1. User Responses to Social Bookmarking at MLibrary Ken Varnum varnum@umich.edu Web Systems Manager University of Michigan Library

2. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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

4. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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. User Responses to Social Bookmarking Inherits from Delicious.com Penn Tags Flickr Facebook Many other social bookmarking sites

6. User Responses to Social Bookmarking What Is Different? Collections MLibrary (library web pages) Mirlyn (library catalog) Digital Images Scholarly Publishing Everything Else Integration with Site

7. User Responses to Social Bookmarking How MTagger Is Used Tags are generally tagger-centric Exception: Librarians tag differently

9. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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 we’d like

10. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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

11. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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

12. User Responses to Social Bookmarking Usability Study Conducted over four months in summer 2008 Two students at U-M School of Information Librarians on steering committee

13. User Responses to Social Bookmarking Usability Recommendations Tag cloud display on pages Tag cloud display in MTagger Handling of “collections” Workflow

14. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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

15. User Responses to Social Bookmarking When It’s not Enough to Say, “I Tag You” Easier sharing: Tags Tagged items User lists Publish to other social networking tools

16. User Responses to Social Bookmarking Alternate Catalog Integration

17. Favorites Will be Tags

18. User Responses to Social Bookmarking 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?

19. User Responses to Social Bookmarking Bigger Picture Benefit to scale (delicious) Benefit to academic focus Mechanism needed for sharing tags across libraries

20. User Responses to Social Bookmarking Thank You Email: varnum@umich.edu Blog: RSS4Lib http://www.rss4lib.com/ Usability Reports: http://www.lib.umich.edu/usability/projects/MTagger.html