This document presents a study on the usage of social tagging and bookmarking applications among academic librarians, highlighting its potential to enhance resource discovery and user participation in libraries. While many librarians are not currently utilizing these tools, they express an intention to adopt them in the future, recognizing the benefits despite concerns over vocabulary control and user awareness. The study suggests the necessity of training users on the advantages of these applications and indicates that further research could explore user perspectives on social tagging in library contexts.

1. SOCIALTAGGING/BOOKMARKING
APPLICATION:
THE USAGE IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES
AP Dr. Noorhidawati Abdullah
Department of Library & Information Science
Faculty of Computer Science & Information
Technology,
University of Malaya

2. Presentation Outline
SocialTagging/Bookmarking
Research Purpose
Research Design
Findings
Conclusion

3. SocialTagging/Bookmarking in Libraries
Social tagging/bookmarking is a process of adding tags or keyword
freely to online resources which is an important aspect of social
bookmarking services that resulted in folksonomy
Taxonomy and ontology are classifications and
naming conventions prepared by experts
Folksonomies are result from individuals freely
tagging resources available in the Internet.
Social tagging = collaborative tagging =
social classification = social indexing
The main intention - to facilitate their access in
the future by enabling them to search using the
keywords they have tagged to the resource

4. SocialTagging/Bookmarking
Social tagging services (e.g. Delicious, CiteUlike and PennTag) -
offer an alternative mechanism for resource discovery and
browsing of digital resources (e.g. website, scholarly papers)
through tags that were added by users
Tags - serve as ways for users to organize their information
based on their own preference for future retrieval
Often criticized for imprecise and ambiguously chosen
keywords for tags when compared to conventional
classification scheme used by professional indexers (e.g.
librarians or information specialist) who manually categorize
the resources.
Conflicting opinions that social tagging is too flexible and do
not have enough control over the vocabulary

5. SocialTagging/Bookmarking
With the advent of Internet - radically increased the amount of
information to the public - to continually manually categorizing
resources by professional indexer is not only impractical but
costly as well.
Therefore, one possible solution is to
incorporate social
tagging/bookmarking tool into library
resources to empower users to
actively participate and contribute to
the library collection by allowing them
to freely attach their own tags to the
resources.

6. SocialTagging/Bookmarking in Libraries
A number of empirical studies have
reported on experiences using social
tagging/bookmarking tools in libraries
For example:
University of Pennsylvania - implemented PennTag -
allows users to tag their library OPAC
PennTag enabled members of the university’s
community to not only tag but also comment on
resources in the library’s online catalog
SOPAC is developed by Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) -
allows library users to assign tags to individual library
resources, or to write review or comment and to view the list
of the most popular and recent tags
LibraryThing (www.librarything.com) - is a cataloguing and
social networking site for book enthusiast where they can tag,
rate and review books

7. • Current usage
• Among academic librarians
• Reason of usage and non-usage
• Benefits
• Drawbacks
Research Purpose

8. Research Design
Sample : 100 librarians;
72% response rate

9. 65 responses from both public and private academic librarians
69.2 % of the respondents are female; 30.8% are male
15% of the respondents are administrative librarian and cataloguer ;
14% are reference librarian
Working Experience:
44.6% are having less than 5 years’ experience working as librarian;
29.2% are having 6-10 years working experience
Age Group: 47.7% are in “30 - 39 years”;
38.5% under 29 years old
Highest Academic Qualification:
50.8% of the respondents had a master degree; 49.2% are holding a bachelor
degree
Demographic

10. Findings
A library subject
guide
44%
Collect and share
resources for staff
professional
development
22%
Illustrate valuable
resource to patrons
who are learning
research skills
17%
Provide a
mechanism for
library patrons to
contribute to
resources
17%
Purpose of Using SocialTagging/Bookmarking
Application

11. Findings
There is no need
44%
Not aware of their
availability
28%
Takes time to get
familiar with the
technology
15%
Other
13%
Reason for Non-Usage

12. Findings
A library subject guide
27%
Collect and share
resources for staff
professional
development
21%
Illustrate valuable
resource to patrons
who are learning
research skills
24%
Provide a mechanism
for library patrons to
contribute to resources
28%
Intention to Use in Future

13. Findings
Benefit of using the social tagging/application as opined by
several librarians such as L6, L9, L28, L32, L33:
For example some respondents pointed out:
It is very useful to help user in getting information about material
in library collection and it can also be used to share information
/materials with others - (L6)
I believe students can contribute to the value of the
items/materials information if they are allowed to tag
terms/words to their bibliographic info - (L9)

14. Findings
Some of librarians were not aware of the application (L5, L52) and
feel there is no need to use social tagging/ bookmarking (L62).
The comments are as follow:
It is good to know about the usage of social tagging/bookmarking
application but I have no idea on what it is about and how it
usefulness to the librarians – (L52)
It is a good service for academic libraries. However, not all users are
aware about this services provided by libraries.They still need to
provide training for users in order to explain the benefit of this
services – (L62)

15. Findings
Some librarians expressed their concerns related to the usage
of social tagging/ bookmarking application in library setting
(L30, L9, L26) as shows in the following comments:
…..too much to tag, it would be too many keywords - (L30)
….librarians' need to ensure quality control take place - (L9)
….library need to consider about the budget to upgrade the
library website in order to benefit tagging that could improve
retrieval functions - (L26)

16. Conclusion
This study provides a landscape of social tagging/bookmarking
application usage among academic librarians.
Majority of respondents were reported not using the application
but they indicated as having the intention to use it in future and
were aware of the benefits.
Future study could be conducted to investigate social
tagging/bookmarking applications in library patrons’ perspective
Focus could be done on the usage of tagging application in library
OPAC and other library resources as such in the special digital
repositories e.g. thesis and dissertation.