Social Media in Library 2.0

My LIBR 559M study buddy Dana and I tried our hands at defining “social bookmarking” this week.  Here’s our definition:

Social bookmarking allows users to store, share, organize, classify and search bookmarked web resources; users can view their own as well as other’s bookmarks. Bookmarks can be accessed from any computer with access to the Internet. Social bookmarks differ from the “bookmark” or “favorites” feature on most browsers because they allow users to create their own metadata, often called Folksonomies, by tagging their links. Social tagging allows users to form communities with other like-minded users. Librarians can teach students to use social bookmarks: students can use social bookmarking tools to organize their information and access new information that others have bookmarked. This saves students time and energy. Popular social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, and Reddit, while the site Connotea has become popular among academic researchers by allowing them to store and share “bookmarks” or references with other like minded scholars.

Source: Mu, Cuiying. “Using RSS Feeds and Social Bookmarking Tools to Keep Current.” Library Hi Tech News 25.9 (2008): 10-11. Web. 13 July 2011.

Screenshot from www.delicious.com

Del.icio.us

I’ve never used a social bookmarking tool before (except for a brief fling with Diigo).  Since Delicious seems to be the popular bookmarking tool of libraries, I’m going to give it a go.

Registration was quick and painless, but unfortunately the Delicious Firefox extension isn’t compatible with Firefox 5.0.  It was also really easy to import my existing bookmarks from Firefox: the only problem (and it’s an annoying one), is that it took my Firefox bookmark folder names and used them as tags, instead of importing the tags that I so painstakingly added to my Firefox bookmarks.  (Thankfully, other Delicious users have tagged my pages with similar tags to my own.)  I’m finding it fairly easy to navigate around the website, though I can’t say that it’s my favourite interface.  Using the search box to look through other people’s bookmarks is really easy, and I love the graph showing a timeline of when the bookmarks were saved.  (My search for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was very fruitful.  I’ve used the RSS tool to have new bookmarks tagged with “Buffy” delivered to my Google reader!)

How can libraries use Delicious? According to Melissa Rethlefsen (Library Journal 2007): “Besides its well-known basic tagging and bookmarking capabilities, del.icio.us offers a built-in tool set and application programming interface (API) that let libraries do practically anything with their data. Its tag roll and link roll features—which update steadily—provide any account user with a snippet of JavaScript for any web page or blog, allowing easy access to a library’s del.icio.us links.” Libraries can post their Delicious tag clouds on their websites or blogs, or use the link rolls as subject guides. Updates are instant. The software is easy to use for library staff and patrons. If both staff and patrons are on board with Delicious, it can be a very useful tool for libraries.  Click here for a few more related articles and links to libraries that are using social bookmarking tools.

Will I keep using Delicious?  It’s too soon to say.  I like being able to search tags and lists that other people have created.  But for managing my own bookmarks, I prefer the systems I’m already using.

In our class module this week, we were introduced to Marshall McLuhan:

McLuhan (1911-1980) was, among other things, a communication theorist.  In his work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he proposed that the medium of a message affects society in profound ways, and that the content of the message is of minimal importance.  He uses the example of the light bulb: a light bulb is a medium without content, and yet it has had a major impact on our society.  I couldn’t argue with the light bulb example, but I immediately (and strongly) disagreed with his assertion that medium was more important than content in the example of literature.  For example, if I’m reading the Sartorialist, the most important thing to me is the photographs.  Whether I’m reading it in hard copy or on Scott Shuman’s blog doesn’t really matter to me.  Sure, on the blog there’s more content, and there are (many) additional comments, but what I’m really after are the photos.

However, a friend showed me a book last night that has made me rethink my stance.  Jonathan Safran Foer recently published a book called Tree of Codes.  He “wrote” the book by taking an English language copy of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and literally cutting out words to create his own narrative.  The effect is stunning: while the reader is reading the text on the top-most page, he/she can glimpse the coming text through the holes in the page (and of course, there’s no rule to say that the reader can’t opt to read all visible text).  In this instance, the medium is undoubtedly more important than the content: an electronic copy of this would be disappointing, to say the least.  If Safran Foer had used a different version of The Street of Crocodiles, the reader would have a different visual experience.  Had the author decided to erase words, or black them out instead of cutting, the reader’s experience would be very much altered.

This video explains how Tree of Codes was made:

So, in this case, I have been suitably chastised. 🙂  But I stand by my assertion that usually, or often, content is more important than medium in literature.  What do you think?  Thanks to Marty for writing the blog entry that got me thinking about this.