The Synthetic Librarian

This blog post is an assignment for a course I’m taking at the University of Alberta: EDES 501. In this assignment we are asked to consider all of the Web 2.0 technologies that we have explored in this course and decide what technology we would choose to introduce our coworkers, and discuss how we would fit it into a larger context of technology integration.

Choosing a technology to introduce to staff

In this course we have reviewed a wide variety of Web 2.0 technologies: photosharing, videosharing, social bookmarking, podcasting, virtual libraries, wikis, mashups, social networking sites, twitter, and blogs. Each of these has enormous potential for using libraries. I would argue that they are all required, however to pick just one, I would choose social bookmarking.

Why social bookmarking? Librarians are not strangers to social bookmarking and I believe that the time is right for more sophisticated uses of social bookmarking within libraries. Because the technology is mature but still evolving, social bookmarking can be put to greater use in reference, marketing, and training. In each each of the next three sections, I will explain an important use for social bookmarking in the library context, and then provide insight into what librarians must learn to put social bookmarking to this use. I will provide specific ideas for how that learning might take place in practice.

First, librarians must improve their own tagging practices

“Librarians use the latest information technology to perform research, classify materials, and help students and library patrons seek information.” (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook for 2008/2009). Librarians are required to be exceptional if not expert searchers, thus social bookmarking represents a technology that librarians must become adept using. To better use social bookmarking, librarians must draw upon knowledge of indexing and abstracting to create well organized collections of bookmarks. To use social bookmarking for to enhance search, librarians must be are of the various social bookmarking systems that exist and techniques for using them.

Indexing and abstracting skills can improve social bookmarking

Farooq, Kannampallil, Song, Ganoe, Carroll, & Giles (2007) examined two years of data from CiteULike, a social bookmarking service for scholarly publications. They argue that tag reuse is important for long-term use of social bookmarking but found that “tag vocabulary is consistently increasing and users are not reusing others’ tags” (p. 354, p., 358). Librarians should recognize this pattern. It is precisely the argument that librarians make for authority control in bibliographic records. Strict authority control cannot work for social bookmarking, however, improving resuse is highly desirable as Farooq, Kannampallil, Song, Ganoe, Carroll, & Giles (2007) have argued.

Librarians represent a professional class of worker (potentially) trained in the kind of skills that can improve tag reuse. Last year, as part of my work toward and MLIS degree, I choose to take a course on Indexing and Abstracting specifically so that I could improve my ability to tag bookmarks in delicious. I had accumulated over 1000 bookmarks and was finding it increasingly difficult to retrieve them. Learning the professional practises of journal article indexers helped immensely. For example, coming up with consistent rules for choosing the plural or singular form of tags, or for choosing how many tags to apply and their specificity have allowed me to continue to grow my bookmarks (nearly 500 in the past 4 months).

For librarians to improve their own bookmarking practices they should engage in professional development and either refresh their existing knowledge of indexing, or audit courses on indexing. These skills will apply equally well no matter what social bookmarking system is being used (e.g. delicious, diigo, CiteULike, etc.). It is important to note that cataloguing is unlikely to be as effective: rigid and formal classification systems designed for use in the library setting are not the same as general principles for organizing knowledge.

The need for improved tagging cannot be overstated. Benbuann-Fich & Koufaris (May 2008) examined the motivations of users in social bookmarking and found that “users contribute tagged resources for other users only if they believe they will be useful for those users. Moreover, higher quality contributions for others do not diminish the quantity of such contributions. We also find that there is a spill-over effect from quality of contributions for self to quality of contributions for others” (p. 150). Thus librarians can create and benefit from a snowball effect. The research indicates that users will contribute more if they feel others value it, and quality increases by some encourage quality increases by others.

In this respect, I believe that peer-education among librarians could be extremely effective in improving tagging. If I openly communicate my tagging practices among a peer group, it may start that snowball effect that Benbuann-Fich & Koufaris (May 2008) observed.

Use the Delicious Toolbar

There are other, technical, lessons to be learned that can assist librarians in improving their tagging practices. Farooq, Kannampallil, Song, Ganoe, Carroll, & Giles (2007) found that in CiteUlike, the user interface did not support tag reuse and suggested interface changes that would promote tag reuse. In the past two years, several social bookmarking systems have added toolbars to assist users in visualizing bookmarks. For example, both delicious and diigo have toolbars for the Firefox web browser. These toolbars help users make new bookmarks, quickly access their existing bookmarks, and view the tags used by others. By adding the ability to see which tags others have used to describe a webpage, users are much more likely to reuse existing tags.

This may seem obvious, however, graduate students at Indiana University conducted a formal usability test of the Delicious social bookmarking system and found that the existence and availability of the Delicious toolbar was not obvious to users (Addy, Fan, Rafuiddin, & Zhao, 2008, p. 7). My own experience is that most delicious user (I know quite a few) use only the bookmarklet or the just the plain site: few use the toolbar. My personal approach to educating co-workers would start with instruction of the use of the toolbar, not of the service itself. I suspect that if the tool is useful, users will figure out how to use it without instruction of the all-to-basic aspects. If the tool is hard to use, they may not encounter enough early success to justify further exploration.

