The Synthetic Librarian

Go sign up now for this Information Security course:
http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/springsummer2010workshops.cfm.

It’s just one weekend, dirt cheap, and going to be loads of fun. It’s in Edmonton at the School of Library and Information Studies (University of Alberta).

Taught by Lisa Yeo, formerly of The Alberta Library, now a Ph.D. student, and author of “Personal Firewalls for Administrators and Remote Users” (and very cool person). The bonus is that yours-truely, Cloned Milkmen, will be giving demonstrations. RFID hacking, barcode hacking, wifi man-in-the-middle, and more.

Here’s an excerpt:

To introduce students to the theory and practice of information security – the protection of information and information systems. The course will focus on foundational concepts, assessment and evaluation of information security practices in the library and information studies context.

IT Managers have a hard job. A significant challenge is obtaining good information to guide their management practices. While many established professions have literature to help with this, IT’s professional literature is just emerging. Here are three resources that can help:

The Practice of System and Network Adminstration (2nd Ed.) by Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup.

Go by this now. Seriously. By a copy for yourself and your favourite sysadmin. While your at it, buy Limoncelli’s book “Time Management for Systems Administrators”. If you don’t buy this book and read it, your throwing away money. You are probably also losing good people and opportunities as well.

Proceedings of CHIMIT: Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

The papers from this conference are publicly available. Each year, this conference includes coverage of “Field Studies” where researches observe and study systems administrators and how they work. What makes sysadmins tick? What difficulties do they encounter when they do their jobs? What contributes to their succesess and failures? How do they work together? What can lower the number of mistakes made by sysadmins? The conference also covers how interfaces can be designed to support the work of systems administrators.

Proceedings of the ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference on Computer Personnel Research

This is available from the ACM Digital Library. Members can get access fairly cheap, or your local library may have access for free. This is a conference that disseminates research about IT Professionals (“Computer Personnel Research”). What motivates career decisions and satisfaction in IT? How are IT goals established and achieved? How do you manage IT groups and projects? What makes users accept or resist IT change? How do IT operations generate value? What is the impact of IT skill development? The papers cover a wide-variety of topics and the scope ranges from small to global, with international coverage.

What does it mean to find your voice in blogging? I believe there are two parts to the answer of this question. First, If you want to be relevant, people must be able to distinguish you from others. Second, you must be authenticate: 100% you. The first part is important, because no one will read you unless they find you relevant, and they won’t read you unless you stand out. The second part is important because, without it, you cannot consistently achieve the first part.

I have some rules that I follow to help me achieve these two things and I’ll explain them below.

I’m not going to quote any scholarly research. That is because everything I learned about finding my voice, I learned from Copyblogger, a blog written by professional copy editors and writers, not from scholarly sources. I was once employed, on contract, as a technical writer and, when I stumbled and experienced difficulties, I spent a fair bit of time reading about writing. Copyblogger was the turning point for me and I’ll refer to a few choice posts below.

Rule 1: Construct a Niche

Copyblogger asks Why Should Anyone Read Your Blog? and in answer they suggest that you pick the “spaces” you write in carefully. You want to compete in an idea-space. Yes: Compete. You won’t get noticed if your ideas are the same as everyone else. At the same time, you want to be relevant. This implies that when you write, you need to post in place where your topic is valued but you must say something different from others.

I accomplish this not by picking arguments but crossing boundaries. I like to combine knowledge taken from different fields and apply it to things I’m interested in. I have found this to be a remarkably constructive approach to building relevance in a niche. For example, the title of my blog is an allusion to “synthetic psychology” and librarianship two different fields that can inform one another.

By the way, what copyblogger means by “space” is the conversation that your writing is part of. Even if it is on your blog, it needs to be part of a bigger conversation. You need to link to the sources you are responding to (technical mechanisms called trackbacks and pings will alert others that your responding to their posts automatically usually).

My past “niches” have involved combining librarianship and cognitive science, information security and usability, systems administration and psychology. I can always distinguish myself from other voices by “mashing up” the topics a bit.

