize information via a bottom-up "folksonomy".  That's fine for bookmarks and photos, but could this type of social tagging allow users to organize library content?  And if so, why would libraries sanction such a system?

Our guest will help us explore these questions and more.  Adam Seldow is a doctoral student in the Education, Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education (HGSE).  He's the founder of TeacherShare.org, an online class website and gradebook, and is currently piloting social tagging with HGSE's Gutman Library.

From a student perspective, there are numerous benefits of social tagging.  Access to the universe of material tagged by their peers and professors increases the scope of research and discovery.  "Gray literature" -- materials not yet published or peer-reviewed, blog posts, discussion forum entries, ezines, websites, podcasts -- could now be categorized and shared.  The use-case would involve a student searching their library resources online and receiving a search results list that first presented "official" findings based on the keywords used in the search but then also presented additional community-generated 'popular' tags for each item.

Ultimately proponents argue that this is good for academic research for the same reason it was good for bookmarks and photos -- the chances of finding what you want dramatically increase when you can search the accumulated knowledge of tags created by the community vs. those created by a single, top-down taxonomy.  Plus there is the added benefit of being able to classify items with tags related to specific sub-communities -- tagging content with a specific Harvard course identifier, etc.

And if it literally helps students find materials, then some libraries have decided that it is a good business to investigate.  UPenn, Yale, and Oregon State already have pilot programs in place.  And there are already systems in place that libraries and students can leverage.  Connotea is a social tagging service operated by the Nature Publishing Group (short video overview of Connotea).  Connotea even allows users to export their link libraries into EndNote, a popular software package used by researchers to manage their bibliographic sources.  Bookmarklets exist that allow sites bookmarked in a browser to automatically be added to users' del.icio.us and Conntea accounts.  Adam has also introduced tagging into his GradeWeb site for teachers hosting content online.  He used open-source bookmarking software available from Scuttle.

We'll discuss Adam's work with HGSE's Gutman Library as well as what the HBS library and instructional technology community thinks about its application here.

Comments

[Andy]

Looks like a really interesting session! At Baker Library we're looking into allowing users to submit websites to our search engine and tag them with keywords.

Note: This week there was a social tagging workshop held in Edinburgh. A number of interesting papers from the workshop are available at:

http://www.rawsugar.com/www2006/taggingworkshopschedule.html

[Denis]

Correction on Adam Seldow's title -- he's the founder of Gradeweb, Inc. (http://www.gradeweb.com)

[Denis]

My notes from today's chat:

Social tagging
* user-defined meaning for content
* helps organize, store info
* social aspect -- connect with other researchers

Relies on and helps create a "folksonomy" -- from Wikipedia: A "folksonomy" is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. The freely chosen labels – called tags – help to improve search engine's effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary. The labeling process is called tagging. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us.

Info is accessed in several ways -- by related tags, users, related users, etc. Social tagging increases the amount of info available to you.

toptaggers.com - allows you to weight tags by certain users heavier than others

Social tagging allows you to:
* discover new materials by leveraging the search success of others
* associate your topic to other topics through related tags
* harness & categorize "gray literature"
* rate, comment, and add your 2 cents
* create niche groups within sites

Controversy:
* 'incorrect' tags
* spagging (spam tagging)
* opportunity cost of neglecting off-line resources
* licenses and restricted access to materials
* unsafe/inappropriate links
* obscure docs -- harder to locate?

Bottom line -- works well as a *supplemental* research tool.

TOOLS
* Del.icio.us -- bookmark sharing via tags (bought by Yahoo)
* Flickr -- tagging photos (bought by Yahoo)
* Penn Tags
* Unalog (Yale uses this)
* Connotea
* TeacherShare.org (based on open-source Scuttle platform)

Social tagging sites:
http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html

Common features:
* bookmarklets add URLs quickly/easily
* you and others can tag the same bookmark (build meaning)
* export/import bookmarks to and from browsers
* user profiles -- pub/private reading lists
* popular/recent tag clouds
* RSS feeds in several standard formats

Advanced features
* export bookmarks to bibliographic software (EndNote, etc)
* OpenURL, XBEL (SML Bookmark Exchange Language), XOBIS (Organic Bibliographic Info Schema), and MODS (metadata object description schema) support
* Form pub/private groups
* commenting, post to blog, email to friends, ratings on-the-fly (AJAX)
* User rankings for 'trusted' users
* personal tag cloud generators
* custom RSS feeds by tag, user, or group

"Library 2.0" -- making your library's space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. Get people into / back into library by making it more relevant.
* build a collaborative community on/offline
* not that different from what happens now *inside* physical libraries
* social tagging networks personalize the search process with colloquial language
* social tagging only a small piece of library 2.0 virtual communities

Social tagging in libraries
Pros
* search using own language
* related article and user recommendations
* organize and discover 'gray literature'
* connect with people sharing interests
Cons
* loss of a controlled vocabulary, taxonomies, ontologies
* content often not peer-reviewed
* site licenses may restrict usage
* complacency with other peoples' reading lists

Adam's favorite social bookmarking sites:
* Connotea
* TeacherShare.org (Adam's pilot using Scuttle open source software)
* Del.icio.us

Adam does not normally begin his research with social bookmarking sites, but it is a great supplemental set of sources. He sometimes enters his search phrases in a social tagging site to see what related tags/users appear.

Adam then played a 10-minute Flash presentation/overview of how he uses the tools in research.

How can social tagging tools help educators connect with researchers?
* share "usable knowledge"
* prof development
* student/prof reading lists
* interest groups

Teacher 2 Teacher
Teacher 2 Student
Student 2 Student

* Tagging integrated as a pat of a suite of tools or as part of school's existing portal

------------------------
DISCUSSION

Harvard Grad School of Ed's Gutman Library -- just starting to investigate this with Adam and determine context for usage. Starting to think about where it could be piloted -- an Ed school or FAS (undergrad) course. Penn system was sponsored by a fac member wanting students to share annotated bibliographies in a film class.

HBS Baker Library starting to investigate similar things like Search Space (used at MITRE) -- can add a URL to search results, etc. See social tagging as a useful adjunct. Most library folks in the room agreed -- it seemed to be a very useful adjunct and most librarians counsel their researchers already to use a mix of controlled vocab and jargon, etc, in their searches.

Adam sees this as a low-cost way to generate interest in libraries and make them more usable (tag clouds, etc).

How do you get folks to do *work* when researching -- adding metadata? Group discussed how primarily users do this for themselves, and sharing is a secondary perk.

Group discussed Harvard environment and how

Larry brough up usability -- Delicious is overwhelming and unusable. But sites are getting better. Alexis -- amazon feature showing screenshot of website next to link. Blinklist.com -- social bookmarking site that puts picture and user ratings, shows tags, etc.

onlywire -- bookmarklet to add to a bunch of sites.

http://seldow.com/HBS/

[Hal]

I just signed up for a Connotea account, and I have "implemented" FindIt@Harvard.

Basically, I filled in the appropriate openURL resolver URL, and it worked perfectly!

For people at Harvard who want to try it, here's the URL for Harvard's openURL resolver:

http://sfx.hul.harvard.edu/sfx_local

Naturally, I labeled it FindIt@Harvard.

Hal

[Denis]

Nice post on PennTags on Many-2-Many: http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/06/10/penntags_when_card_catalogs_meet_tags.php