Using Socialbookmarking Sites for Outreach and Publicity

Polina Ilieva and Rachel Taketa, UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management

UCSF has an extensive collection of tobacco industry documents as well as audio and video recordings that can be used by researchers in fields such as public health, tobacco control, economics, and history. The main objective of this project is to provide more visibility to our digital library by leveraging the popularity, mobility and accessibility of selected socialbookmarking sites to promote and encourage the use and sharing of our digital resources.

We created a list of widely known socialbookmarking sites and analyzed them by audience, usage, and goals. From that list we selected 15 sites that target research/educational communities and the general public, have a long-standing (in digital age) reputation, stable interface, and moderate to high traffic. Based upon keyword searches within the bookmarking sites combined with the archival thesaurus, we decided upon 17 standardized tags to be used for our own submissions. For each site, we registered as users and bookmarked links to two pages: the LTDL home page and Multimedia Collectionpage. In the case where a particular site already had a link to one or both of the LTDL pages, our submissions included a check for correct URL and title, additional tags, and more descriptive information to let users know that these materials cover a wide range of topics, not just tobacco-control.

Finally, we added a bookmarking widget to these two LTDL pages, as well as every document/resource in the digital library, to facilitate bookmarking and sharing of the collections and to collect statistics about activity. At the end of the project we analyzed usage statistics for these pages.

LTDL SAA Research Forum 2008 poster