Rule 2: Don’t bury your lead

A big part of being distinguished from others is being remembered. To be remembered you need to be noticed, and to be noticed you need to attract attention long enough for new readers to get your point. My rule for this is “don’t bury your lead.”

Burying your lead means that you take a while to build up to your point.

An important rule of writing for the web is to never bury your lead. It’s good to tell a story, but no one will stay around long enough to read your story, if they don’t trust that you have a point. What that means, for someone like me with a small audience, is that I have to get to the point right up front.

If you want to get noticed, you need people to understand your point. But not everyone is going to take the time to read every word of your post, so you need to get to the point. That way, even if someone doesn’t read everything you wrote, they still got your point.

So I have come up with a rule of thumb to help me with this. My rule is, “Say it in a sentence, a paragraph, and an article.” I will figure out the essence of what I want to say in one sentence: if the reader has time for just one sentence what do I want them to “take away”? Then I will expand on that with just one paragraph. Finally, I will write the same thing up with much more detail: premise, assumptions, argument, and resolution/conclusion. Copyblogger describes this in their post “Your Unique Story Proposition“. You want the reader to be clear about what you are saying no matter where they start reading your post or how long they stay. This gives them the chance to see the 100% authenticate you even if they don’t know you yet.

I should point out that my recent blog posts were for a course and I haven’t followed this rule very well. I wrote dramatically longer pieces, due to the requirements of the grading criteria, than I ever would in a “real” blog post. In part this is because it takes a LONG TIME to be concise. My blog posts for this class take about 8-12 hours to research and write. But because of the deadlines involved (every 3 days) I cannot justify the extra 2 hours it would probably take to cut them down and weed them (it kills me actually… really kills me to post stuff that long).

Rule 3: Say something controversial

If you’ve managed to be relevant and to make your point, you need for people to remember you and find you remarkable. To do this, it helps to say something controversial (remember that part about competing in an idea-space?). Honestly, this scares me, and when I first blogged years ago, I avoid saying anything controversial. I wanted to be objective and rational.

Copyblogger however advises that you have the courage to be wrong. You need to walk the fine line of stating an opinion and supporting it, but not being so brash that you are offensive. You’ve got to give yourself room to be wrong.

This is important not just as an method of getting attention (and therefore distinguishing yourself from others in the minds of your readers) but because it makes you part of “the conversation”. If you can say something and be corrected by someone else: that’s a conversation.

In “Markets Are Conversations”(Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger, 2001), Searls and Weinberger argue that, in the online world, everything is a conversation because people are empowered to respond as well as read. The Internet has transformed marketplaces from producer-consumer environments into conversations in which everyone is a participant. They advise that business must find their “authentic” voice and that people will easily detect unauthentic marketing.

Being authentic is how I try to prevent “saying something controversial” from being “something offensive.” I like to use attention getting headlines, but nothing that I cannot defend or be corrected for. Take my most recent blog post for this class where I call Facebook a “Creepy Privacy-eating Monster.” That got your attention right? I’m will to stand by that. I’m also willing to be proved wrong or discuss the matter at depth where the sensationalism is irrelevant. I know this is the case because Facebook does creep me out. It creeps a lot of people out. On the other hand, I know facebook has a lot of privacy controls (and I know them intimately and technically). So I can go either way and that is the nature and value of discourse.

Things my rules don’t help me with.

I’ve been struggling with one piece of advice from Copyblogger for some time: Formality. In “How to write with a distinctive voice” (oh how very relevant to this week’s topic!) Copyblogger advises that bloggers avoid formality. This is a big problem for me, and I suspect for other grad students. We spend so much time writing formal papers that blogging can be a jarring experience.

When I follow my steps of “say it in a sentence, a paragraph, etc.) I naturally star following a kind of assertion-evidence teaching model. But that leads me into formality pretty fast.

