Month: February 2008

New Tagging Tool at University of Michigan Library

I’d like to talk about a tagging project we just launched at my workplace. MTagger is a social bookmarking tool that we’ve integrated into several University of Michigan library resources. A tag cloud now appears:

Like del.icio.us and many other social bookmarking tools available on the Internet, MTagger allows users to bookmark and tag web pages using language that makes sense to them. Anyone can see tag clouds on pages and search MTagger; only users with valid U-M network logins can apply tags. (Individuals can, of course, opt out of sharing their tags with others if they choose.)
Unlike these other tools, MTagger offers the concept of “Collections” — letting users restrict their searches for similarly tagged items to a specific collection (library catalog records, images, web pages, etc.). While tags themselves would allow people to serendipitously find items in other collections, the “Collections” metaphor will, we expect, help drive home that the library offers more than books, electronic journals, and databases.
More important than the tagging functionality itself is what MTagger will allow our faculty, staff, and students to do. MTagger brings a social component to research that we have not previously had. It will allow users to share knowledge about library resources with each other, to enable quick-and-dirty subject guides to be produced, and — we hope — to bring researchers together via their individual tag clouds. As research moves online, chance meetings in the stacks of researchers with overlapping interests become even more rare. Through tagging, we hope to be able to recreate some of those synergistic interactions as one researcher finds a tag of interest, and through that, the other researcher.
Oh, and just to keep this in the realm of libraries and RSS, anything that can be searched within MTagger can be accessed via an RSS feed.

RSS Feeds for Individual User’s Lists in WorldCat.org

OCLC announced today that “Public WorldCat lists are available as RSS feeds that can be monitored using any RSS-capable service or software.” When you view a user’s list within WorldCat.org, you will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for that list — so whenever that user adds an item to it, you’ll find out.
Libraries that use WorldCat.org lists to generate reading lists on various topics can now embed those lists easily and automatically on library web pages — and let their patrons know, at the same time, that there are new items of interest.
So, for example, I’ve created a brief list of books about RSS. You can subscribe to its feed at http://worldcat.org/profiles/varnumk/lists/53691/rss. Whenever I add a new item to the list, you’ll know. If you go to my list in WorldCat (it’s called "RSS4Lib RSS List"), the RSS link OCLC provides redirects you to AddThis.com, a site that provides one-click subscription or one-click bookmarking links to a wide range of RSS aggregators and social bookmarking services.

What Happens When You Blog

The February 2008 issue of Wired magazine offers an interactive graphical depiction of what happens to your blog post once you click the publish button. "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You" shows all the interactions between the blogger, the aggregator, spam blogs, and (the whole point, right?) the reader. The Flash graphic depicts all these interactions and makes somewhat clearer how your post gets to wherever it’s ultimately consumed.

Law Library of Congress — RSS Feeds

The Library of Congress’s Law Library of Congress now offers RSS Feeds on the following topics: News & Events, Research Reports, Webcasts, and Global Legal Monitor.
The “Research Reports” feed, for example, includes such topics as “How to Do Russian Legal Research” and “Children’s Rights: International Laws.”
These new feeds are just a small portion of the complete list of Library of Congress RSS Feeds.