Social Bookmarking Tools Research Articles

University Students, Social Media, and Purposeful Use

University students are frequent users of networked environments, such as social media, in their everyday lives. Although often associated with socialization and entertainment, their social media use is multifaceted, reaching across other life activities and contexts. This exploratory, qualitative study draws upon interviews with 25 university students in the United States, considering how they use social media across learning and professional contexts, and how they view their role in this setting. During the interviews, students participated in a card sort activity that presented them with 41 potential social media tasks they might engage in as well as two different ways of categorizing social media tasks.Findings showed that students use some social media tools, like Instagram, widely across contexts, while other tools are relegated to specialized use or contexts, largely driven by task. Instructors set the tone for using certain other tools, like X (formerly known as Twitter) or Diigo (a social bookmarking tool), whereas other tools are used to access resources but not to interact, like Pinterest and YouTube. Most students reported using social media to interact with others, but only within well-defined networks comprised of friends and classmates. Interactions with these individuals were focused on supporting friendship and accomplishing learning or extracurricular tasks, respectively. Beyond that, students reported a passive role on social media, consuming rather than producing content and leaving limited traces of their presence in the public sphere, with the exception of situations when students were leaders in extracurricular groups or using social media for their jobs. In those instances, the most common uses were related to posting event and promotional information. After engaging with the social media tasks and activity categories presented in the card sort, students offered two types of reflections. One group reflected on the limited nature of their personal social media use, whereas the other group indicated that there was a range of social media tasks and uses that they had not previously considered. The small group of students who did not offer any sort of post-activity reflection indicated that they had small networks with limited activities by design, and lacked interest in thinking further about them. These findings have implications for higher education institutions, where students might be offered learning, extracurricular, and career support opportunities to help them develop both awareness and skills related to common networked knowledge activities and corresponding digital skills.

Research output and visibility of librarians: Are social media influencers or distractors?

The study examined the influence of social media use on research output and visibility of librarians in university libraries in southwestern, Nigeria. A descriptive survey research approach was utilised in the study. The population consisted of 363 librarians from all of southwestern Nigeria’s university libraries. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings revealed that librarians produce a high level of research output but their research visibility is low. The use of social media significantly positively influenced the research output and visibility of librarians. The study concluded that the use of social media can improve librarians’ research output and visibility, and thus recommends that more effort be made to expand the use of social media such as Yahoo, ResearchGate, Zotero, ORCID and LinkedIn, as well as greater awareness of social bookmarking tools such as Bibsonomy.

Professional Learning Networks

Professional learning networks (PLNs) are uniquely crafted and dynamic learning ecosystems, consisting of people, spaces, and tools that meet an educator’s professional needs, interests, and goals (Trust et al., 2016). They serve as a means through which people grow in aspects of their professions. The people within a PLN are individuals who provide career-based feedback, advice, ideas, emotional support, and/or mentoring (Krutka et al., 2017; Trust et al., 2016). The spaces within a PLN are physical, digital, and hybrid places that support or enable professional knowledge building with and from others, such as conferences, workshops, webinars, Twitter chats, unconferences, Reddit forums, and massive open online courses (Trust and Prestridge, 2021). The tools within a PLN are physical resources (e.g., books, curriculum materials) and digital technologies (e.g., Internet search databases, social bookmarking tools, blogs) that are used to access, curate, construct, and disseminate professional knowledge (Trust et al., 2018). Taken together, the people, spaces, and tools within a PLN can support ongoing professional learning and growth for individuals in any academic or organizational context.

