Evaluation of Delicious so far...(OLJ Activity Module 2)

My use of Delicious as a social bookmarking tool

As a born organiser, Delicious is heaven sent. Not only does it help me make my references easy to access but I can also share these resources with others and theirs with me. It’s a great collaborative tool. I have heard of people who have created websites where they organised all their favourite sites on one page but I’m not a techno head so Delicious and other social bookmarking tools (Ma.gnolia (open by invitation only), BlinkList (looks similar to Delicious), Furl (now bought by Diigo – bookmarks everything!), Conotea (looks easy to use but mainly for scientists, researchers and clinicians), CiteULike (for scholarly reference) are the best things since card catalogues.

Effectiveness of features and functions

The features and functions aren’t that intuitive. It took me a while to figure out that the ‘tag symbol’ is when you save a web site whilst you’re on the site. I am now trying to learn how I can bundle bookmarks in different subjects. Click on ‘tag bundles’ – name the bundle and list the tags you want in it. It will then save all the bookmarked websites that have those tags you specified.

I’m not sure if I like using the tagging system to create my folders to store my bookmarks in. I don’t mind the idea of tagging in a non-hierarchical way and using words used by everyday people to describe objects also known as folksonomy (Farkas, 2007, pp. 134-135), but my bookmark tags are my own interpretations and others may not view them the same way. However, Delicious has cleverly solved this problem by allowing the user to use recommended tags, which others have already assigned to their websites/resources.

Your Network is a great feature for checking other accounts but its only drawback is you must know the user name.

Different ways an Information Organisation may be able to utilise Delicious to support information service, learning and collaboration of users and employees

For users:

• Library catalogue could be tagged so patrons know what the resource is about
• Assist users in their search of web sites in their subject of interest
• Incorporate RSS feeds for patrons about useful links that the librarians have bookmarked (Farkas, 2007, pp. 139-145)

For employees:

• Keep up to date in their chosen field
• For internal projects
• Manage website links (Wood, 2007, p.135)

References

Farkas, M.G. (2007). Social software in libraries: Building collaboration, communication, and community online. Medford, N.J.: Information Today, Inc.

Wood, M.S. (Eds.). (2007). Medical librarian 2.0: Use of Web 2.0 technologies in reference services. New York: Hawthorn Information Press.