Investigative Exercise 6 Social Bookmarking

Community book reviews are a great and useful tool for libraries to use. They allow community members to be able to write their own opinions of an item, be it a book, a dvd or something else. This provides other users of the library to see what other people thought of the book, without having to go to another site to read reviews there. It is also useful for library staff as they can then see trends in what people seem to like or not like, what is getting the popular reviews and what is being ignored. This information could come in handy when it comes time to weed the collection or for other collection development purposes.

The only drawback with allowing community reviews is that by allowing anyone access to write what they want, ANYONE can then write what they want, meaning that problems could arise with unsafe material being written on book entries for anyone to see, so libraries need to be mindful of what is being posted onto the reviews.

My local service, Sutherland Shire Libraries already makes use of these social bookmarking tools. When you search a book or other item in the catalogue there are options to view community reviews and tags as well as options to create your own review and tags for the item you are looking at.