Language learners' digital literacies: Focus on students' information literacy and reading practices online

AbstractThe widespread use of technology and the Internet have changed many of language learners' everyday practices, including literacies. While there have been many studies with the focus on language learners' digital literacies, few, however, have explored language learners' digital information literacy and online reading practices with the use of social bookmarking tools, especially in a community college setting. We address this gap by investigating community‐college language learners' digital literacies when social bookmarking with the focus on digital information and online reading practices from an ecological perspective. In this qualitative multiple‐case study, the focal participants were five English learners, students in an English as a Second Language writing course in a community college in the northeastern United States. Data collection included interviews, observations, and researchers' e‐journals. Thorough within‐ and cross‐case analysis of data shows that language learners searched for digital texts and evaluated them based on relevance, reliability, interest, language, and importance for them and their learning community in the social bookmarking tool. The participants struggled with the number of results in search engines, keywords, and evaluation of digital texts for relevance and reliability. We show the need for more instruction, support, and guidance of language learners' digital information literacy practices as well as the benefits of providing students with opportunities to read digital texts. Our suggestions for future research include investigating the role of multimodality and other factors that influence language learners' evaluation practices when they look for and read information online.

ESL students’ perceptions of using a social bookmarking tool for the development of reading in a second language

Building on research on the development of reading and use of technology for language learning, this multiple-case study explored English as a second language (ESL) students’ perceptions of using a social bookmarking Web 2.0 tool for the development of reading from an ecological perspective. Five students in a community college ESL course in the northeastern part of the USA participated in the study. The data sources included interviews, observations, e-journals, and artifacts. Thorough within-case and cross-case analysis of data revealed a number of Diigo affordances which ESL students found beneficial for their development of reading, role of context and mode, participants’ collaborative stance, and various aspects of influence Diigo had on ESL students’ development of reading. The findings and discussion of the study highlight the role of social bookmarking tools in raising ESL students’ motivation and engagement in reading. The study offers suggestions for further research and implications for practice.

ESL students’ perceptions of using a social bookmarking tool for the development of reading in a second language

Building on research on the development of reading and use of technology for language learning, this multiple-case study explored English as a second language (esl) students’ perceptions of using a social bookmarking Web 2.0 tool for the development of reading from an ecological perspective. Five students in a community college esl course in the northeastern part of the usa participated in the study. The data sources included interviews, observations, e-journals, and artifacts. Thorough within-case and cross-case analysis of data revealed a number of Diigo affordances which esl students found beneficial for their development of reading, the role of context and mode, participants’ collaborative stance, and various aspects of influence Diigo had on esl students’ development of reading. The findings and discussion of the study highlight the role of social bookmarking tools in raising ESL students’ motivation and engagement in reading. The study offers suggestions for further research and implications for practice.

Effective Tagging Practices for Online Learning Environments: An Exploratory Study of Tag Approach and Accuracy

This exploratory study examines student tagging activity within a five-week social bookmarking unit. Students in six sections of a course were tasked with locating, tagging, and then highlighting and discussing course-related materials using Diigo, a social bookmarking tool. Three different tagging approaches were tested: dictionary only, freestyle only, and dictionary + freestyle. Analysis focused on accuracy and rates of student tagging, popularity of different tag types Findings show that most students were able to tag with high rates of accuracy after a single brief lesson. The dictionary-only approach led to fewer tags overall as well as fewer single-use tags than freestyle tagging. It also resulted in students applying useful classes of tags, such as type of content, that did not emerge within the freestyle tag groups’ folksonomies. However, freestyle tagging was not without its merits, and provided opportunities for students to include tags that reflect relevant interests and more specific topics that were not addressed in the tag dictionary. The combined approach, if carefully taught and applied, appears to have the greatest potential for supporting student information literacy skills.

Social Networking Tools for Informal Scholarly Communication Prove Popular for Academics at Two Universities

Objective – To investigate the adoption, use, perceived impact of, and barriers to using social networking tools for scholarly communication at two universities.
 
 Design – Cross-institutional quantitative study using an online survey.
 
 Setting – Academics working in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences at two universities: one in Europe and one in the Middle East. 
 
 Methods – An online survey was devised based on a previous survey (Al-Aufi, 2007) and informed by relevant research. The survey was piloted by 10 academics at the 2 participating universities. Post pilot it was revised and then circulated to all academics from similar faculties at two universities. Three follow up emails were sent to both sets of academics. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Descriptive and inferential statistics were analyzed using ANOVA tests.
 
