Should law librarians teach tagging?

Social Research Management (SRM) web services such as LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com), del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org/) and Connotea (http://www.connotea.com) allow people to save, organize, annotate, and publicly share URLs to web resources of interest to them. LibraryThing is a popular service where users catalog, rate, review, and share information about books that they own. Some traditional libraries are using LibraryThing to announce new acquisitions. Del.icio.us can be used to create access points to any web resource. CiteULike and Connotea are similar in function to del.icio.us, but they focus on scholarly works, and they accommodate more extensive metadata about the works described. Each of these services allows a user to tag an item with self-selected keywords. Any subsequent user can discover the item through searching the service’s aggregate pool of tags. In addition, through their common tags, users of these tools can discover each other for discussion of their mutual interests.

A forthcoming article in Legal Reference Services Quarterly (posted on NELLCO and blogged about on the “Law Librarian Blog“), by Kumar Percy Jayasuriya, (Georgetown Law Library) and Frances M. Brillantine (Catholic University of America, Judge Kathryn J. DuFour Law Library), discusses Library 2.0 services, SRM services among them, and how they might be used in academic law libraries. The article is titled, “Student Services in the 21st Century: Evolution and Innovation in Discovering Student Needs, Teaching Information Literacy, and Designing Library 2.0-Based Services.” A statement from the article caught my eye: “Law librarians should teach students how to consistently and meaningfully tag their research so that everyone can easily benefit from each others’ knowledge” (page 32).

The role of the law librarian as information literacy instructor has evolved with the emergence of electronic resources. Today, many law librarians focus their efforts on teaching patrons how to do their own e-research. Now, thanks to Web 2.0, information literacy instruction may grow to encompass teaching our patrons how to be better amateur subject catalogers. We could hardly have imagined a role like this for ourselves when I started working in law libraries. Yet if SRM services gain traction in the legal field, we may well see a growth in the role of technical services law librarians as information literacy instructors. It’s an intriguing possibility.

LawLibraryThing?

One of the most mind-blowing things about Library 2.0 is the push to bring all the world’s literature together in — or at least accessible from — a single place. Tim Spalding is one of the pioneers of this mission. He is the creator of “LibraryThing” (http://www.librarything.org), a web site that invites everyone in the world to catalog his or her own books on the site to be shared with the rest of the world. Based on a user-entered identifier, such as ISBN, LibraryThing pulls metadata from Amazon and library catalogs from the Library of Congress, universities, and other institutions across the globe. The service thus strives to maintain “library-quality” while leveraging social tagging. Many bibliophiles have embraced the idea wholeheartedly, cataloging their personal book collections with relish. The Web 2.0 social aspects of the system allow users with similar reading tastes to find each other for online conversation. Book reviews can be posted, too. LT is not only for individual users, however. Some libraries use LibraryThing widgets to announce new books on their web sites. Publishers are even offering advance copies of new books to LibraryThing users to review.

Consistent with the theme of this blog, we now ask, what does LibraryThing, mean for law libraries? At present, not much. Its flavor is decidedly more popular than legal, and most libraries known to use it are public. Not surprisingly, a search for tags of a legal nature, e.g., “legal,” turn up lots of hits for Grisham and Turow novels. Selecting a tag like “jurisprudence” or “constitutional law” improves things. However, the results are sparse and casebooks and study guides are dominant. At present, the service is clearly more popular with law students than practitioners, legal academics, or law librarians. The potential for growth as a tool for the legal community is there, however. If the service becomes more popular with the law community, it might be useful as an acquisition and marketing tool for law librarians and as a legal research tool for students, legal academics and practitioners. As of this writing, twenty LibraryThing users have identified themselves as being law librarians, but use by members of this group appears to be exclusively personal. It would be interesting to see whether a “LawLibraryThing” would take off a few law libraries began to use LibraryThing widgets to announce new books. Any takers out there?