Thursday, January 7, 2010

Method 7 - Tagging, folksonomies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Bookmarking in Delicious is a tremendous resource for libraries and individuals. The web has grown exponentially in such a very short time. For individuals one could bookmark items that are specific to one's areas of interest. One could tag reviews of books that sound interesting and return to them. You could also save and tag articles that take more time to read which you would like to return to at a later time. You could also have items appear in your inbox or an RSS feed which are new to the Delicious website. This saves a lot of time and enables one to easily keep abreast of any area of interest.



For a library it would be ideal to have a collection of bookmarks for some of the topics that are constantly being requested: job search resources, local history resources, local government resources, and many others. Some libraries have used tags that parallel the Dewey Decimal system. This seems useful in one sense in organizing information in the same way as books and materials on the shelves are organized. The ability to provide an unlimited number of tags specific to individual sites would seem to be a stronger organizational tool in my mind. I think it would be useful to tag sites in terms of primary and secondary sources just as you would other items. A website from a particular organization would certainly be primary; sites created by individuals may be extremely valuable or may only be marginally valuable. A library could easily tag items of current interest to staff or patrons through Del.icio.us. Some of these might only need to be retained for a couple of months; others might need to be retained longer or in another set of bookmarks for staff only. Libraries could bookmark games that are deemed appropriate for certain age groups. These could be subdivided as educational with the skills being identified. Libraries could also bookmark tutorials for users of Microsoft Office products or users needing other computer skills that are continually asked about.

It seems that a selection criteria or parameters for adding bookmarks would need to be established for a library. One person could apply the parameters and look to create tags that would be consistent and user-friendly.


The capability to share resources with others makes the value of bookmarking increase substantially. Finding individuals or libraries with similar interests or approaches would save a lot of time when scouring the web for items of personal interest or items of interest to library staff and customers.

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