LIBR 246-12: Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools (Fall 2008)

September 29 - October 5, 2008

• Learning Objectives
• Lecture
• Readings
• Examples
• Things to Do
  

 

Learning Objectives

By the end of the week, you should:

1. Understand how social bookmarking tools and social search work.
2. Identify ways that social bookmarking tools can be used in libraries.
3. Identify ways that user-generated content and collaborative filtering can be capitalized on by libraries.

 

Lecture

Quicktime Movie (29 minutes)

Slides (PDF)

Transcript (PDF)

 

Readings

Required
Farkas, Chapter 8
Ou, C. “folksonomy? ethnoclassification? libraries? wha?” Rawbrick.net.
Harder, G. (2005). “Del.icio.us Linkrolls; Why not library content too?” blogdriverswaltz.com.
Rethlefsen, M. (2007, September 15). “Tags Help Make Libraries del.icio.us.” Library Journal.
Chun, S., et al. (2006). “Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums.” Museums and the Web 2006. Albuquerque, March 22-25, 2006.
Gold, B. (2007). "Mahalo and Friends: 10 people powered search engines." Mashable.

Optional
Spalding, T. “LibraryThing: A Social Cataloging Web Site.” Library of Congress Digital Future & You series. (video)

 

Examples

Human-powered search
Mahalo
Digg
Sproose
Technorati
Swicki

Recommendations
LibraryThing

Social Bookmarking
del.icio.us
steve.museum
StumbleUpon
Furl
Connotea
CiteULike
Kaboodle

Rating Sites
TripAdvisor
Rate My Professor

Libraries Using Social Bookmarking
PennTags (take a look at this project in PennTags. Click on “Cinema of Martin Scorcese” which will take you into the UPenn Library catalog. Look at the bottom of the catalog record.)
The College of New Jersey Libraries
University of Michigan Health Science Libraries
Springfield Technical and Community College
Menasha Public Library
Dublin City Public Libraries

Libraries Using Tags in the Catalog
Danbury Public Library (see how they have used LibraryThing in their catalog)
Bedford Public Library (see how they have used LibraryThing in their catalog)
Ann Arbor District Library

Libraries that Use Collaborative Filtering
University of Huddersfield Library Catalogue (do a search for the Harry Potter books and see the recommendations at the bottom of the page).
Ann Arbor District Library (do a search for the Harry Potter books and see the recommendations at the bottom of the page).

 

Things to Do

1. Play with all of the examples listed above.

2. Complete Exercise 4 (due October 4).

3. Write at least one blog post on one (or more) of the following topics (due October 4):

1. What are the pros and cons of tagging in library catalogs?

2. Where do you see user-generated content providing value for libraries and how could it be collected?

3. What do you think of social search tools like Mahalo and Sproose and how do they compare to tools like del.icio.us and Technorati?

4. Write your own reflections on what you learned this week.

4. Write a blog post that includes a brief description of an article, technology, blog post, or other interesting resource outside of the classwork you've found that's related to that week's topic. Be sure to include a link to the resource (due October 4).

5. Comment on at least two other people's blog posts (due October 6).