I first tried using Delicious 2 or so years ago, and was super confused at first. I used it for a while to archive some favorite websites so I could find them easily when I was away from my own computer. I didn't use it again until recently when a friend of mine moved away, now we have a special Delicious that we can both log into and use to share links. With tags it's super easy to sort and search for links by subject. Because links are basically ranked by how many people tag them, it's really simple to find helpful website on any topic. Tagging a link in Delicious can be just as easy as adding a favorite to your browser. All you have to do is install a Delicious application in Firefox or IE, then all you do is push a button to tag a website.
The thing about tagging / labeling that bugs me is that some sites use commas and some don't. Flickr and delicious don't, but Blogger does. This creates a bit of a learning curve, especially if you're using multiple sites and applications that all tag and label things differently. I think no commas could be standard, with quotation marks for multi word phrases. With delicious you just smush words together or use an underscore if you need more than one in a tag. For example, say you wanted to tag a picture in flickr, a blog post, and a website with the labels hot dogs and chicago. In flickr you would type in; "hot dogs" chicago. In Blogger you would say; hot dogs, chicago. And in Delicious you would write; hotdogs chicago or hot_dogs chicago. Why can't this be standardized?!
Delicious could be a great research tool for Committees. Since many Committees and Task forces are charged to investigate procedures and products used by other libraries and companies, Delicious could be used to organize helpful links. Delicious might also be a great tool for the reference desk. Librarians could create a Delicious account containing helpful for frequent reference topics. For patrons who can't physically make it into the library a compilation of links would be a great resource.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment