Social Networking, Librarianship, and the Context of Information

It seems that social networking provides a number of different useful tools for libraries to contextualize the content of their collections. As libraries have embraced the Web, from OPAC to electronic databases for journals to virtual reference services, they have managed to transform the centralized institutional nature of the discipline into a more decentralized aggregation of content access. Social networking, long heralded as Web 2.0, provides an important detail to this decentralized aggregation of content access; where before, it was largely up to the researcher to do the work of contextualizing various search results into a meaningful and knowledgeable context, it seems that some of the predominant tools of social networking provide much in the way of automating this context while providing a general framework of its meaning.

Two of these tools include innovative tagging and user commentary. For instance, a site such as Librarything allows users to create tags for books, collections, authors, and many other bibliographical entities that point one to more books aggregated under these diverse tags, reviews, or related topics. This is clearly akin to the subject heading tagging already in place in most libraries, where one search result is tagged through an already established subject heading that may or may not be related to another in the library; in this system, the users have little say in how the cloud of subject-headings relate to each other and how they are aggregated. In Librarything, these tags are user created, and provide a more diverse context to search results. Social networking additionally brings into play effective user commentary, where reactions to research, books, etc. can be read additionally to the bibliographical information by the user. Incorporating Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or any number of other social networking interfaces can provide a meaningful supplement to research.