Social Bookmarking: A Tool for Shared Resource Building

Abstract

For many years, a distinct trend was evident in how music librarians approached Web resources. Web pages of links were created in an attempt to organize the Internet, grouping links by category and usually certifying that the content on those pages was scholarly in nature in an attempt to aid the students and faculty we serve. As the Web grows, maintaining such pages has become less viable. Many individuals have abandoned the idea of creating pages of links and depend instead on a few quality listings that are maintained by other institutions and librarians. Recently, one major Web resource guide was taken offline, leaving many of us to grapple with how we could provide the same type of resource from this point forward.In an MLA-L listserv discussion (the listserv of the Music Library Association-see resource list), this conundrum was discussed at length. In my perception, most participants agreed that providing listings of Web pages quickly becomes an unwieldy task because pages go in and out of currency, links become broken, and new content can be posted at any point. Many librarians had already abandoned the idea of creating their own resource listings because other resources existed that were better established. But when and if those resources were taken down or not updated, the librarians were left without the tools they had relied on. Some questioned whether librarians even need to attempt to organize websites because of their temporary nature and the increasing search functionality of the major search engines.If librarians do have a place in helping to organize, navigate, and instruct on Web resources, we need to find ways to do so that move beyond each individual creating a Web page of links with potentially Jenny Colvin is Music Librarian, Furman University, Greenville, SC.

Cocurated Digital Culture: Machinima

“…Referring to technological determinism, Bardzell [15] draws on Benjamin [16], McLuhan [17] and Ellul's [18] views that technology changes the experience and meaning of art and thereby the nature of culture. There is little discernible structure, however, to formation and viewing of collections of contemporary user-generated content by communities beyond individual member metadata tagging and search using an array of social bookmarking tools [19][20][21]. Moreover, as Kluszczynski [22] intimates, the type of creative practices employed challenge traditional views of an author, replacing them with a notion of "dispersed-authorship," where creativity is an interactive process negotiated between artist and audience [23].…”