Thing 6 - controlling the web

Thing 6 is all about being in control - so that you can impose your system of order on the web to make it useful for you. We’ll be exploring bookmarking, tagging and personal startpages.

(a) Bookmarks

TASK 1 - browser vs MyLibrary vs delicious

There’s more than one way to manage your bookmarked/favourite websites.

Browser based bookmarks/favourites

Bookmarking your favourite websites is probably familiar to you.

Just to refresh you memory…
Find a website you like or find useful, and then…..

    Using Internet Explorer

•  click the green plus/gold star button to “add to favourites”
•  Name the favourite in a way that makes sense to you.
•  Click add.
•  To view the feed to check if there are any new items for you to read, click the gold star button, and pick the “favourites” column; alternatively, click “favourites” in the top menu bar.
• You have the chance to organise your favourites into folders if you want to. Click “favourites” in the top menu bar, and click “organise your favourites”

OR

    Using Firefox,

• Click the star in the address bar, this automatically adds it to your list of Bookmarks (notice it changes from clear to gold)
• Click the star again, and you’re given the chance to name the bookmark in a way that makes sense to you, and to put it in a particular folder (depending on the way you’ve organised your bookmarks)
• You also get the chance to tag the bookmark.
• Click done or “remove this bookmark” as appropriate.
• To view your bookmarks, click “bookmarks” and chose “recently bookmarked”

 

NHS MyLibrary bookmarking

Your NHS ATHENS password will also let you personalise the section MyLibrary. This works as an RSS reader (that you can use for Keeping Up To Date). It also has a bookmarking section, so that wherever you are, you can login to find the links to your favourite/most useful websites.

• Go to http://www.evidence.nhs.uk - click the “journals and databases” link, and click “sign in to ATHENS” and login with your ATHENS password. Click to MyLibrary.
• Look at the section marked My Links.
• it’s already got some links which NHS Evidence thinks you might find useful, but if you don’t like these links, just tick the box and click “remove selected links”
• Now it’s time for you to add some links which you do find useful.
• Open a new web browser or tab, and find a website you find useful. Copy the address/URL.
• Back in MyLibrary, click “Add Link”, and copy the URL in the appropriate box. (be careful to delete the existing http://)
• Fill in the box marked “Link Title”, and click “add link”
• Add a couple more links to other websites.

 

Extra Task: optional

Try adding categories to your links.

When you add a new link, complete the “category” box. When you add another new link, perhaps you will want to add the same category tag, or create a new category. It works like a system of folders.

So far, this method of bookmarking (or creating favourites) is a personal thing – only you can see them, whether that’s on the computer you are logged into, or on the basis of your ATHENS login, No one else can see them.

Social bookmarking services allow you to save or bookmark your favourite web sites online and to share them with others. Using a Social bookmarking service is like saving favourites to Internet Explorer or any other web browser but with added benefits:

Watch this video to see what is meant by social bookmarking (you'll need your headphones):

Delicious

•  Sign up for a Delicious account at http://delicious.com/ This will require you to set up a Yahoo account.
•  During the sign up process you will be given the option of downloading the Delicious “bookmarklet”. This is a useful button which sits in the “links” toolbar in Internet Explorer and other internet browsers and allows you to bookmark web sites to Delicious as you browse. Install it if you wish. If you're not sure you can always install it later.
•  If you haven't used Delicious before, take a look through the information in “Help”
•  Save at least five of your favourite web sites as bookmarks and give each tags.
•  If you have installed the Delicious "bookmarklet" you can save web sites to Delicious simply by visiting the web site you want to save and clicking in your links toolbar.
•  If you haven't installed the "bookmarklet", log on to your Delicious account and click "Save New Bookmark" (top right) you will then have to enter the URL of the page you want to save followed by its title and tags.
•  Save your blog and/or another web site on the theme of web 2.0 as a bookmark. Add tags and this time also include the “12thingsbeforexmas” tag so that other members of the programme can find the bookmark.
•  Choose “Tags” / “Explore” and search for the tag “12thingsbeforexmas” to view bookmarks shared by other member of the programme. Save any pages that look interesting to your own Delicious account.

Extra Task: optional

a. Read about tagging and folksonomies by searching using the Delicious search. This searches all the public bookmarks saved on Delicious. Save any pages that look interesting to your own Delicious account (don’t forget to share them using the 12thingsbeforexmas tag as well as some of your own tags).

b. Send a bookmark to another user by adding their delicious username to the “send” field. (If you don’t know anyone using Delicious you can send a bookmark to me: ilk21@cam.ac.uk).

(b) Tagging

Tag (metadata)             
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia         
A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.0
In information systems, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.


Tagging should come naturally to librarians. Tagging blog entries, photos on facebook, bookmarks on delicious etc is how the social web organises its information. As library staff, we know that retrieving information can be a pretty complex task, and that the more access points a record offers, the more chance there is that a reader will find it.

Tags are the access points of Web 2.0: they work in the same way as NLM Subject Headings, or MeSH. The difference is that they're generated on the fly by users, not imposed by library taxonomies.

Tagging is designed to be both personal - you choose which tags you want to use - and collaborative - others can see the tags you've assigned, and can choose to follow you in using them. Of course this doesn't always happen! One person's "cat" may be another's "feline quadruped": unlike NLM, there are no right and wrong ways of tagging.

Some people find this idea inspiring; to others, it's opening the door to anarchy. Yet tagging is perhaps the defining element of web 2.0's user-generated content, and it's not going to go away. This in turn is going to have a profound effect on our readers' expectations of how information is described and retrieved.

An interesting way to use tagging comes with Twitter - by adding hashtags (eg #12thingseoe) to your tweets you can follow tweets about the same topic, even if you don’t follow the person doing the tweeting. This is particularly useful, I find, when there’s a conference or meeting that I can’t attend but would find interesting.

If you’re a Twitter novice you can find about a bit more about what it is and why it might be useful here: http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=979
If you’re up for a few more hints and tips this http://www.squidoo.com/twitter4librarians might be useful, and if you want a way of joining in, try http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/ for topical discussions.

(c) pulling it all together - personal homepage

Since you’ve already seen MyLibrary, accessible via your NHS ATHENS login, you’ve got a picture of what a personal homepage can look like. If you’ve got a Google account, you’re maybe already familiar with iGoogle - but enjoy that while it lasts since iGoogle will be discontinued in 2013. What a personal homepage, or personal startpage, can give you is all your favourite and useful links and feeds in one place. Both these resources are private - no one else can see the resources you pull together.

As an alternative to both MyLibrary and iGoogle, you could consider NetVibes as a way of having a private space, and the option for a public facing homepage. Like iGoogle there’s an option to have lots of pages (or tabs) that focus on different things, and there’s the chance to add in fun or useful widgets.

Have a look at http://www.netvibes.com/sathlibraries#About It’s an NHS library service that has created a public website that pulls together tools and resources relevant for a range of different subject areas. It contains lists of useful links, and RSS feeds, all in one place.It’s a quick and easy way to create a public webpage. Here’s another example: http://www.netvibes.com/northantspslibraries
My own netvibes page (http://www.netvibes.com/ilk21#General ) is a bit messy, but it works for me - there’s also a private side which I’m not showing you, which is available to me when I login.

Does this look useful to you, or to your library? What feeds, bookmarks and widgets would you pull together for yourself, or for library users? If you library website is not on the internet, perhaps you could build a public page that clinicians could access from home.

your thing

- blog about how you could see these tools being used by your library or library users