Social Software & Sites for Public Libraries

Flickr, Tagging, and the F-Word

Jessamyn West began with a quick overview of Flickr as a lead in to Jenny’s talk on social software. Advent of web tools that allow us to be more social and what social software’s play is in the workplace.

Flickr like other social software allows people to share stuff. Its easy to use from many different platforms. Allows you to share (with intellectual property metadata) photo. Tagging allows you to share your terminology with other folks and allows me to share my interpretation of “aboutness”. With Flickr other people can add tags to your photos. The metadata that you didn’t think to add like the tag “USA” for things in the US which those of us who live in US often forget to do. Can easily go from your pictures with a given tag to everyone’s pictures with the tag. Get a sense of which of your tags are more popular than others. Can see desire lines (Peter Merholz) as a result. See what is really important to people not what libraries and librarians think are important to people. We aren’t talking about throwing out existing classification systems. The idea is to get classificiation from multiple points of view. Folksonomies are user created meta-data, its created by a grassroots community classification, to mutually exclusive with other systems, and flat structure (no heirachy), helps with scalability problems, and helps involve users iwth ther process and tames with sharing urge.

del.ico.us – Jenny Levine

The bookmarking service that allows folksonomy creation.

• Track one person’s bookmarks
• track a topic
• Find others with similar…
• Hacks
• ToRead
• ToRent
• ForName
• Download media in iTunes

LaGrange Public Library is using this to share information. Thomas Ford Memorial Library (Aaron) is bookmarking in del.ico.us and displaying those bookmark on the library site.

This idea is really catching on. There are lots of examples. CiteULike is an academic version of del.ico.us which allows people to share their research stuff. 43Things allows you to try to find people who want to do similar things. 43Places is similar and is places people want to visit. Technorati searches blogs and blog tags. Amazon seems to have added this to the concordance of some of their books. BooksWeLike is another site which allows tagging. What if people could organize their own preferences and tag them and we could share this information with other library users? Library Thing also allows tagging.