This study examines the question of whether tags can be useful in the process of information retrieval. Participants were asked to search a social bookmarking tool specialising in academic articles (CiteULike) and an online journal database (Pubmed) in order to determine if users found tags were useful in their search process. The actions of each participants were captured using screen capture software and they were asked to describe their search process. The preliminary study showed that users did indeed make use of tags in their search process, as a guide to searching and as hyperlinks to potentially useful articles. However, users also made use of controlled vocabularies in the journal database.
"Whenever I teach open source to librarians I always start by outlining why libraries are the prefect breeding grounds for open source. What many librarians probably don’t realize is that the open source community actually shares a lot of the same ethics, ideals and characteristics as the library world. I think that Glen Horton put it best in his talk at the 2008 Computers in Libraries conference:"
SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets. Learn more about the SIMILE project.
As research and scholarship move increasingly into the digital arena, the processes and organizations involved in the publication of this work must evolve as well. The changing landscape of libraries, publishers, and scholarly societies; university views on tenure and digital scholarship; the emerging role of search engines; and the continuing development of information technology have created a need for radical rethinking of the roles of the major players in scholarly communication. We need to understand how users create, discover, and evaluate information, as well as the real and virtual environments in which they do their academic work, in order to plan our scholarly communication and e-publishing strategies for the future. In the past, discussions of change in scholarly communication have often focused on the use of new technologies. Going forward, the conversation needs to focus on the less technical, but perhaps even more complex, issues of changing user needs, different organizational structures, new kinds of jobs, and partnerships among the key organizations involved in knowledge dissemination.
One of the fastest growing trends today is combining data and functionality from several sources to create new services that provide a unique user experience. They’re called mash ups. Think Google Maps. Yahoo Pipes. Facebook Plug-Ins. Libraries are doing Web mash ups as well: Meebo Instant Messaging. Library Lookup. Bookburro. And, in a way, they’ve been doing all kinds of mash ups for years. Think story hour, open-shelf access, cafes, book lockers.
Mitis-Stanzel, Irene (2008) Social Tagging in Bibliotheken. MSc Thesis, Postgraduate programme in Library and Information Studies, Austrian National Library (Austria), University of Vienna (Austria).