 Main Results – The survey achieved a 34% response rate (n=130). The majority of participants were from the university based in the Middle East and were male (70.8%). Most of the responses were from academics under 40 years of age. The use of notebooks was prevalent at both universities. “Notebooks” is used as a term to describe laptops, netbooks, or ultra-book computers. The majority reported use of social networking tools for informal scholarly communication (70.1%), valuing this type of use. 29.9% of respondents reported they do not use social networking tools for this purpose. Barriers were identified as lack of incentive, digital literacy, training, and concerns over Internet security. Among the non-users, barriers included low interest in their use and a perceived lack of relevancy of such tools for scholarly communication. The types of tools used the most were those with social connection functions, such as Facebook and Twitter. The tools used the least were social bookmarking tools. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test indicated that there was no significant difference at the 0.05 level between the use of social networking tools at both universities, with the exception of using tools to communicate with researchers locally and with publishers at one of the universities. 
 
 Both universities use tools for communication with peers and academics internationally. The responses were mainly positive towards the perceived usefulness of social networking tools for informal scholarly communication.
 
 Conclusion – The authors conclude that despite the small sample of the community of academics investigated, there is a general trend towards increasing use and popularity of social networking tools amongst academics in the humanities and social sciences disciplines. As technology advances, the use of such tools is likely to increase and advance among academics. The authors point to pathways for future research including expanding the methods to include interviews, focus groups, and case studies. Another angle for research of interest is interdisciplinary differences in the use of prevalent tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

Social technologies for online learning: theoretical and contextual issues

Three exemplars are presented of social technologies deployed in educational contexts: wikis; a photo-sharing environment; and a social bookmarking tool. Students were found to engage with the technologies selectively, sometimes rejecting them, in the light of their prior conceptions of education. Some students (a minority in all the studies) were unsympathetic to the educational philosophy underpinning the technology’s adoption. The paper demonstrates, through an examination of in-context use, the importance of sociocultural factors in relation to education, and the non-deterministic nature of educational technology. The academic study of technology has increasingly called into question the deterministic views which are so pervasive in popular discourse and among policy-makers. Instead, sociocultural factors play a crucial role in shaping and defining technology and educational technology is no exception, as the examples in the paper show. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the examples for the use of social technologies in education.

@toread and Cool: Subjective, Affective and Associative Factors in Tagging

This paper examines the use of non subject related tags in social bookmarking tools. Previous studies of tagging determined that many common tags are not directly subject related but are in fact affective tags dwelling on a user’s emotional response to a document or are time and task…Cet article examine l’utilisation de l’étiquetage par mots-clés qui ne sont pas directement rattachés aux sujets. Des études précédentes sur l’étiquetage ont déterminé que beaucoup d’étiquettes communes ne sont pas directement rattachées au sujet mais sont plutôt des étiquettes affectives liées à l’état émotionnel des utilisateurs…

Open Source and Free E-Learning Tools Useful in LIS Education

E-learning is commonly referred to the intentional use of networked information and communications technology in teaching and learning. The present paper discusses the synchronous and asynchronous mode of e learning with its features. It also defines and summarizes the impact of open source software on teaching and learning process. The numerous open source e learning tools are discussed with examples such as Open source LMS, Open source authoring tools, Open source audio editing software, Open source social bookmarking tools, Open source CMS etc. It also throws light on free e learning tools useful in e learning such as Slideshare, Youtube, Wikis, RSS, Wordpress etc. The paper concludes with e learning initiatives in India.

