DSL II - Activity I

Welcome Back to the

DSL Program - Part II

Tagging
You may have recently heard the term "tagging" in the context of organizing digital photos. Tagging has been around for a few years. On the Web it is being used to categorize Web pages through social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Technorati, and others. It is also being used on the Library's Staff Blog and Library Online Lounge (LOL) blog as what Blogger calls "labels".

Still confused? Here are a couple of resources to explain more about social bookmarking:

• Common Craft: Social Bookmarking in Plain English. (video)


• Seven things you should know about social bookmarking (pdf)

Adobe's Photoshop Album digital photo organizer software brought the tagging concept to the mainstream for digital photography, and the popular online photo sharing service Flickr also helped to spur the trend. Today many photo organizing software programs are using the tag metaphor, including Corel Snapfire, Google's Picasa, Microsoft Digital Image, and the Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista.

Tags are really nothing more than keywords used to describe a piece of data — be it a web page, a digital photo, or another type of digital document. Of course, organizing digital images by keywords and categories has been around for a long time, it just wasn't called "tagging" until fairly recently.

Adobe's visual metaphor of the tagging concept in Photoshop Album helped make the idea more accessible to the public. After all, a keyword or category is something abstract, but a tag is something tangible which you can visualize… like a gift tag, or a price tag. In Adobe's software user interface, they showed a very literal representation of the act of tagging. Your keywords were literally displayed as "tags" and you could drag and drop these tags onto your pictures to "attach" them to the photo.


Activity I - Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking manager which allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorize your bookmarks. Many users find that the real power of Delicious is in the social network aspect, which allows you to see how other users have tagged similar links and also discover other websites that may be of interest to you. You can think of it as peering into another users’ filing cabinet, but with this powerful bookmarking tool each user's filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at Delicious and learn about this popular bookmarking tool.

Discovery Resources:
· Otter Group Del.icio.us tutorial (8 min video) - Highly recommended!!!
· Us.ef.ul: A beginners guide to Del.icio.us
· Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users

Discovery Exercises:
1. View the 8 minute Del.icio.us tutorial to get a good overview of its features.

2. Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?

3. Reply to this blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool and answer the following questions: How could this benefit you at home or work??
How could the library use this tool??

Optional Activity I: If you’re up to the challenge, create a Delicious account for yourself and discover how this useful bookmarking tool can replace your traditional browser bookmark list.

Note: If you do setup a Delicious account, here’s a quick word about the Delicious Buttons. On PCs that have the toolbars locked down, these will install as options in your browser bookmarks. Use the “Post to my Delicious” link to add the current webpage to your account (you may need to log in). Use the “My Delicious” link to view your online account.

Optional Activity II - LibraryThing

Are you book lover or cataloger at heart? Or do you enjoy finding lost and forgotten gems on the shelf to read? Then LibraryThing may be just the tool for you.

Developed for booklovers, this online tool not only allows you to easily create an online catalog of your own it also connects you to other people who have similar libraries and reading tastes. Add a book to your catalog by just entering the title -- It’s so easy that you don’t even need MARC record training to do it – or connect with other users through your similar reading tastes. After a user catalogs books, he or she can tag them, add/correct cover pictures, and use social features. When a book is tagged, it can be viewed when other users or books use that tag.

There are lots of ways to use LibraryThing. You can even view your books on a virtual shelf, add a widget to display titles that are in your catalog or install a LT Search box on your blog.So why not join the ranks and create your own library online. With over 65,000 registered (BTW: LibraryThing also has group forum for librarians users and over 4.7 million cataloged books, you're bound to discover something new.

Check out Amanda's LibraryThing account she created for the Children's Lit class. When a batch of new children’s books arrives downstairs, she uses the bar code reader to scan them into this account, and quickly tag them by genre, book type, ethnicity, etc. She then posts the link to the account for the students in the class (to the blog and wiki for the class as well as into Blackboard).

Discovery Resources:
· About LibraryThing
· Library Thing tour
· LibraryThing blog (updates & news)

Discovery Exercise:
1. Take a look around LibraryThing and create an account.
2. Add a least 5 books to your library.
3. Reply to this blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool and answer the following questions: How could this benefit you at home or work?? How could the library use this tool??