[Web4lib] social bookmarking sites

[Anderson, Patricia]

Hi, Janette,

The main point to basically any social tech is whether or not you find interesting people there. That means different things to different folks. Functionality is, of course, also an issue, but personally, I think people tend to trump function, assuming the systems are mostly pretty similar.

For myself, I use del.icio.us, heavily. Melissa told me I am the only librarian (or medical librarian?) she knows with more links in del.icio.us than her! I am working with ~7 delicio.us accounts, for a couple different libraries, some grant projects, a couple classes, a website collection, and of course my personal collection (which has over 10,000 links).

I've looked at several of the social bookmarking sites that are for academics specifically (such as Connotea, CiteULike, collab2, etc). What I've noticed is that they tend to attract specific domains. For example, CiteULike is more tech geeks, and Connotea is more life science. HOWEVER, despite that distinction of community, the most interesting folk I find in any of the explicitly academic tools tend to have several social bookrmarking accounts and post the same link to several places. There are even tools to help you multi-post (Social Poster, for example). In that case, one is pretty much the same as another, and why not do several? The main advantage I find to del.icio.us is that it is the biggest, meaning no matter what interests you, there is probably someone there collecting the same things. Which is where I started -- where are the people. :)

 -- Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of David Rothman
Sent: Tue 1/8/2008 5:56 PM
To: janette treanor
Cc: Web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] social bookmarking sites
 
Hi Janette.

It'll depend a litle on what you mean by "Social bookmarking."  For
instance, some people call Digg <http://www.digg.com/> a social bookmarking
service ...though I'm not really sure I'm comfortable with that.

I've written a bunch of blog posts of "Digg for Medical Literature" that may
be of interest.  You can find a list of them at the bottom of this
post<http://davidrothman.net/2007/11/14/health2info-digg-for-medical-literature-part-xi/>
.
The bigger social bookmarking tools for academic literature, I believe, are
CiteULike <http://www.citeulike.org/> and Connotea<http://www.connotea.org/>,
but Elsevier recent came out with 2Collab <http://www.2collab.com/>.
Of these, I've enjoyed playing with Connotea the most, but still use
del.icio.us for most things.

Much more expert than I am on social bookmarking for biomedical literature
is medical librarian Melissa Rethlefsen (Education Technology Librarian at
the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN), who wrote an article for Library Journal
on Social Bookmarking
tools<http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6476403.html> and
another article on such tools specifically for medical
libraryfolk<http://midwestmla.org/midline/2007/11/feature_articlesocial_bookmark.html>
.

Hope that helps!

-David

David Rothman
Community General Hospital Medical Library
Syracuse, NY
http://davidrothman.net
http://www.libworm.com



On Jan 8, 2008 5:32 PM, janette treanor <janettetreanor at gmail.com> wrote:

> Morning all,
>
> I am looking at social bookmarking sites for academics (medical in
> particular).
> Does anyone have any comments?
> What do you use and why not another one?
>
> thank you in advance and have a wonderful day
> janette treanor
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
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