Internet Librarian: Social Software and Sites for Public Libraries

Social Software and Sites for Public Libraries
Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian
Jessamyn West, http://librarian.net/

The wonderfully talented team of Jenny and Jessamyn presented to a packed room about social software: one of the key buzzwords in the technology world. 

Jessamyn’s presentation was titled “Flickr, Tagging, and the F-Word.”  Flickr is a photo-sharing website.  Flickr was recently bought by Yahoo!.  You can take photos from your digital camera, from iPhoto, from your phone, from anywhere and quickly post them.  You can both search and browse Flickr.  One of the great things about Flickr is that it promotes sharing.  Flickr allows you to license your photos with a variety of licenses—use photo, modify photo, redistribute photo, etc.  Flickr also allows commenting and notes on each photo, which is another method for sharing information and opinions.  What makes Flickr different from other photo websites?  TAGGING!  Tagging on Flickr is just like metadata….but extremely free-formed and flexible.  One person may tag a photo as libraries, while someone else may then tag it as architecture, buildings, public, exterior, USA, etc.  Both the poster and the viewers can tag items.  The tags act like subject headings in a catalog—they’re hyperlinked to a complete list of items with that tag.  This flexible method of tagging allows for communities to evolve in Flickr, people-driven classification (fancy that!) and a much more interactive and useful online environment.  Flickr is an example of a folksonomy.  Folksonomy is the F-word.  It’s created “by folks.”  People decide what access points are important to them for findability.  It allows people to use different names for things—again, fancy that! 

Jenny talked about del.icio.us.  del.icio.us is another example of a folksonomy: tagged bookmarks.  del.icio.us is also searchable.  Jenny suggests that del.icio.us is a great place to learn about subjects—as people have already decided that these sites are memorable and worth keeping.  This is a great way to access pre-filtered information on topics.  There are a number of hacks, including tagging something “ForX” (X=person’s name), and then set up an RSS feed for that category to send sites to someone else.  The LaGrange Park Library has created a set of reference bookmarks that are accessible by any of their staff and (very important) any of their users.  What a better way to keep reference bookmarks (as opposed to the oh-so-evil IE bookmark files).  You can also use this to display these bookmarks as subject guides on your website (through HTML display of your RSS feed for that category).  The Thomas Ford Memorial Library is doing this now (rock on Aaron).  43 Things is a wonderful new project through which people list 43 things people want to do in their lifetimes, and helps people with similar goals connect.  Jenny also showed us Books We Like: a site where people tag books that they’ve enjoyed.  Jenny feels that tagging has a role in our library catalogs in the future, taking advantage of ours users to contribute tags to help us organize our materials and make them more findable.

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