Social Tagging

Del.icio.us is a great site that help users organize their bookmarked links. I have enjoyed setting up my account with this site because it allows me to organize all of my bookmarks in one location. Because everything I need to check on a daily basis in the same place, I won’t forget my list of sites and accounts to monitor. This is critical for personal and professional use. Professional librarians can easily monitor the latest sources of importance to them and their organization. They could easily find and access websites and other links that would help their patrons. This centralized, remote location is a major advantage because it facilitates organization of information, and allows for easy access anywhere, as long as there is an internet connection present. The public tags also facilitate information discovery because you can search any topic of interest to you. Searching such a global collection exposes the user to sites and ideas he may never even thought about.

I was also excited to explore LibraryThing, which is basically one giant, online library catalog. This website contains millions of cataloged books and allows a user to search for just about anything. The site contains recommendations, tags, ratings, and reviews of books of all genres. Since the records contain tags that are somewhat more “colloquial,” it is easy to find any type of source; someone searching online does not need to be concerned with standardized taxonomy. I enjoyed searching this site because it is really useful for reader’s advisory. I am always looking for something to read, but I usually don’t know where to start. Now I can find all sorts of recommendations, reviews and summaries for “top authors” and “top picks.” Now I know exactly where to go when I need a book to read for fun.

Flickr is an interesting site that allows users to upload, organize and share photographs. As with the above two sites, a user can search for any subject, except in this case, the user is seeking some kind of visual information. This process is facilitated by the use of tags. I don’t believe I would personally have much use for Flickr in my day-to-day life. I suppose if I needed an image or photograph for a project, I would look here. The chances that I find what I need by doing a simple search are quite high. Overall, the more tags assigned to an item, whether it is a book, image or website, the greater the chances of finding it.