BMJ Case Reports

BMJ Case Reports is a journal that provides a collection of peer-reviewed case reports in all disciplines for health care professionals and researchers. This title is available only in electronic format from BMJ Group. Cases come from 70 countries, and the journal consists of more than 3,800 articles that cover both common and rare diseases. Content is updated frequently, often more than once each week. Tabs are available in the middle of the home page for quick navigation to case reports. Tabs are organized into the categories of recent cases, the previous month's most read articles, specialties, and top-rated cases. There is no ranking of the previous month's most read articles, but a list of nineteen was included on the date viewed. Specialty topics include both clinical and nonclinical classifications, such as endocrinology and ethics. It is unclear how top-rated cases are selected, and the tab includes titles without publication dates. Services for individual articles include email; alerts for when articles are cited, are corrected, or have e-letters published; similar articles in the journal; and addition of an article to a folder or portfolio. BMJ Case Reports has embraced popular networking functions. Users can utilize social bookmarking tools, including Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, CiteULike, and Mendeley. Users are also able to rate articles by either liking or disliking them and have the option of commenting on the reason for their choices. While several articles were rated, it did not appear that many had comments. BMJ Case Reports also has a blog, which further highlights case reports from Editor's Choice selections. Editor's Choice articles are free without registration, as are article summaries. Another “Spotlight” on BMJ Case Reports draws attention to a particular specialty and links directly to the cases in that collection. The journal allows users to browse articles that most interest users by providing links by specialty and by article type. The specialty topics are the same as those mentioned in the discussion regarding tabs. The types of cases are subdivided into Full Cases and Other. Article types are varied and include options such as “Learning from errors,” “Myth exploded,” “New disease,” and “Unexpected outcome,” among others. Content also includes videos and images. Cases featuring video reports are listed together; however, the current list of 65 results could not be sorted and the advanced search menu did not have a search feature for video reports. Instead, the display showed 10 results at a time, presumably in date order. The “Images in…” feature lists journal content that contains images. For the 836 results in this collection, users can modify the list's citation format (standard or condensed), change the number of results per page, and sort the order according to relevance, most recent, or earliest first. The advanced search menu does include images as a way to limit searches. Individual and institutional subscriptions are available, and subscribers are called “fellows.” Fellowships allow users to use all published materials, whether for teaching or personal use, without the need to ask for additional permissions. Fellows may also submit as many cases as they would like with their subscriptions. Users with access to institutional fellowships are not required to pay individual fees. Fellows may also submit unlimited cases for publication. Compared to similar resources, BMJ Case Reports is a somewhat unique product. For example, although the National Library of Medicine catalog of journals referenced in the National Center for Biotechnology Information databases lists numerous titles devoted to both open access and privately published case reports, these titles are dedicated only to specific disciplines. Two other titles, The American Journal of Case Reports (formerly, Case Reports and Clinical Practice Review) and Journal of Medicine Cases, are open access titles that have a similar scope as BMJ Case Reports; however, they do not share the features discussed that are unique to BMJ Case Reports, nor do their sites share the ease of navigation as seen in the BMJ product. Several items on the BMJ Case Reports site may be redundant. However, the resources available through BMJ Case Reports are easy to find and are presented logically.

Promoting health sciences journal content with Web 2.0: A snapshot in time

This study examined if health sciences journals incorporate Web 2.0 technologies that can be used to disseminate journal content using tools such as RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter, and other social bookmarking tools. The study also examined if open access journals used Web 2.0 technologies more than traditional journals. Most journals offer RSS feeds and over half allowed readers to share journal content through social bookmarking tools. Approximately one quarter of journals had Facebook or Twitter accounts promoting journal content. Traditional journals were more likely to use Web 2.0 technology than open access journals.

Providing collaborative learning support with social media in an integrated environment

During the last few years, social media technologies have started to be used for collaborative learning. While most of the case studies reported so far involve a single social media tool or several individual, separate tools, in this paper we advocate the use of an integrated social learning environment, which aggregates several Web 2.0 tools (wiki, blog, microblogging tool, social bookmarking tool, media sharing tools). The platform, called eMUSE, occupies a well defined niche in the landscape of Web 2.0-enhanced learning spaces, providing value-added services for both students and teachers: learner tracking functionality, monitoring and visualization features, grading and evaluation support. A comprehensive rationale underlying eMUSE, a description of the platform architecture and functionalities, as well as an experimental validation in a project-based learning context are provided in the paper.

