Libraries which promote social bookmarking on their website may do so successfully if they take certain factors into account. Firstly, librarians must find a way to promote this feature, whether by cloud tagging on the home page or some other prominent location, and if necessary by targeted contact with those most likely to use the tool.
Secondly, librarians must be sure that those who use tagging features are reasonably familiar with its proper use. This is generally true of current undergraduate students, who may be more familiar with Web 2.0 than most, but some form of training session, tutorial or other educational resource should also be made prominently available.
Another important consideration is which tagging platform to use. In the case of PennTags, for example, the University of Pennsylvania has a proprietary tagging network; this system, while well-organized, does not connect students with tags at other locations, as Del.icio.us tagging might. While Del.icio.us is free, by contrast, it may connect to more general tags worldwide, which may not be of as much use to those searching for specific topics.
Social tagging, in this respect, seems to work best in smaller, more specialized groups, such as a means to organize and share information for a group project in a specific class (Carpan, 2010). In such a situation, an in-house tagging mechanism such as Penn's would be more than sufficient to the task. The private tagging option on Del.icio.us might also work in such a situation, either on the site itself or using a library site with Del.icio.us widgets. Libraries working with students might also want to consider tagging applications geared more towards academics, such as Connotea or CiteULike, or one with a "sticky note" function such as Diigo (Redden, 2010).
In the final analysis, libraries can make social tagging work for both them and their patrons, provided they take into account promotion, platform, and training level. The challenge lies in determining which type of tagging, or which application, to use, how to market it to a target audience - having decided what that audience is and how they will use it - and making sure that audience has a baseline level of competence in the medium.
References
Carpan, C. (2010). Introducing information literacy 2.0. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 17(1), 106-113. doi:10.1080/10691310903584627
Redden, C. S. (2010). Social bookmarking in academic libraries: Trends and applications. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 36(3), 219-227. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lih&AN=50403277&site=ehost-live
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