Week 3: Tagging, social bookmarking and social citation-sharing

Last week we looked at social networking, sites that enable you to share thoughts, ideas and opinions. This week we’ll be looking at tools to help you manage and share information, whether online information from websites and social media sites, or more traditional forms of scholarly information such as journal articles and references to books and other publications.

Tagging

Tagging is a system for assigning keywords to web-based content (such as websites, images or blogs) so that you can easily retrieve items on a particular topic and so that others can use your tags to find those items, or choose to assign similar tags to their items. As librarians we may shudder at the thought of there being no controlled vocabulary in the use of tags, but they are a convenient and easy to use tool to help organise information on Web 2.0 sites.

You may have already made use of tags in creating your blog posts in week 1 and 2. When you entered a term in the ‘Labels’ box (if using Blogger) for your blog post you were ‘tagging’ that post. If you didn’t add any tags you can always go back and add them now.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for saving links to websites that allows you to access your ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favorites’ from anywhere, rather than just within your Web browser on a particular PC, because they are all stored within your online account. You can then organise your bookmarks by adding tags. It becomes ‘social’ because other users can see the tags and browse for websites by the tags that have been assigned to them by other people. That means you can identify websites relevant to you that have already been identified by human beings as being useful sources. This can make a refreshing alternative to sifting through hundreds of search engine results.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is possibly the best known social bookmarking site. In addition to allowing you to save and tag your bookmarks, it lets you see bookmarks other people have made, see how popular they are and see the tags that have been applied to them. You can set up RSS feeds from another Del.icio.us user so you can be alerted when they add a new bookmark. It also allows you to easily share your bookmarks, either by creating a 'network' of Del.icio.us users or by creating a page of links that you can then link to from your own website or blog.

Did you know: If you’ve already heard of Del.icio.us you may have heard rumours that it was to be terminated. Well there’s good news. It’s been taken over by AVOS (the company behind YouTube) who plan to continue Del.icio.us. See Del.icio.us FAQs for more information.

Diigo

Like Delicious, Diigo ("Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff") is a social bookmarking site, allowing you to bookmark webpages, tag them and find other webpages by using other people’s tags. But Diigo does more than that, its aim being to "focus on providing better ways to process, manage, share and discover information" it is a constantly evolving resource, "a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other." See http://www.diigo.com/about.

The additional features you get from Diigo include:

• The ability to highlight portions of web pages and attach sticky notes, save these so you can come back to them later and share them with friends and colleagues using groups
• News and recommended sites personalised to your interests.
• The ability to see who else has bookmarked a page and what similar sites they have bookmarked giving you another avenue for identifying relevant websites. You can search for "people like me" based on similar interests, tags or sites. Diigo then allows social networking allowing you to connect with these people by inviting them to be a ‘friend’, sending them messages, inviting them to join a group or adding them to your watchlist.

The standard version of Diigo is free to register.

For a demonstration of the features of diigo, watch this short video:

Thing 5: Set up an account on Diigo and bookmark, tag and highlight a page and add a sticky note to it.

To set up an account on Diigo:

• From the Diigo home page, click on Get Started Now! or on the Join Diigo link to the right of the top menu bar.
• Enter your details and click on Continue. You will be sent a confirmation email with a link in it on which you need to click to activate your account.
• Once you have clicked on the link in the email, follow the on-screen instructions to add the diigolet to your favourites / links bar or install the Diigo toolbar. The quickest and easiest option is to add the diigolet, but frequent users of Diigo may feel they benefit from installing the toolbar as it has more features (this requires admin rights on your computer).
  Tip: Diigo works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. If using Staff WTS, however, you may not be able to capture the bookmarklet in IE – use Firefox instead. It should work fine on Staff WTS 2010. We also had problems making the bookmarklet work on a Windows Vista computer using IE and a computer that had bookmarklets added from lots of other programs. Email us if you are having problems installing the diigolet.
• You’re now ready to start adding pages to your library. Go to any website and click on the diigolet on your favorites / links bar. From the toolbar that appears you can choose to highlight text, bookmark it to your Diigo account (including adding tags), add a sticky note, share on twitter, facebook or by email or simply link to your diigo account.

Optional extra:
You might like to try investigating using lists on Diigo and searching for other people’s sites using the search box to explore the community library or look for groups or users interested in that topic. You can even add feeds to your Diigo bookmarks so they appear on your blog (look at the options under Tools). We’ve done this on the 11½ Things blog – look to the right under the Blog Archive.

Did you know:

• You can migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo
• There are iPhone and iPad apps for Diigo which allow you to bookmark sites on the go, or read websites offline.

Social citation-sharing

You could easily use social bookmarking sites to bookmark the webpages of particular journal articles and share them amongst a group of colleagues (bearing in mind access to the full text for colleagues would depend on their subscription or institutional subscription). There are other sites set up, however, that are designed specifically for that purpose and have additional related features. Some of them function as full bibliographic software packages which enable you to insert citations in Word documents and generate a bibliography. Examples include Mendeley and Zotero.

We’re not going to go into detail here because the summer school session on Freely available bibliographic management and collaboration tools running on Friday 15 July is all about these tools. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the session you can check out the presentation, handouts and worksheets on the Summmer School Moodle course.

Thing 6: Post an entry on your blog saying what your impressions are of Diigo, or any other tool mentioned this week, and why you think this tool might be of particular use to researchers, academics or clinicians.

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Optional extras:

If you want to know more then have a go at exploring some of the following sites:

Library Thing
LibraryThing is a social bookmarking site for book lovers. It allows you to create an online catalogue of books and connects you to other people who have similar collections.


Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike and EndNote Web
Check out the material on social citation software from this week’s summer school session, available on the Summer School Moodle course. There are worksheets to help you explore the resources.

Further information
Check out the websites we found on Diigo on social bookmarking.