What’s Next for Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking—sharing lists of Web finds online to be accessed from anywhere, by anyone—has been a great tool for librarians to gather, organize, and disseminate the best of the Net. Though an improvement over storing such files on a computer, bookmarks stored online are still a digitized version of the classic print index or directory. Like so many reference tools, they are great for librarian use, but don’t always work so well for our patrons or students. There is, however, a new breed of tools emerging that can provide a better end-user experience.

The basic concept of moving beyond a simple list of Web sites to include annotations and other enhancements to sharing has been around for a few years. Furl has always had great support for comments/notes collected from a bookmarked site. With fields for author, publication date, and source, Furl can also generate citations for your bookmarks in several styles. Then there’s Google Notebook, which is more about Web clipping—capturing text from a site—and embedding the clips in a notebook-style content list. By listing content, as opposed to sources, it feels more like traditional researching and note taking. Even so, Google Notebook and Furl are user-centered tools, which don’t do much for librarians in our role as information guides.

Like special librarians who gather and organize resources for business customers, we sometimes need to gather information to share with school staff or younger children. In these cases, we need to be able to arrange the results of our research into a published format. This adds a new twist that previous social bookmarking tools had not always considered. Imagine the power of being able not only to gather, but also to share research reports with your school. The principal has a question about curriculum mapping? A high school teacher needs a quick review of information on a current event? What if you could find quality sites, clip the information, and then publish the findings? A new, emerging tool lets you do that and much more.

The best example of this is Webnotes, currently in private beta. This tool feels like it was custom designed for use by librarians with support for Web clipping text, organizing clips into folders, and publishing HTML or PDF reports of clips and notes. The tool works best through a lightweight toolbar that installs on either Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers. For schools that cannot download, an available bookmarklet provides full functionality with no installation required. The full toolbar adds additional tools such as a sidebar explorer that lets you quickly review saved annotations or place new research into folders. Reports are generated from the contents of one or more folders, so it would be best to create a new folder for each new question or project for easy publication. WebNotes is designed for research, and as such focuses on organizing text from sites. It does not offer clipping of images at this time.

For image clipping along with text, there are other options such as the popular and powerful Evernote or the newer Thumbtack from Microsoft. Both of these sites are built around a page layout onto which clips of text and/or images are placed; a feature that is certainly slick, but also more confusing than the simple WebNotes interface. Evernote and Thumbtack publish collections of clips to a site, but only Evernote has a printable format like WebNotes.

With the near constant barrage of information, the role of librarians has shifted from hunting for scarce resources to selecting the best among the bunch. Sites like WebNotes that take social bookmarking to the next level by including publishing features are powerful tools for identifying and sharing the best that we can find.

Would you like to try Webnotes? Click here for the beta invitation for SLJ readers.