The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student: Making the Connections (review)

Reviewed by: The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student: Making the Connections Lizah Ismail The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student: Making the Connections, Susan Gibbons. Chicago: American Library Association, 2007. 120p. $44 (ISBN 978-0-8389-0946-1). How viable are academic libraries in this new millennium? Will the Net Generation (sometimes referred to as Millennials or Generation Y) still find the academic library and the services it provides relevant in light of the lifestyle-changing technologies that have consumed this generation? Susan Gibbons’ book addresses these concerns and provides a practical guide for academic librarians that she maintains will help them ride this technology wave and be as vibrant and pertinent to Net Gen students as they need to be. Gibbons is no stranger to tackling the needs of undergraduate students. Her book, Studying Students: the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (Chicago: ACRL, 2007), co-edited by anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster, applied ethnographic techniques to understanding the University’s undergraduate students and their use of information. Her current position as Dean of Public Services and Collection Development at the University of Rochester library as well as her previous position as Director of Digital Initiatives for the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, puts her in a unique position to explore the changing technological landscape facing academic libraries today and how this impacts library public services, especially with regard to the Net Generation. Using organizational business theories, Gibbons identifies the new technologies invading the academic library world as “disruptive technologies,” which have forever transformed or altered a product or service, and align with what consumers are looking for – convenience and low cost. Ignoring disruptive technologies (such as travel agents transitioning to online travel sites, and film-based photography to digital) will cause businesses to fail. Similarly, academic libraries that refuse to acknowledge and learn from the convenient and free disruptive technologies that the Net Generation consumes (online games, social networking, sharing sites, mobile communication devices) will inevitably be rendered irrelevant. The Net Generation is not only our current crop of undergraduates, but our future graduate students and faculty. Gibbons argues that understanding and embracing them now, instead of merely acknowledging that they are different or that they exist, will help us in the long run. Citing various studies, Gibbons paints Net Generation students to be team-oriented, sociable, skilled multi-taskers, who crave or desire instant gratification, and personalized, customized user experiences. Gibbons has devoted a whole chapter to these attributes, reinforced by, or present in, the online games Net Gens play. These students are the first generation of digital natives, as opposed to previous generations of digital immigrants, who had, at some point, used or seen analog technology at work. Adapting technologies such as Web 2.0 applications (RSS feeds, blogs, Wikis), social bookmarking tools (delicious, tags) and communication devices (IM, texting, Facebook) – Gibbons devotes a chapter to each section – to libraries’ online services and resources will improve the library’s relevance with Net Gen students. Though the Web 2.0 technologies mentioned above now appear dated (and Gibbons is the first to acknowledge this, stating that such is the current technological landscape where everything is in constant flux), the message that academic [End Page 225] libraries need to be continually adapting and changing is clear. Some may argue that this is mere common sense and that any entity or organization that does not keep up with the times in some shape or form will end in failure. Gibbons does recognize this (she models her premise on organizational business theories, after all) but she brings home the point that libraries and librarians may have a harder time adapting due to their reluctance to relinquish control of library practices learned and developed over many years that have defined librarianship. For example, Gibbons correctly states that the inflexible Subject Terms or controlled vocabulary used in the library’s OPAC record is perplexing for most users, particularly Net Gen students who are accustomed to tags and links that direct them to related items or most popular items (a feature pioneered by Amazon.com). Now, four years after the publication of her book, such features are...

Oh! Web 2.0, Virtual Reference Service 2.0, Tools & Techniques (II)

The paper describes the theory and definition of the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies (tools) such as synchronous messaging, collaborative reference service and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking tools, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes and how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access.