The diigo toolbar in particular is very attractive, and while I am heavily invested in delicious, I would start by introducing co-worker to diigo. Diigo also has the potential to converge with other social networking systems, as I will discuss later in this post.

Social bookmarking can be integrated with the ILS and other library applications

A famous library use of social bookmarking is PennTags: the Pennsylvania State University Libraries social bookmarking system.

PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources. Members of the Penn Community can collect and maintain URLs, links to journal articles, and records in Franklin, our online catalog and VCat, our online video catalog. Once these resources are compiled, you can organize them by assigning tags (free-text keywords) and/or by grouping them into projects, according to your specific preferences. PennTags can also be used collaboratively, because it acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits of the Penn community, and can help you find topics and users related to your own favorite online resources. (Penntags website, “What is penntags”)

A novel feature of PennTags is the defacto subject guides that are created when users create “projects”. Projects are groups of bookmarks under a common title. For example, I might create an “EDES 501: Social Bookmarking” project to collect tags for this post. Project represent a high-level classification than tags and allow groups of bookmarks to be shared easily. Another interesting feature of PennTags is that items within the library catalogue can be tagged, providing for a new discovery mechanism for library collection items: the catalogue alone provides search by subject heading, but supplemented with folksonomy, users are more likely to find what they are looking for (see also Jefferson, 2007).

Barsky & Purdon (2007, pp. 66-67) stress the importance of these features “we can use social bookmarking tools to create Internet subject guides. An example of this the University of Pennsylvania Library’s social tagging cloud…. This page provide up-to-the-date information on user behaviour at the university’s library. Moreover, how about tagging your own online public access cataog (OPAC)?” This is excellent for UPenn, but we must ask how this can be accomplished for other libraries who do not have their own homegrown social bookmarking system.

The solution could be to use Widgets, Gadgets, and Badges from Delicious. For example, Delicious has a number of badges that can be easily embedded into library catalogues or other library webpages to promote bookmarking and to allow others to see what tags have been used to describe a page. This webpage has a delicious badge in the right-hand column that indicates how many people have bookmarked the page. The University of Alberta embeds a link to Delicious in the details page for every item in their catalogue to make bookmarking easier. However, I believe the most useful badge is one that shows what tags the current page is tagged with (as below).

So how can we encourage librarians to use these? I have already begun to implement my own approach to peer-education. Two years ago I gave a presentation called Widgets, Gadgets, and Badges at a local library conference. The talk was aimed making the use of this kind of technology as simple as “copy-and-paste”. I believe that making introductory use of these technologies to have the lowest barrier-to-entry but also to have high-rewards, they are more likely to be explored. The significant uses often require self-learning and exploration but to sustain motivation and build momentum, peer-education must focus on low-investment/high-reward strategies. Widgets, gadgets, and badges represent that.

Social bookmarking can aid in marketing and community engagement

The importance of low-investment/high-reward strategies in peer-education is so that librarians are likely to pursue more sophisticated uses of social bookmarking. There are substantial opportunities, beyond simple copy-and-paste widgets, to integrate social bookmarking with library websites. Delicious and Diigo both offer rich APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) that can be used to integrate social bookmark data into other websites. While this requires programming knowledge that librarians are unlikely to posses, they must provide leadership in identify opportunities and driving development.

In this sense, social bookmarking services must be thought of as databases of organized knowledge. Librarians use these systems to identify and describe valuable information resources. Toolbars help with that as does skill development (e.g. indexing as discussed). However, to have the greatest impact on users, the content must be presented in a variety of space outside of the social bookmarking system.

PennTags is hailed for its use in constructing subject guides, however Delicious or Diigo (thanks to their APIs) can be used to do the same. For example, it is possible to write a Javascript (a program embedded in a webpage) to fetch the bookmarks of a specific user, with specific tags, and present them on the webpage directly. Thus any library can use Delicious or Diigo to create dynamic subject guides. Any time the librarian updates their bookmarks, the library subject guide webpage would automatically be updated. In fact, I wrote such a system for The Alberta Library’s Ask-a-Question system many years ago.

If subject guides are possible, Librarians might consider radical collaborative efforts with their community. Imagine a subject guide that displays all the bookmarks from everyone who is a member of a librarians network, and has a particular tag. Librarians could use this to promote library events and collections. Patrons only need to “friend” the library in the social bookmarking system and then use a tag promoted by the library to have their own bookmarks included in a subject guide. If authority or authentication is desired (to prevent spam links), then the system could be reversed so that the librarian must friend the patron instead.

Similar opportunities exist by simply promoting the RSS feeds of the library’s own bookmarks. For example, if a library or librarian has a Delicious account, it is easy for people to subscribe to bookmarks for a specific tag. If the tag relates to a collection or event, then it may be valueable for marketing. Systems like Yahoo! Pipes can be used to trivially create visual displays of the RSS feed that can be embedded in any webpage.

