Not Quite Lost in the Clouds

I have to admit, initially, I was beyond resistant to social bookmarking. To me, it was cataloging meets the apocalypse: disorder, chaos, clouds of locusts disguised as words… I just didn’t get the concept of different people contributing to what librarians did best – categorizing and organizing information. And the clouds – what is with the tag clouds?

After going through the Web2.0 course blog and reading over the selected materials, the concept of tagging and bookmarking started to become clearer. Then I started my del.icio.us account.

After experimenting with my new webpage organizational system, I see what all the talk is about. Granted, I still find the tag clouds useless (maybe its just me and my poor vision, but I have a hard time judging text and determining its level of significance based on size), but the concept of organizing webpages with appropriate labels and then being able to search by those labels is immensely valuable. With this new-to-me tool, I can actually find the pages I want most and can access them whether I am at home or the office. Del.icio.us has done for my webpages what Bloglines has done for my favorite posts (or EndNote for citations).

Though social bookmarking has made a difference in how I better organize webpages, I can see some of its limitations, such as making sure you are using appropriate labels. How I define blood clotting, resources, and research may be different compared to how some of our patrons define these terms. For social bookmarking to work for everyone, common terms (dare I saw authority control) need to be utilized: if our users don’t know what we are talking about or can’t find what they are looking for, social tagging is only going to frustrate them.

Perhaps the concept of social bookmarking may give us incentive to better understand our users, their needs, and how they look at library services and resources…