In the assignments for the course I just finished, its been killing me to read what I’ve posted on this blog. It’s a hodge-podge of formal/academic writing and informal blogging. I don’t think the posts I write for this class are representative of my overall blogging style, but I still think the formality thing is something I have to conquer.

On the other hand, given the niches that I attempt to fill all of which are either academic or highly technical… how can I avoid a certain formality and still remain clear?

This post is an assignment for a graduate course I’m taking at the University of Alberta: EDES 501 an Exploration of Web 2.0 for Libraries. In this assignment, I am asked to reflective on what I have learned throughout the course, and discuss how it will impact me my future.

In EDES 501 we learn, primarily, through blogging. We are given 13 blogging assignments. For each one, we have to explore a different Web 2.0 technology, read about it, use it, reflect on it, and blog about our experience. Because the course is offered as part of the University of Alberta’s Teacher-Librarianship program, we are required to put these technologies into a library (or teacher-librarian) context. The blogging assignments require that we read the scholarly literature as well as the blogsphere. Finally, and most importantly, we must demonstrate our ability to use Web 2.0 technologies: we must apply these technologies by creating podcasts, videos, etc.

I believe that Cognition is for Action (Wilson, 2002, p. 626). Our intelligence comes from and is directed toward our need to interact with our environment. By demonstrating our use of technologies, instead of just discussing those technologies, we change the context of how we perceive those technologies and open ourselves to new opportunities for applying those technologies. EDES 501 changes how we think by making us do.

Two illustrate this, I will share three highlights of my EDES 501 exploration. Each be framed in the form of an assertion about Web 2.0. The most important one, I will argue, is that Web 2.0 is a technology that turns participation into value.

Highlights of my Web 2.0 Exploration

Privacy is Misunderstood

While I only touched on it lightly in several blog assignments, the concept of privacy was with me constantly during this course. Specifically, the notion that privacy is misunderstood by people both as users of Web 2.0 systems and by those who operate Web 2.0 systems.

The primary misunderstanding that must be addressed is that privacy is not confidentiality. Confidentiality (or secrecy) is one method we employ to get privacy. It is confidentiality that most Web 2.0 sites offer us instead of privacy.

What is privacy then? A traditional view of privacy is that one has the right to be alone or apart. (Woodward, 2007, p. x). Privacy, in the modern sense, is an individual’s right to control information about them (Acquisti, et al., 2007, Chapter 1). Both of these definitions are important in Web 2.0.

We would not like to have anyone feel that they are forced to participate or that we have invaded their private spaces. For librarians considering uses for Web 2.0, we must be sensitive to the fact that users may not appreciate us fulfilling our professional role in spaces that “feel private.” I have largely advocated for risking violations of this view of privacy (for example, when I suggested pro-active reference as a form of library marketing).

Mostly, this definition impacts the degree to which we might require users to participate in open social systems in order to benefit from library services. Users must be able to get reasonable access to library services, without having to join Facebook, tweet their personal questions, or expose themselves. Twitter evangelists take note: it is OK for people to NOT like and not value Twitter.

I am much more concerned with the second, modern, definition of privacy. I would be extremely critical of the privacy practices of Web 2.0 companies, but instead I will highlight how the emerging practices of Web 2.0 companies are creating the privacy: Web 2.0 is giving us increasing control over the information about us.

Facebook has had a number of “privacy train-wrecks”. Facebook has typically responded by offering users new controls to allow them to decide who can see their information. The fundemantal features of social media sharing are “sharing” and “social relationships”. As these services evolve there is a natural tendency to provide features that enhances these two things: find grain control over how and with whom we share. This is also, happily, the modern definition of privacy. By fulfilling our sharing needs, Web 2.0 must also fulfil our need for privacy.

It is important to note that there is a giant loophole in my optimistic observation of Web 2.0 privacy. Consider Facebook: since this release of their application platform privacy controls have been irrelevant, because it bypasses all those controls. Think also of Google. Google knows not only what you search for, but due to the popularity of its advertising system and analytics products, they know almost everything you read online (I challenge you to look at 100 pages and mark down which have Google urchin, analytics, or adwords embedded in them: most pages allow google to track you).

