Saturday, December 22, 2007

#13 Tagging and del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is definitely a useful tool for keeping track of individual bookmarks. It's nice to be able to create your own tags and to play around with the different ways of organizing them for yourself. It strikes me that so many of the tools we're learning about in this QL learning are about making the web more manageable and in a way smaller. I think that one of the biggest challenges facing librarians today that maybe wasn't such a big deal in the past is the absolute glut of information out there. We have to find ways to wade through it so that we (and customers) can find what we need and not get lost. I think that del.icio.us is a good tool for paring down our options to quality sites as we look for information.

Before this exercise I hadn't used del.icio.us for much beyond keeping track of my personal bookmarks, but now I can see that it is useful to check out sites that many, many people have bookmarked. Chances are that it's worth looking at. It's also good to kind of get lost in del.icio.us to find some new sites you haven't come across yet. I also liked being able to check out other users' descriptions of their bookmarks. It was interesting to scan down the list of comments to get more of an idea about the site quickly.

I think that libraries could use this tool to make topic specific collections of links. Maybe for a class visit that is researching a specific topic? It's kind of like the pathfinders we all had to make in library school.

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