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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. Three Ways to Tag: Navigation

7. Three Ways to Tag: Tag Cloud

8. Three Ways to Tag: Bookmarklet

9. 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.

10. Tagging Something

11. Then What?
Your tags are available in MTagger

12. Item Listing

13. 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

14. Everyone’s Tags

15. User Demographics

16. What Gets Tagged

17. Finding New Stuff

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

19. Feed for Person’s Items

20. Feed for a Tag

21. Feed for a Person’s Specific Tag

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

23. Resource Guides

24. Managing Tags

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

26. 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

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

28. 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)

29. 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)

30. Links MTagger: MTagger Updates: Ken Varnum
MTagger Updates:
Ken Varnum
Blog: