October 22 - 28, week 7: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

This week we look at what happens when thousands of people add their own subject headings to things online - tagging.

We'll also look at what happens when thousands of people choose their favourite websites, tag them, store them online and then share them with each other- social bookmarking.

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This week you will:
Thing 10 : Compare a search using del.icio.us with Connotea, kartoo, dogpile, zuula and google. Blog about your findings
Thing 11: Join del.icio.us and save and tag a few sites

Blog post: What did you discover when you compared different search methods?

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The Learning 2.0 at Mac blog post about Tagging, Social bookmarking and folksomies gives a very comprehensive description .

Here's the Commoncraft video that demystifies social bookmarking: Social bookmarking in Plain English

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Examples of libraries using social tagging/bookmarking

QUT library Creative Industries subject guide now includes a del.icio.us tag cloud which has also been incorporated into the relevant unit's page on Blackboard (the Uni’s Learning Management System). It was live 2 weeks after they first had the idea.

University of Pennsylvania has created it's own social tagging site called Penn Tags , where staff and students can create "projects" covering material both owned and not owned by the library.

Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne have incorporated into their catalogue subject headings from popular “catalogue and share your own book collection” site, LibraryThing.

Ann Arbor district library allows users to directly add their own tags in the catalogue.

The new version of the Innopac Opac, Encore, promises user generated tags.

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Further reading (optional)

7 Things you should know about social bookmarking Educause guide.


The social bookmarking faceoff from the Read/Write web


Angela Kille's presentation about social bookmarking for the Michigan State University Libraries


A librarian's guide to creating 2.0 subject guides by Ellyssa Kroski


The Brave New World of Social Bookmarking: Everything You Always Wanted to Know But Were Too Afraid to Ask (PDF), Amanda Etches-Johnson.


The Hive Mind: Folksonomies & User-Based Tagging, Ellyssa Kroski.

Talking with Talis: the Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang. [This is a podcast]

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Fun site for the week
Google image labeller game. Log in as guest.

You play against someone else in the world to apply labels to an image - trying to get as many as possible without using the same terms. (It's a sneaky way that google gets real people to tag images in their image search - but it's fun at the same time)