User Responses to Social Bookmarking at MLibrary

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User Responses to Social Bookmarking at MLibrary

• Ken Varnum
• varnum_at_umich.edu
• Web Systems Manager
• University of Michigan Library

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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

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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

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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

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Inherits from

• Delicious.com
• Penn Tags
• Flickr
• Facebook
• Many other social bookmarking sites

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What Is Different?

• Collections
• MLibrary (library web pages)
• Mirlyn (library catalog)
• Digital Images
• Scholarly Publishing
• Everything Else
• Integration with Site

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How MTagger Is Used

• Tags are generally tagger-centric
• Exception Librarians tag differently

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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 wed like

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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

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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

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Usability Study

• Conducted over four months in summer 2008
• Two students at U-M School of Information
• Librarians on steering committee

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Usability Recommendations

• Tag cloud display on pages
• Tag cloud display in MTagger
• Handling of collections
• Workflow

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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

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When Its not Enough to Say,I Tag You

• Easier sharing
• Tags
• Tagged items
• User lists
• Publish to other social networking tools

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Alternate Catalog Integration
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Favorites Will be Tags
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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?

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Bigger Picture

• Benefit to scale (delicious)
• Benefit to academic focus
• Mechanism needed for sharing tags across libraries

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Thank You

• Email varnum_at_umich.edu
• Blog RSS4Lib http//www.rss4lib.com/
• Usability Reports
• http//www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/MTagge
  r.html