My 2012 To-Do List for Teaching, Research, and Scholarship

LIKE MOST OF YOU, I like to start the new year with a list of resolutions. This year, I made a list of new tools that can help me be a better teacher and a better organized researcher and scholar. As always, I started by dusting off my social bookmarks to examine those items I bookmarked recently. I subscribe to lots of services (e.g., blogs, slideshare, tables of content from technology magazines and journals) so I constantly bookmark interesting new tools as well as content for my research, my courses, and this column. Here is what I found. Web-Based Apps PREZI This presentation software allows you to co-create presentations in a nonlinear format (unlike, for example, PowerPoint). This 21st century hypermedia platform allows you to create slides with associative links rather than linear progression. Zoom in, pan left or right, pull out to see the bigger picture, and zoom in again to focus on details. Prezi offers different licensing agreements (Public, free; Enjoy, $59/year; Pro, $159/year) and student/teacher licenses. Check it out at http://prezi.com/index/. CONNOTEA This is a free online reference manager for researchers, clinicians, and scientists. I have used Delicious, a social bookmarking tool, for years, but now need to share more than just websites with my research team and doctoral students. This web-based product, offered by Nature Publishing Group, publisher of the prestigious journal Nature, does not require downloading. It is easy to use and allows you to save bookmarks, references from PubMed, publisher PDFs, and even Amazon book references. It will recognize the reference and populate bibliographic information where possible. You can tag items as you please and easily share them with colleagues, the public, or a select group (e.g., your PhD students or research team). Check it out at www.connotea.org. VOICETHREAD Since I teach online and assign a lot of team projects, I am always looking for tools that foster collaboration. VoiceThread allows you to share multimedia and comment in five different modalities: telephone (helpful for rural areas without good bandwidth), voice on a microphone, text, audio file, or video via webcam. I have seen it used in several blogs in higher education and want to explore its use not only in our online program, but with our social network. Imagine the debates we could have on hot issues in informatics. The fee associated with VoiceThread is reasonable. Click on Products, Higher Education, and you will not only see the fee structure and licenses, but a compilation of research that documents the effectiveness of the tool. Check it out at http://voicethread.com/. Data Visualization Tools With the current data deluge, it will become more and more important to use different tools to present data in our courses, in presentations, and for decisionmaking in the health care and academic environments. I recommend starting with videos by Hans Rosling that depict new ways to present data in interesting ways: * Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo * Hans Rosling: No More Boring Data: TEDTalks: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w * Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w In 2010, my colleagues Deborah Vincent, Marie Hastings- Tolsma, and Judith Effken published a great article, with good examples, on visualization tools for presenting data from large datasets. See Data Visualization and Large Nursing Datasets at the Online Journal of Nursing Informatics, 14(2); http://ojni. …

Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact

BackgroundCitations in peer-reviewed articles and the impact factor are generally accepted measures of scientific impact. Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, blogs or social bookmarking tools provide the possibility to construct innovative article-level or journal-level metrics to gauge impact and influence. However, the relationship of the these new metrics to traditional metrics such as citations is not known.Objective(1) To explore the feasibility of measuring social impact of and public attention to scholarly articles by analyzing buzz in social media, (2) to explore the dynamics, content, and timing of tweets relative to the publication of a scholarly article, and (3) to explore whether these metrics are sensitive and specific enough to predict highly cited articles.MethodsBetween July 2008 and November 2011, all tweets containing links to articles in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) were mined. For a subset of 1573 tweets about 55 articles published between issues 3/2009 and 2/2010, different metrics of social media impact were calculated and compared against subsequent citation data from Scopus and Google Scholar 17 to 29 months later. A heuristic to predict the top-cited articles in each issue through tweet metrics was validated.ResultsA total of 4208 tweets cited 286 distinct JMIR articles. The distribution of tweets over the first 30 days after article publication followed a power law (Zipf, Bradford, or Pareto distribution), with most tweets sent on the day when an article was published (1458/3318, 43.94% of all tweets in a 60-day period) or on the following day (528/3318, 15.9%), followed by a rapid decay. The Pearson correlations between tweetations and citations were moderate and statistically significant, with correlation coefficients ranging from .42 to .72 for the log-transformed Google Scholar citations, but were less clear for Scopus citations and rank correlations. A linear multivariate model with time and tweets as significant predictors (P < .001) could explain 27% of the variation of citations. Highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles (9/12 or 75% of highly tweeted article were highly cited, while only 3/43 or 7% of less-tweeted articles were highly cited; rate ratio 0.75/0.07 = 10.75, 95% confidence interval, 3.4–33.6). Top-cited articles can be predicted from top-tweeted articles with 93% specificity and 75% sensitivity. ConclusionsTweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.

