Poster Abstract

1. Collaborative social tagging and information literacy
Munirah Abdulhadi, University of Sheffield, mabadulhadi1@sheffield.ac.uk
Dr Paul Clough, University of Sheffield, p.d.clough@sheffield.ac.uk
Barbara Sen, University of Sheffield, b.a.sen@sheffield.ac.uk
Web 2.0 tools are reliant on the power of people’s creativity and participation in an
interactive environment. Social tagging is a Web 2.0 tool that supports personal
information management, as well as the collaborative creation of user communities.
Social tagging provides users with a flexible way of collecting, storing, organizing
and sharing different types of information by assigning descriptive tags. Libraries can
employ social tagging tools via implementing tagging services (e.g., LibraryThing for
libraries), creating an account in social bookmarking services (e.g., Delicious), or
building their own tagging systems (e.g., PennTags, University of Pennsylvania). In
order to build Information literate communities in the Web 2.0 world, it is important
to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, functionality and
usage of these emerging tools and applications. This poster presents the findings of an
investigation into social tagging and information literacy to illustrate how social
tagging can aid and benefit information literacy development and practice. A
comparative analysis of the functionalities provided by collaborative social tagging
systems was carried out across a range of collaborative social tagging services (e.g.,
Delicious, CiteULike and Connotea) and Library 2.0 sites with social tagging
functionalities (e.g., Worldcat, LibraryThing and Goodreads). A list of social tagging
features was compiled from the comparison that was categorized into posting,
searching, browsing, managing and sharing functions. We compared these tagging
features with the SCNOUL Seven Pillars model of information literacy to examine
potential synergies between them. This helps to demonstrate ways that libraries can
exploit opportunities for building social tagging systems into library practices, support
tagging literacy and information literacy, and ultimately help users improve their
searching, resource organization and sharing, research and learning skills.