LibMarks is a social bookmarking and tagging application designed for libraries. The system promotes user access to library resources by enabling them to tag and bookmark items from the library catalog, online databases, and the internet. Users can save all their bookmarks online, share lists and links with others, research topics of interest, and discover new and interesting resources available at the library and beyond.

How Does it Work?

LibMarks brings the power of collaborative search and social bookmarking to your library, enabling your users to benefit from the "collective wisdom" of the entire community.  LibMarks is a fully-featured bookmarks manager similar to a site like del.icio.us®, but customized for your institution. Users can group bookmarks for a specific project or a task (lists), and publicly share their lists with others or keep them private for personal use. Bookmarks can be tagged with keywords, described with notes, and rated using the star-rating system (1 to 5 stars). LibMarks includes features like tag clouds, the most popular and most recent links added, and the most active users.

Why Does My Library Need LibMarks?

Web 2.0, social networks, and folksonomy (tagging) have changed the way people find and share information online. The power of "collective wisdom", and the social aspects of web 2.0 make finding the right information easier (and more fun).

Libraries, as information centers, must adapt to these changes. For example, providing flat search results from the library catalog does not help as much as tags, suggestions, and filtering of catalog items by the user community - which is what LibMarks enables. Just providing the list of electronic databases, without additional context or relevance, is not as useful as tracking and tagging database articles and links for a research project, which makes these results available to future researchers.

LibMarks gives your users a better way to search and browse the library resources. The catalog searches can be greatly improved with tags and notes, which assign relevance and give user perspective to the catalog items. Users can now see which items from the catalog are popular in the community, and by browsing the tags they can see the items others think are relevant for a given topic. The same holds true for online databases and any internet websites of interest to your audience.

Social bookmarking and tagging are a natural fit for Libraries. Enabling users to save and tag items from the library catalog, online databases, and the internet benefits the entire community. LibMarks promotes access to the library resources and services, while encouraging active participation in the sharing and discovery of information at the Library and beyond.