The Impact of New Technologies on Current Awareness Tools in Academic Libraries

Cuiying Mu's column is a help to both accidental technologists and non-techie librarians in two ways: it clarifies the differences between and strengths of various RSS readers and social bookmarking tools, and it provides guidance on teaching these tools to our users. This column underscores a similarity of users' technology competencies and needs across different types of libraries and around the world: users don't know what technologies are available to make their work easier. While Mu writes about a program at an academic library, the tools also are applicable to workshops and guides that teach users of public and special libraries how to manage their personal research and even their collection of news and entertainment items from the Internet. Integration of these technologies into K-12 information literacy programs would tie in with teaching how to select credible sources and provide students with a head start on managing their research for term papers. RSS and social bookmarking are not familiar to most of our users; librarians have a role in educating not just about information resources but about tools to manage information.--Editor Our users live in a world of too much information, and they are struggling to keep themselves up-to-date with new publications in their research fields. Academic librarians are aware that information overload can lead to frustration and feelings of despair. To prevent our researchers being drowned in the information floods, academic librarians should teach them to manage information effectively by using the technologies available, such as RSS feeds and social bookmarking tools. New technologies have created opportunities for learners to have richer learning experiences. Academic librarians, as facilitators of the research and information-retrieval process, need to actively apply the new information technologies to information literacy programs and train their users to use the technologies available to remain current with the publications in the student or reseacher's subject field. RSS and social bookmarking are two tools that have a place in libraries' information literacy programs. The purpose of this column is to help you establish or update user education on RRS and social bookmarking. Included is an outline of a current awareness course and users' responses to the course, some technical issues and solutions when working with library databases using RSS feeds alerting service, comparisons of RSS readers and social bookmarking tools, and one librarian's recommended RSS readers and social bookmarking tools for researchers. THREE REASONS TO PROMOTE RSS AND SOCIAL BOOKMARKING Save the Time of the User While these tools have been around for a few years, students and faculty are not always aware of them. Even those who use RSS feeds for reading blogs and news may not know of the usefulness of this tool for their academic lives. Using RSS feed technology to manage information saves users time and energy and increases their access to the knowledge they need by creating a recurring alert of new information from blogs, websites, and article databases. Social bookmarking technology allows users to take advantage of the insights of other users to find information related to the topics they are researching, even in areas that are not obviously connected to the primary topic. (1) Social bookmarking promotes discovery through serendipity as well as through careful use of searching and tags. Enhance Literacy One of the goals of the academic library is to develop users' information literacy skills. Literacy Standard Five of ACRL's Information Literacy Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology states that an information literate student should recognize the need to keep current in his or her subject field and have the ability to use a variety of methods and emerging technologies for keeping current in the field. …

As folksonomias entre os conceitos e os pontos de acesso: as funções de descritores, citações e marcadores nos sistemas de recuperação da informação

O artigo discute as potencialidades das folksonomias, a partir da proposição e análise de esquemas de representação de conceitos, que constituem os diferentes recursos de indexação de assuntos. Aborda o desenvolvimento das fontes de informação especializadas e revisa os fundamentos técnicos das linguagens natural e documentária. Trata dos sistemas de recuperação, que exploram as redes de colaboração inerentes à produção e ao uso da informação, ilustrando o funcionamento desse tipo de recurso, ao tratar dos índices de citação e dos favoritos socializados. Por fim, menciona a distinção necessária entre o papel das folksonomias, como instrumentos de representação conceitual e como pontos de acesso.