The standard discourse related to Web 2.0 and privacy however focuses around how much information we “put out there.” Through this course I have come to realize that the real issue is “how much control will we have to share with whom we want.” Libraries, as they develop their own Web 2.0 applications, must give users choices both to share and not share. Too many library applications today offer no sharing, perhaps under the misunderstanding that privacy is provided to patrons only when we keep their information secret. Let us, as a profession, find new ways to allow our users to share what they are comfortable sharing.

Organization of Knowledge has become Ambient Findability in Library 2.0

Why should we help our users “share”? Because, in Web 2.0 sharing is how information becomes organized (and organizing knowledge is a fundemantal aspect of librarianship).

The last chapter of Morville (200x) has this to say about the findability of stuff on the web:

Findability is at the centre of a fundamental shift in the way we define authority, allocate trust, make decisions, and learn independently…. Because our trust in authority has eroded, we must find our own solutions. We select our sources. We choose our news. But since we’re swimming in information, our decision quality is poor. So, how do we stop from drowning? We fall back on instinct. We retreat from data. We drop pull and endure push. We pay attention only to messages that find us. And when we do search, we skim. A keyword or two into Google, a few good hits, and we’re done. We satisfice with reckless abandon, waffling back and forth between too much information and not enough. And, we make some very bad decisions as individuals, organizations, and societies.

Morville (2005) paints a dire picture in that passage, but not all hope is lost (I highly recommend his book). Folksonomy, social tagging, is helping us organize the information on the Web.

Throughout this course, I have come back to social tagging over and over. It seemed that every time I explored a Web 2.0 technology, the way that I derived value from it required social tagging. Systems with rich tagging systems worked better for me than those without.

In social media sharing systems, enormous value is added when items are tagged. This helps us search for them, it helps us find which items are related to each other, it helps us understand what a person is interested (by seeing what tags they use). Even without substantial authority control, folksonomy is powerful here.

In social bookmarking systems, which exist to give us tagging abilities, the best ones were those that had rich displays that enable quick ways to find things that were tagged the same, and to let me find people who used various tags. Delicious does this best, but Diigo might become better.

I’m not interest in Twitter, but even as a non-tweeter, I found enourmous value in Twitter search systems, primarily because of the use of social tagging.

What I learned here is that social tagging is allowing everyone to participate in organizing the web. Not everyone will blog: writing is hard. Not everyone will Tweet: its just noise to many people. Not everyone will write book reviews: that takes time and critical thinking. But many people can and will tag items.

Participation is Value

This brings me my most important lesson from EDES 501. If Web 2.0 were a single technology, it’s function would be to convert participation into value. I held this belief before EDES 501 [it's not new, see (O'Reilly, 2004, "Architectures of Participation"], but I gained a much deeper intuition for how that is occurring and how powerful it is.

To me this implies that a critically important thing for libraries to do, without delay, is to find ways to allow users to participate through and in libraries, and for libraries to find ways to participate in the communities that they serve. Web 2.0 gives us the opportunities for this, but it is unclear where the low-hanging fruit (the cost-effective, expeditious opportunities) are.

I have pointed to the example of Bibliocommons which is an OPAC that provides social media features to library users. But it is not cleared if this is a “walled garden” or not. My exploration in EDES 501 made me somewhat wary of walled gardens in Web 2.0.

There are some things that are very obvious to me know. Libraries should be enabling bookmarking of their catalogues: if your library cannot do it, people will use something else instead. Libraries should be enable comments and feedback on many pages. Libraries should be allowing users to contribute (wiki-style) to learning and training materials for library systems. Our users understand our systems better than we do in some cases: leverage that experience.

Librarians hold the role of expert searchers, finders, and recommenders. The “participation = value” model of Web 2.0 suggests two things here: librarians should be looking for their users online, in social space, to fulfill those roles. Librarians must participate beyond the walls of their libraries because other people are already fulfilling that role online and doing a passable job of it. Librarians, show your strengths: be web maven.

