November 2008 Archives

Excerpts from my November 2008 quarterly "Web Reviews" Column:
Let's Get Social, Cite Me? (November 2008). SciTech News. 62 (4), p32-35.

Bookmarks. Tagging. Folksonomies. The Web is being catalogued, and not just by special libraries! For example, it was recently reported that nearly 10 million people are organizing the Web at http://delicious.com. StumbleUpon.com is not far behind with 6 million according to their Web site. These popular social bookmarking networks allows people to keep track of the Web sites they find useful and share those discoveries with others (sound familiar?). Yet as an information profession you understand that in the wide Web world, a little social bookmarking can never compete with the personal bibliographic citation manager, such as EndNote, BibTex, and Refworks provide. Fortunately for both of us (librarians and our patrons) there is a small, but growing niche developing in the social software sphere: the social citation manager.

These social citation tools are primarily designed with the science and technology researcher in mind. But these managers differ not with their ability to organize literature citations; rather they aim to help keep track of a user’s entire web space in one integrated tool. Some do this better than others. As a Sci-Tech librarian you can help users determine which one might work for their specific needs. Try to leave the tagging up to them.

Social Citation Managers

Social Bookmarking

Add Social Bookmarks to your Blog using this tool http://www.toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks/. I'll let you know how it goes...