Bookmarking and tagging

From this point forward, posts will be concerned with LS 590: Social Media and Informatics

I intend to focus my studies for the projects in this course on community building. I'm particularly interested in the use of RSS feeds and forums, and learning how to build and manage them. I am also interested in not only the how but the why of community building, as well as privacy issues inherent in creating private spaces within the public sphere of the internet. I am hoping that much of my research will be practical and informative, and allow me greater flexibility in using freely available social media tools to create safe community spaces.

One of my goals as a technologically oriented librarian is to help build open source OPAC and search algorithm features designed and implemented by librarians, for librarians. I believe that this can not only reduce costs for libraries, by reducing the reliance on third party software, but also create greater flexibility to fill the needs of different libraries and solve many of the problems that third part software companies may not consider. This requires a community of librarians to create, test, and implement ideas, so community building is a big focus of mine.

Bookmarking and tagging are huge community-oriented tools to allow people to connect disparate concepts in the sea of information to one another, and provide further growth of knowledge. Tagging can lead a searcher from one relevant article to the next, without the need to pick out specific keywords or rely on a computer-generated search algorithm to pick out relevant information. It uses direct human intuition rather than algorithmic mathematics, which can be both more flawed and more accurate, sometimes at the same time. Bookmarking is a favorite of mine, and I use several types of software to save articles and websites for future use, so that I can refer back to previously identified resources and information.

As a budding library professional I appreciate the tools that enable greater community communication, and faster, more accurate access to information. Human intuition and interpretation is a powerful tool that cannot yet be fully mimicked by computers, and I think it would be foolish of us not to take advantage of it, flaws and all.