Enterprise social bookmarking - in a community of practice in IBM, Denmark by Joachim Florentz Boye and Marianne Lykke Nielsen Royal School of Library and information Science, Denmark

Introduction In 2007 we carried out a study of social behaviour in an information sharing system with the following research questions: 1.How can enterprise social bookmarking support knowledge and information sharing in communities of practice? 2.How can enterprise social bookmarking aid the formation of new communities of practice?

Why this subject? Social bookmarking and tagging is now beginning to create new, self-supported information environments in companies. Several papers on social bookmarking and tagging on Internet services already exist, but the number of empirical studies of social bookmarking as a professional information tool on corporate intranets is still rather limited.

Method The method of hermeneutics was chosen due to the uniqueness of the case and limited amount of previous knowledge. IBM employees in a technical sales department in IBM Denmark were interviewed about their perceived use of enterprise social bookmarking in combination with an observation of the bookmarking application itself. The interviews and the application features were then analyzed and discussed in concordance with themes from the theory of communities of practice as established by Wenger (Wenger, 1998), and from the work on social tagging and bookmarking (Mathes, 2004; Golder & Huberman, 2006; Marlow et al., 2006).

Challenge - the literature Social bookmarking and tagging Many blogs and opinions – but few papers and even fewer empirical studies. Communities of practice Varying interpretations of this concept have been suggested. We chose Wenger (1998) because of the elaborate and universal theoretical framework he proposes.

Challenge - the case IBM was the only available company with the experience that was needed for the study. IBM has developed the enterprise social bookmarking system Dogear, which was released in 2007 as a part of the social software application Lotus Connections. The following slides show screenshots from a demo version of Dogear (Minassian; 2007)

Results Motivation Motivation Dogear seemed to facilitate both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for bookmarking and tagging. Types of bookmarks Types of bookmarks The bookmarked webpages seemed to consist almost exclusively of professional content, helping to reduce the amount of noise in bookmark searches. Employee profiles Employee profiles The use of the employees’ real names and contact information in Dogear was used as a search parameter along with tags and free text search. The formal identification of bookmarkers also helps in evaluating retrieved bookmarks.

Results (2) The semantic vs. syntactic issue The semantic vs. syntactic issue The tag suggestion feature in Dogear seems to increase tag convergence, that hampers the retrieval of relevant bookmarks since the tags are applied by different employees in different contexts. Serendipity Serendipity On the other hand, the semantic inconsistency between different communities of practice and user groups seems to have some serendipitous effects that are appreciated by the employees. Tagging consistency Tagging consistency The study showed an example of intratagging inconsistency in that an individual tagger had trouble retrieving his own bookmarks, because of the lack of semantic structure in the tags and the mental gap between the tagging process and the search process.

Overall conclusions Dogear shows potential regarding the sharing of work-related information between employees in shared practices inside IBM. Dogear shows potential regarding the sharing of work-related information between employees in shared practices inside IBM. By displaying both employees’ professional interests and formal identity, Dogear also shows potential in facilitating the creation of new communities of practice. By displaying both employees’ professional interests and formal identity, Dogear also shows potential in facilitating the creation of new communities of practice.

Discussion & future research In companies: In companies: Can employee’s tags be used to enhance and improve corporate thesauri? In libraries: In libraries: Can social tagging add value to OPACs?

References Golder, S.A. & Huberman, B.A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. In: Journal of Information Science, 32 (2), p Marlow, C. et al. (2006). HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, flickr, academic article, toread. Proceedings of Hypertext, 2006: Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies – cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata: communication/folksonomies.html

References Millen, D.R. & Feinberg, J. (2006). Fetch!: es/ _dogear.html Millen, D.R., Feinberg, J. & Kerr, B. (2006). Dogear: Social bookmarking in the enterprise. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada, p Minassian, S. et al. (2007). IBM® Lotus® Connections R1 – Reviewers Guide. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice – learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.