PennTags looks like a very interesting experiment.
PennTags lets you organize and share your bookmarks. You can use the UPennToolbar or the PennTags Bookmarklet to post websites into your tagspace. PennTags can also be used to tag Franklin and VCaT records. [PennTags /]
Functionally, it looks very like del.icio.us. Graphically, it looks well with pictures of birds!
A few interesting things for me:
- I have suggested several times that we will see greater use made of a new bibliographic tissue which connects the user environment and database resources. I am thinking of citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking (see citulike and unalog) and perhaps RSS feeds. These are personal and shared collections of data and links.
- These provide one example of another emerging feature of our bibliographic apparatus – we will increasingly have discovery or ‘rendezvous’ experiences outside the catalog, or other library resources, where the user may want to be linked transparently back into a library service for fulfilment. This example shows a local bookmarking service. Citation managers, reading lists, and so on, as I just mentioned, are others. As we expose more data to search engines, that provides another example. It is not straightforward doing this in a robust generalized way.
- Is there a scale issue here? Users need to be motivated. Would they rather benefit from collaboratively meshing (‘mesh-up’?) with a broader range of users in a wider service – del.icio.us itself for example – or in a more academically focused service like citulike? Or …?
Incidentally, I seemed to be getting strange results with some of the catalog links that I tried.
Update: Michael Winkler left a comment that the catalog bug is fixed.
Via diglet.
