User Responses to Social Bookmarking at MLibrary

User Responses to Social Bookmarking at MLibrary

Ken [email protected]

Web Systems ManagerUniversity of Michigan Library

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

What Is MTagger?

• Library-Based Tagging Tool• delicious

• fURL

• Social networking tools (Flickr, Facebook, etc.)

• Way to organize academic bookmarks• Always accessible

• Shared with others

• Build a common pool of knowledge

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Why?

• Give our users a way to organize most library resources

• Demonstrate “2.0” technologies to ourselves

• Improve findability of resources

• Give users a stake in our collections

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

What MTagger Does

• Allows users to assign keywords to “library stuff” on our site• Catalog

• Web Pages

• Digital Images

• Library publications

• Or anything, anywhere (via bookmarklet)

• Search, display, retrieve bookmarks

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Inherits from

• Delicious.com

• Penn Tags

• Flickr

• Facebook

• Many other social bookmarking sites

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

What Is Different?

Collections• MLibrary (library web pages)

• Mirlyn (library catalog)

• Digital Images

• Scholarly Publishing

• Everything Else

Integration with Site

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

How MTagger Is Used

• Tags are generally tagger-centric

• Exception: Librarians tag differently

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Usage

• Basic Stats (as of 3/26/09):• 1357 total users; 603 actively tagging

• 3775 tags; 3159 unique

• 2820 unique URIs tagged

• Not as broadly / deeply as we’d like

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Perceptions of MTagger

Interviews with users, non-users, and librarian users

• Personal motivations are stronger than social motivations

• Preference for tag display alongside traditional search results

• Tagging needs a marketing campaign

• Tagging is a "Librarian" thing

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Privacy

• Tagging tied to U-M single sign-on (uniqname); guest accounts welcome

• Accountability & public face

• Balance of anonymity and sharing

• Most feedback on this issue from a single source

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Usability Study

• Conducted over four months in summer 2008

• Two students at U-M School of Information

• Librarians on steering committee

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Usability Recommendations

• Tag cloud display on pages

• Tag cloud display in MTagger

• Handling of “collections”

• Workflow

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Lessons Learned

• Personal motivations are stronger than social motivations

• Focus on outcomes of tagging, not process

• Enable personal reference library• Increase flexibility of tag display/retrieval

• Contextualize the material that users bookmark

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

When It’s not Enough to Say,“I Tag You”

• Easier sharing:• Tags

• Tagged items

• User lists

• Publish to other social networking tools

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Alternate Catalog Integration

Favorites Will be Tags

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

New Library Web Site

• Better integration in new library web site

• Make tagging a byproduct, not a product

• Will influence search engine

• “My Library” redux?

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Bigger Picture

• Benefit to scale (delicious)

• Benefit to academic focus

• Mechanism needed for sharing tags across libraries

User Responses to Social Bookmarking

Thank You

Email: [email protected]

Blog: RSS4Lib http://www.rss4lib.com/

Usability Reports:http://www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/MTagger.html