Tag! You’re It: Social Bookmarking at MLibrary Ken Varnum Web Systems Manager University of Michigan Library Access 2008 2 October 2008

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

What is a Tag? A label that you assign to a web page Think of it as a filing system One web page can be in many of your folders One web page can be in many people’s folders Has meaning to you Lets you find a group of like things again Word or phrase

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

What Is Different? Collections Integration with Site MLibrary (library web pages) Mirlyn (library catalog) Digital Images Scholarly Publishing Everything Else Integration with Site

Three Ways to Tag: Navigation

Three Ways to Tag: Tag Cloud

Three Ways to Tag: Bookmarklet

Where People Tag Navbar is only on web pages (15% of tagged items) Tag Cloud is virtually *everywhere* a tag can be added -- Mirlyn has 70% of tagged items Bookmarklet accounts for roughly twice as many pages as “non MLibrary pages” would indicate -- so it’s used for many things on the library web sites.

Tagging Something

Then What? Your tags are available in MTagger

Item Listing

How MTagger Is Used Basic Stats (as of 9/27): 823 users 2329 tags (1957 unique) 1849 items (URLs) Not as broadly / deeply as we’d like Tags are generally tagger-centric Exception: Librarians tag differently

Everyone’s Tags

User Demographics

What Gets Tagged

Finding New Stuff

MTagger RSS Feeds Every search Specific person Tags Individual tags used by a particular person

Feed for Person’s Items

Feed for a Tag

Feed for a Person’s Specific Tag

MTagger Data Available in Programmer’s API MTagger Data Available in RSS Styled HTML JSON Details lib.umich.edu/mtagger/mtaggerAPI.txt

Resource Guides

Managing Tags

Issues and Challenges (1) Tagging tied to U-M “uniqname” Accountability & public face Pluses and minuses

Issues and Challenges (2) Balance of anonymity and sharing MTagging is a public act Offers anonymity, not privacy Most feedback on this issue from a single source

Issues and Challenges (3) Getting noticed by users Fliers, handouts, cards Various publicity tools Integration into library BI Word of mouth

Where Next? Usability study Summer 2007 Improvements planned for Tag cloud display on pages Tag cloud display in MTagger Handling of “collections” Workflow Integration into VuFind beta Expansion into HathiTrust (née MBooks)

Development Environment Cake PHP MySQL JavaScript on web pages (Mirlyn, Image Collection, Scholarly Publishing) to build a valid permalink Intent to make version 2 open source (spring 2009)

Links MTagger: MTagger Updates: Ken Varnum http://lib.umich.edu/mtagger MTagger Updates: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/archives/mtagger/ Ken Varnum Email: varnum@umich.edu Blog: http://www.rss4lib.com/