Before these sophisticated applications are possible, Librarians must be confident users of all basic aspects of social bookmarking. I believe the peer-learning strategy outlined previously can accomplish that. However, to kick-start thinking about more sophisticated uses, librarians also have to be comfortable, at a minimum, with the copy-and-paste economy of widgets of the type created by Pipes or made available directly by Delicious and Diigo. Even if the librarians are not the technology implementors they must understand the connection between how they organize knowledge, and how it becomes embedded and available elsewhere (such as on their library homepage).

In this sense, education of other non-bookmark related technologies is essential before more sophisticated bookmark-related projects can be conceived. Librarians must feel confident enough to say “yes” to new ideas. I put a great deal of faith in the idea that Yahoo! Pipes can be platform that convinces librarians that sophisticated applications of RSS and social bookmarking are worth pursuing (as opposed to high-risk). Even if Yahoo! Pipes is not the actual technology that accomplishes these projects, it is the one that can show how easily it can be done and that sophisticated applications are *really* possible.

Social bookmarking is converging with other social media

Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott (2005, “Architectures of Participation”) discusses Tim O’Reilly’s concept of ‘architectures of participation’ “whereby a grassroots user base creates a self-regulating collaborative network. The result of this approach is that the best applications become more useful for all participants the more that people make use of them.” This is what we hope to get out of social bookmarking.

In a very basic way Delicious and CiteULike already deliver this. However, emerging trends point to how social bookmarking might grow dramatically in its value. For example, Google Reader recently added a feature called “Sharing” that is essential social bookmarking. Google Reader is a an RSS aggregator, but the Sharing feature allows a user to mark an item from an RSS feed, or any webpage, for “sharing” via the user’s public profile. Users can “follow” each other’s shared items from withing Reader or via an RSS feed or via another users Profile page. For example, my shared items are public.

This combines the features of social bookmarking and social networking and RSS aggregation. When these features are combined, the potential for value-through-participation is substantially enhanced. Imagine that your patrons might be able to follow a subject librarian. Imagine that the library might incorporate the profiles of their librarians into their own library website. Imagine that the library could aggregate and display the RSS feeds for their own librarian’s shared items on subject guide pages on their website. The number of ways that patrons might discover the resources being promoted by the library expands dramatically.

Conclusion

In summary, social bookmarking is converging with other important Web 2.0 technologies. It is likely to gain in value in the near future. I believe that an effective strategy for introducing this to co-workers is to promote and demonstrate low-investment/high-reward tools and practices that can be used by individual librarians, but that have the potential to be re-used in projects that integrate social bookmarking content with library websites. By encouraging librarians to become more-than-comfortable with the underlying technology is becomes possible to encourage them to imagine possibilities for more sophisticated applications. Even if they are not to be the ultimate technology implementors, Librarians are the expert searchers and organizers of knowledge and by focusing on that side of social bookmarking they are likely to be more capable of leading projects that integrate the organized content they create with library websites and applications.

References

Barsky, E. & Purdon, M. (2007). Introducing Web 2.0: social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians.
Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 27(3), 65-67. https://circle-ubc-ca.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/bitstream/2429/499/1/c06-024.pdf

Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B., & Scott, J. (2005). Social Bookmarking Tools (I). D-Lib Magazine, 11(04). doi: 10.1045/april2005-hammond.

Byrant, T. (2006). Social Software in Academia. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, (2), 61-64. http://net.educause.edu.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/ir/library/pdf/EQM0627.pdf

Jankowski, T. (2008). Becoming an expert searcher. New York : Neal-Schuman Publishers.

Ensor, P. (n.d.) Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher. LITA website.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (2009). Librarians: Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2008-09 Edition..

Addy, C., Fan, C., Rafuiddin, M., & Zhao, Y. (2008, December 2). Usability Report for Delicious.com. Report for Interaction Design Methods course at Indiana University – Bloomington.

Farooq, U., Kannampallil, T. G., Song, Y., Ganoe, C. H., Carroll, J. M., & Giles, L. (2007). Evaluating tagging behavior in social bookmarking systems: metrics and design heuristics. InProceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work (pp. 351-360). Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM. Retrieved August 13, 2009, from http://portal.acm.org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/citation.cfm?id=1316624.1316677.

Benbuann-Fich, R. & Koufaris, M. (May 2008). Motivations and Contribution Behaviour in Social Bookmarking Systems: An Empirical Investigation. Electronic Markets, 18(2), pp. 150-160.

Yanbe, Y., Jatowt, A., Nakamura, S., & Tanaka, K. (2007). Can Social Bookmarking Enhance Search in the Web? Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 18-23, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Puspitasari, F., Lim, E., Chang C., Theng Y., Goh, D., Chatterjea, K., Zhang, J., Sun, A., & Li, Y. (2007). Social Bookmarking in Digital Library Systems: Framework and Case Study. Joint Conference on Digital

Older, N. (2008). Bibliocommons Emerges: “Revolutionary” Social Discovery System for Libraries. Library Journal, 07/18/2008
Jefferson, B. (2007). Forget the Lipstick. This Pig Just Needs Social Skills. Code4Lib Conference, 2007 (video).