« Ten Major Types of Technology Users | Main | On the Road to ALA - Thursday »

June 21, 2007

MLibrary 2.0 Workshop - Social Tagging: What is it and what does it have to do with the library?

Workshop number 2 for Mlibrary 2.0 was today. This one was on social tagging and gave an overview of Flickr and Del.icio.us. There is so much information to get through for each of these workshops that it's very helpful the way the group has organized the web site for users to go back and look into things further.

Suzanne Chapman gave today's presentation. She explained things well, had answers to everyone's questions, kept us on task and gave great examples of how other libraries and groups are useing social tagging.

Suzanne and Bill Dueber came up with an interesting experiment for demonstrating social tagging to the group. They had us to to a picture online and enter our own tags. After everyone entered their tags we checked out what we all came up with, then compared that to the cataloging information. Since there are two workshop sessions the tags are separated into session one and session two. Tagging images, while not standardized has great potential because it allows you to get down into details that cataloging can't possibly include. With broad brush strokes people can enter as many words as they want with the hope that someone will have the same ideas for catagorizing the image.

Something I hadn't heard about before this workshop is Google Image Labeler. It's part game, part social tagging. Google flashes images up and you have up to 90 seconds to come up with as many tags as possible. You are paired with another random user who also enters tags for the same image. You both enter tags until there is a tag match. Supposedly this helps Google to come up with appropriate tags or indexing for their images. It's kind of fun but some images are definitely easier to tag that others. Sometimes there is a short list of words you can't use to tag the image. These are usually the most obvious choices for tags so you have to expend a few brain cells to come up with other, not so obvious tags.

Makes me think I should check out Eye To I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy at ALA Annual. The Informtion Section of ACRL is presenting this along with ACRL Arts Section. They created a virtual poster session using a blog. The presentation is Sunday, 1:30 - 3:30 at Renaissance Washington - Grand Ballroom South, if you're interested.

Social Bookmarking
Things I didn't know:
1. You can suggest links that you think other people in your network might like.
2. You can create delicious feeds very easily and put the code on an appropriate web page or in your blog. This would be so easy to use for so many things in the library!
3. You can customize your tagroll cloud easily in del.iou.us, too
4. You can add a del.icio.us button to Firefox (easier than IE)that lets you post an address on the fly.

Flickr
There's a MLibrary 2.0 group in Flickr with 111 pictures!


Flickr and copyrighting are an interesting phenomenon. I have to do some more reading about Creative Commons and licencing. It's so easy to post pictures on Flickr that no one seems to be concerned about having someone's permission to post their picture or taking pictures of book covers and slapping them up on a web page. Who controls the content, the image, the right to display? It's all getting looser and looser which is not necessarily bad thing.

There's a Michigan Libraries Flickr group along with a lot of other fun groups. I think KRS should join the Librarians on Motorcycles group, it only has two members.

Posted by swortman at June 21, 2007 01:20 PM

Comments

Thanks for live blogging! Great summary.

Posted by: suzchap at June 21, 2007 05:33 PM

Login to leave a comment. Create a new account.