Social Bookmarking as Online Reference Organization Tools
Recently, I was visiting a library reference desk when another patron asked for help locating a couple of forms on a government website. The librarian knew exactly what forms she was looking for but it still took her several minutes to find the proper page where the forms could be downloaded.
“These were bookmarked on the computers at the other branch,” the librarian told me.
Social bookmarking sites like delicious (sometimes spelled del.icio.us) allow users to store and share all of their web bookmarks online. If the library I was visiting had stored the bookmarks for the government forms on a site like delicious instead of a computer, the librarian would have been able to easily find them. Even more so, if the library made their collection of links accessible from their library website, patrons might be able to locate the resources themselves. Indeed, web savvy libraries have been using social bookmarking sites in exactly this way.
A specific library doing this is the San Mateo Public Library (SMPL) in California. I want to look briefly at the SMPL’s use of delicious mainly because I enjoy the way they have organized their links: by the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC).
I think organizing their collection of links by DDC really highlights how social bookmarking can be used by libraries: to organize and allow access to their virtual reference tools. Librarians who have never used delicious before should easily be able to understand the value of such a system. For example, instead of searching and browsing through the labyrinth of a government website to find a phone number for the IRS, a librarian using SMPL’s delicious account could just go to the link collection that encompasses the DDC number of 336 (income tax) to find a find bookmark for the IRS phone contact page.
By having the bookmarks stored online, it means that anybody can access them from anywhere and they are not tied to one machine or person. Another advantage of using social bookmarking sites is that, well, they’re social. In a library system like SMPL, any librarian might be able to add a bookmark to their delicious account as part of their normal reference work. In this way, librarians who find and tag and bookmark excellent resources make the resources not only findable for themselves in the future but also for their colleagues and patrons. According to Melissa Rethlefsen:
Del.icio.us lets users bookmark web pages for themselves and others, check out what others bookmark, and organize bookmarks in one place for portability…When users tag a resource, that bookmark, the tags the library assigned, and any comments are part of the larger, hand-selected set of resources del.icio.us has become. For each link in del.icio.us, users can track who else bookmarked that link and how they tagged it. Tags are also browsable, both by user and through the whole del.icio.us system.
The disadvantage of organizing bookmarks on delicious by the DDC is that it might not be friendly system for patrons or non-librarians to use. While it’s pretty easy to figure out and browse SMPL’s bookmarks, it’s probably not as intuitive as just having them tagged by their subject. Indeed, it doesn’t seem the SMPL necessarily intends for their patrons to use their delicious account as I can’t find a link on the San Mateo Public Library site that takes me to it. This is a shame because they have collected some really good resources, including a lot of locally relevant links, and if I lived in San Mateo I would be browsing them often. The SMPL’s database and article subpages might be an appropriate place to link to their related DDC link bundles.
(Image: Screenshot of San Mateo Public Library’s DDC organized Delicious bundles)
