PennTagging

Another library themed one - what's going on with me this week! Penn State have developed their own social bookmarking service - PennTags - it allows Penn students and staff to bookmark resources and tag into their catalogue. Look, look, an image link, I'm so proud ->

User perspective
User collects online resources in Penn-tags
Assign tags
Write big annotations (del.ic.ious allows 3 lines, PennTags offered 4000 characters but found it wasn't enough to meet the needs of its research and academic community so it is now 32000)
Find resource again using tags
Share links annotations + tags with world
Put content into research guides and web pages

It came about because a Film Studies tutor wanted students to produce web-based annotated bibliographies that could link to Penn resources as well as public one. He thought he needed a wiki, but no, not one of those old fashioned things...

Expected uses:
Film studies annotated bibliographies (afterall, that was what they did it for)
Students submitted these by sending tutor the link
Librarians can create research guide for courses
Substitute for delicious as it can’t search Penn catalogue, articles, Penn resources

Unexpected uses:
Well, anything else really as they haven't told anyone else about it but word of mouth is spreading it including:
A page by a research student (they think?) cataloguing (at last count) 644 references on the topic of 20th Century classical music in the film industry
Business area studies resource list - this already existed as an indexed spreadsheet of over 1000 resources - PennTags got it on the web to make it more accessible
PennvetTags – current students tag resources and make them available for new cohorts –it is possible, if both parties agree, to inherit posts of another person.
"for_julia" - research librarians are able to tag resources for individual to follow up after 1-2-1 support sessions

The stats
8972 posts (7740 with tags)
582 unique owners, 27 posts per day
7304 unique tags used 26714 times
Ave 4 tags per post

What is being posted -urls 5436 , catalogue 2215, 700 journals, 342 video catalogue, 200 published research projects

What next?
Marketing the PennTags service to wider PennState community, measuring influence on research and (albeit a bit of an afterthought) pedagogy, integrate into video catalogue, export to and import from del.ic.ious, endnote, rtf, ref-works, bibtext etc. Publish APIs. Investigating volume based roles and heirarchy.

http://devtags.library.upenn.edu/

Questions
why do it and why not del.ic.ious? - answered above really
why not a mash up from del.ic.ious? - not really there at the time
is it open source? - no
have you had resistance from library staff? - no, they love it
does it live on? - posts live on, they "die" if they go for 2 years with no one clicking on them otherwise they continue
what if someone posts porn? - not anonymous, policies are strict and clear
how many developers do you have working on this (sometimes known as the 50 developers in the closet question)? - it took 1 developer 1 weekend to develop the core code and it has been refined overtime but development time is light, shared out now but still not 1 FTE.
why birds? - developer's idea, you find a resource, you catch it, look at it, tag it so that you can look at it again in the future, then let it fly off into the world.