EDES 501 has Changed the Course of my MLIS Studies

When I signed up for this course, I expected an opportunity for reflective practice and to revisit technologies that I thought I knew in a whole new way. I got that. I did not, however, expect this course to change my plans for the rest of my MLIS degree: it did that too!

Throughout this course, I have come back to the importance of social tagging over and over. Even after our assignment of social bookmarking, I kept exploring social bookmarking tools that I had never used. I put serious thought into what I wanted to be able to do with these tools and what others were doing with them.

Directed Study in my Future

This weekend I prepared an proposal to undertake a directed study course where I will develop a Firefox add-on that enables social search leverage social bookmarking. This is a direct consequence of my exploration in this class. Prior to the course, I felt that I understand social bookmarking and was using as well as I could. I realize I was wrong and that there are substantial enhancements that can be had. Several papers I read during the course suggested that social tagging is best when tag re-use in encouraged. Usability studies showed that social bookmarking toolbars are essential to making use of social tagging. When I consider the courses I have taken in information architecture and organization of knowledge, and combine them with the reflection I engaged in EDES 501, I come to a conclusion. More people will tag, and more people will tag better, if the usability of tagging is improved. Usability will lead directly to better organization, and better organization will result in greater opportunities for participation. Pure value.

Professional Development in my Future

As part of my assignment on Wikis I created a wiki for a separate project I have been working: Information Security Learning for Information Professionals (ISLIP). Previously, I developed a digital library using the Greenstone software for ISLIP. I’m convinced that a wiki is a better platform, and I intend to develop that project late next year. Similarly, during our assignment on social networks, I discovered the value of Ning, and created a Ning for Information Security in Libraries. I hope to promote that Ning next October during the EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

These are both activities I had planned to do anyway, but this course shaped how I will do them. In the case of the Ning, I am quite optimistic that I will come up with a way to use social networking to generate interesting in information security in libraries. I don’t think I would have considered social networking for this purpose had I not taken EDES 501.

Coming back to blogging

I’m quite happy with the outcomes of my blogging in this course, and what it helped me to discover. However, throughout the entire course, I felt that my blogging was unnatural. This is because it was done in the context of the marking rubric. I think I would rarely post anything as long as I have in this course. To address the kinds of issues that I have addressed in invidual blog posts in this course, normally I would take time to write multiple, more focused blog posts, and others that synthesize them.

I plan to return to a number of the posts I have written, and rewrite them in a more focused way.

I learned something about the pace I like to blog at as well. I think blogging once-a-week is what feels right for me. I don’t like short posts. I like to think about something and go back and edit my posts until they are lean and effecient. In this class I didn’t feel I could do that, but I was constantly aware of the desire to do that.

A note for those considering this course

For those who might consider taking EDES 501 in the future, consider this: EDES 501 temporarily made me a rockstar of the biblioblogosphere. As I am writing this, my blog is currently ranked #2 on Davey Pattern’s Biblioblogosphere “Hot or Not” scale. Basically, that means that I’m blogging about topics that are increasing in popularity among other library bloggers and not blogging about things that are decreasing in popularity.

It’s not just that one “hot-or-not” scale either. Of the span of this course, I’ve discovered that other people are bookmarking, tweeting, and linking to my posts. This isn’t just an ego boost, it means this course has directed me toward generating and finding value.

I believe that this has as much to do with the structure of the course, as it does with me. By making me do Web 2.0, but directing me to participate in the social web, EDES 501 pushed me to think about, write about, and participate in those technologies that are the hottest topics in current library discourse. That doesn’t just make me feel good about the course or about my blogging, its changed me and provided me with new opportunities!

References

• Acquisti, A., Gritzalis, S., Di Vimercati S. (2007). Digital Privacy. CRC Press
• O’Reilly, T. (2004, June). Open Source Paradigm Shift.
• Morville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

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).