Exploration 8: Del.icio.us

It's easy to understand the appeal of creating an account on del.icio.us, saving web pages that catch your fancy, and using your own tags to describe them. The pages are all in one accessible place. You know that you can retrieve them there because you're the person who put them there, along with your own helpful memory jogs.

Personal contribution is a key advantage. In this Exploration and the 23 Things exercise, I had fun looking at the various library systems that use del.icio.us, but for library purposes I don't think it's as useful to access an account that someone else set up. I found lots of really cool things through random browsing, but unless I already knew that the link was there, I wouldn't choose this as the first way to find information. I spent a lot of time scrolling through each library's selected web pages listed in no apparent order, scrolling through long lists of tags in alphabetical order (or choosing the tag cloud option for a non-linear burst of possibilities), and putting various terms in the search box to see if I got any results. I could grasp the one library's Dewey Decimal organization of bookmarks, but I have to admit that I was amused by this approach, because who but a librarian would find this helpful? The real advantage of del.icio.us and other bookmarking/tagging sites is that you don't have to think like a librarian to access information.

When it comes to staff uses in our library system... Our Recommended Sites list is well organized, but sometimes it's difficult to recall the exact site you're looking for or even what category it's under. Maybe we could make a del.icio.us or equivalent site for staff members to create their own tags to help with their own retrieval. Not to replace the existing arrangement, mind you, but to supplement it with a homegrown index of sorts.

And I'll share this from my random browsing of the library sites. One of the libraries had a tag for "Barbara", which I clicked on out of curiosity because it was too vague for my mind. That led to the intriguing Batgirl was a Librarian site. Why? Because Batgirl's first name was Barbara. The Batgirl site in turn had a link to www.ironfrog.com/catsmap.html, with a map of libraries that have resident felines. Someone in our library system is on the ball, because WST's resident cat of a few decades ago is listed on this map. Cool!