Intro: Social Bookmarking

Everyone comes across web pages that they find useful and would like to return to someday. Traditional bookmarking involves saving a link to the website in your browser. This causes problems, however, if you move between computers, as your bookmarks are tied to one computer. Moving bookmarks online solves this problem and creates a valuable discovery tool. Social bookmarking services not only allow users to save their bookmarks online, making them accessible from any computer connected to the web, but also allow users to see websites saved by other users. When saving websites, users can “tag” them with useful keywords and phrases. Because you can see the sites and tags saved by other users, social bookmarking becomes a useful method of finding similar websites that others have deemed useful.

Social bookmarking came about in the mid-1990s, but the term wasn’t coined until 2003 with the launching of del.icio.us (now delicious.com). Delicious was the first successful social bookmarking website, and since its success there have been a slew of other services that have come along. Some are geared toward particular audiences, while others are more general. Most social bookmarking websites allow users to annotate saved websites in some way, either by adding comments and/or highlighting sections of a page. The degree of annotation allowed varies depending on the social bookmarking service used. Most sites also offer a variety of toolbars and browser extensions that streamline the bookmarking process.

Libraries are using social bookmarking in a variety of ways. Many libraries set up accounts on social bookmarking services as a way of saving and organizing recommended websites. Some “next-generation” OPACs allow users to save a link to a catalog record to a social bookmarking service. Libraries can also pull RSS feeds of websites saved in a social bookmarking service into their online research guides, making them dynamic and easy to update.

Learning Outcomes
By the end of this week, participants should be able to:

1. Identify the major features of social bookmarking services
2. Evaluate different social bookmarking services based upon their use for particular audiences and needs
3. Save websites on at least two social bookmarking services
4. Identify ways that social bookmarking services can be used by a law library.