23 Things #13

#13 of the 23 things was: explore the world of tagging and social bookmarking by using del.icio.us. First, I visited the PLCMCL2 Del.icio.us account and clicked on some bookmarks to view the tags and descriptions that had been added to each resource. I then created my own Del.icio.us account. One thing that I like about the site: it is a great discovery tool. After adding a link, I can see who else added that link and look at their other bookmarks---often discovering related or other useful sites I had never seen before…I could spend hours on this site!

I work in the Adult Service department of a public library. It would probably be a good idea for the whole department to create a joint Del.icio.us account to keep better track of useful online reference resources. The bookmarks lists on the Internet Browsers at our reference desk computers are so full of bookmarks it is impossible to find anything! The drawback to separating bookmarks into folders, of course, is that many links could potentially belong to several different folders. With Del.icio.us, a link can easily belong to more than one category, because you can add multiple tags to describe a resource. And then you can easily see what links you have given a particular tag by clicking on that tag---I love being able to see an alphabetical list of the list of tags I have used (on the right hand side of the screen) while viewing my bookmarks. Users can even create tag bundles to group related tags together.

Although most internet browsers allow you to add tags to your bookmarked pages, I still think it is much easier to sift through and find a bookmark on del.icio.us, unless, of course, you only plan on bookmarking a select few sites. Del.icio.us allows you to bookmark hundreds of webpages and locate any site on any topic quickly and easily. Once I have some extra time, I would like to expand my del.icio.us account to include all the online reference resources I have learned about in the reference class I am currently taking (and the Virtual Reference class I took last summer).

I think that Del.icio.us is a great way for librarians to keep track of reference resources…I imagine libraries can create different accounts based on different subjects (that would be useful to students) and then promote the existence of these accounts in the library and on the library’s website. Another advantage to this, of course, is being able to access your bookmarks from any computer at any time. This is really a fantastic way to stay organized and discover/or share new online resources. View my delicious bookmarks here: http://delicious.com/cassidyc26