LibraryThing (librarything.com)
I've been meaning to create an account with LibraryThing for awhile now ... as a member of our library's Technical Services staff, I'm immediately drawn to any service that promotes itself with the ability to "catalog your books online"!
As of this writing, the site boasts 1,360,184 members with 63,542,867 books cataloged (6,173,071 of those are described as "unique works"); also, there have been 76,978,503 tags added to the site - wow, that's a lot of social participation! - and 1,433,245 reviews ... Very impressive stats all around!
I clicked on the "tour" link in order to get a better idea of how the site worked ... First off, it's apparent that the creators of the site want people to know that LibraryThing emphasizes a community experience (the sentence "LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for book lovers" is repeated twice on the first page); users are encouraged to "contribute tags" and share "common knowledge" (i.e. facts about a book or author), as well as "participate in member forums or join the Early Reviewers program."
It is also a great resource for gathering information about the books that one has in their personal collection; LibraryThing draws its cataloging information from Amazon (which non-library users will easily recognize), but also "over 700 libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress."
Of course, the main drawing point is the ability to create one's own descriptive terms via social tagging (here called "LibraryThing concepts"); on this page, the author - I assume it's Tim Spalding but it doesn't actually say - talks about the necessity for a system to organize collections of books, but that "for most personal libraries ... subject classifications [such as Library of Congress subject headings] aren't much use" (sad but true). The author goes on to compare the admittedly cumbersome subject heading "Bible. N.T. Romans I, 18-32 -- Criticism, interpretation, etc. -- History -- Early church, ca. 30-600" (which a lot of patrons won't make heads or tails out of) against the more straightforward concepts of "early church" and "homosexuality". In this case, I would agree that simplicity is sometimes for the better!
All in all, this site is a great resource for book lovers, not only in keeping track of their own collections, but - as the site puts it - "providing some of the best recommendations on the web" through "social information" such as "which members have the book and what they think about it - tags, reviews and even links to conversations about the book."
CiteULike (citeulike.org)
I've come across a few scholarly journals linked through CiteULike via Google, but never actually took the opportunity to explore the site more fully ... Clicking the "Frequently Asked Questions" link found at the top of the very sparse frontpage, I found that the site promises to "store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading." It emphasizes simplicity ("When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library ... CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself") as well as the social aspects of the service ("You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource").
I tried searching for "librarianship" and came up with over 800 results ... Aside from a list of the articles tagged with the term "libraranship", the search also included a list of groups interested in that term (like "librarian" and "Semantic-Social-Networks"), and it produced a tag cloud of other users interested in the term "librarianship" (with users like Joachim Schopfel and David Bibb in bold text for emphasis). This is a great example of the social power of CiteULike, as I can now see what other articles are being used/cited by people within the library profession, thereby discovering sources of information that I might have otherwise missed out on.
PennTags (tags.library.upenn.edu)
The University of Pennsylvania's social-tagging project seems to be one of the first (and most successful) endeavors by the profession to integrate the controlled vocabularies of "traditional" catalogs with the simplicity of user-generated tags ... Of course, since I'm not a student at the university, I can't create my own tags, but the system still allows "outsiders" to browse and see what others have come up with.
The frontpage immediately greets visitors with a tag cloud of the most popular terms ("tags used at least 110 times"). Many of these highlighted tags look familiar to someone like me who is outside their campus community ("copyright", "animation", "medieval_studies"), but some are clearly for personal use ("scholarship_is_changing", "to_read"); it's like how Hesham Allam described some tags as altruistic ("easy retrieval by anyone using that system") and others as selfish ("users tag their own contents for their own easy retrieval").
In their "About" section, PennTags is described as a "social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources." From this description, it's apparant that the service is being "sold" to the Penn community in much the same way as a commercial service like Delicious ("Have you ever bookmarked a web page and then cant find it again in your mass of bookmarks? The beauty of PennTags is that it allows you to organize your bookmarks/resources exactly the way you want and it lets you share them with others. It's both personal and portable"); by portraying the service as something that the students would be familiar with, it makes it that much easier for those patrons to accept the service and adopt it into their usual online routine.
To highlight the popularity of PennTags within the community, the site provides a very robust list of tags already employed by the students, as well as a list of "owners" who are contributing to the social-tagging aspect of the site ... It certainly seems as though the PennTags concept has really caught on with the community, and that the patrons are making good use of its services.
Services like PennTags are a great way to "socialize" the library's online catalog, without completely discarding that system as "obsolete" ... As I've mentioned before, it's a way for social-tagging and controlled vocabularies to work in tandem, in order to better help patrons locate and retrieve the information that they are looking for.
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