Social Bookmarking in Digital Libraries: Intellectual Property Rights Implications

Introduction

Web 2.0 is truly a social web. This is largely because it facilitates extensive user participation in the identification, creation, sharing and use of information. Its architecture encourages and facilitates user contribution, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, remixing and re-use of content, customer-centricity, creation of user communities as well as the empowerment and ownership of content and relationships (Barsky & Purdon, 2006). Web 2.0 is also about democracy; users generating content rather than merely consuming it; open programming enabling everyone to participate; as well as interfaces which make information seeking and use not only easy but also exciting. Web 2.0 has given immense power to the web users. Indeed, it is described as the users’ web where they set rules and control content.

Musser and O’Reilly (2007) identify the primary drivers of Web 2.0 as: 1) globalisation and the need to reach customers worldwide; 2) increased 24/7 connectivity making the Internet an essential part of the basic necessities of life for many people, even in developing countries; 3) growth of the accessibility of the Internet enabling customers to remain connected everywhere they go and to expect services on the move; 4) deepening of digital interactions and transactions in which customers are now not just connected but engaged – contributing content and transacting business; and 5) transformation of the web to become a business facilitator enabling enterprises to reach more clients and generate more revenue. Arakji et al. (2009) assert that Web 2.0 users participate and contribute to various types of online communities ranging from posting opinions for discussion groups, providing technical advice, posting ratings for collaborative recommendations, sharing digital files on peer-to-peer networks, and developing code for open source software projects.

According to Bates (2007) the basic assumptions about finding information have changed. She argues that while librarians are accustomed to consulting traditional library resources such as the catalogue, a database or even a book, the younger generations including Generation Xers and Mellennials assume that any information they need is available somewhere on the web. She further asserts that these same information consumers consider the Internet to be “collaborative and interactive rather than static”. Consequently, she submits that this attitude should be recognised by information professionals who must now shift their information seeking sphere from the traditional to the context of this Web 2.0 world.

One of the services facilitated by Web 2.0 platforms is social bookmarking. Although it is a relatively recent phenomenon (emerging only in the mid 1990s), it has demonstrated a great potential in enhancing web information management. Its popularity continues to grow by the day because it has provided a new platform for information organisation, discovery and sharing. For a long time search engines, for instance, have relied on three categories of content to describe data. These are page content, link structure and query or click-through log data (Heymann, Koutrika & Garcia-Molina, 2008). Now, however, there is a fourth type of data in the form of user-generated content which has emerged strongly as a source of web page description data. Social bookmarking is one of the services which generate this fourth type of data. Social bookmarking technology allows users to store, organise, and share their documents on various websites thereby giving the users the opportunity to express their own perspectives on information and resources through informal organisational structures (Mu, 2008). Social bookmarking enables users to save links to web documents for later use without having to save the actual documents or the links in the browser. Thus, one’s bookmarks are online and can be accessed from any location or device with an Internet connection (Arakji et al., 2009). Wetzker et al. (2008) emphasises that the social aspect of these services is derived from the fact that resources (usually web pages) are tagged by the community as a whole and not only by the creator of content alone.