Delicious and Libraries

I have found Delicious a great resource for organizing resources for the social networking assignment for this subject. I loved the stack feature,it enabled me to separate my assignment topics well. Once the stacks were removed tags became much more important.  I hadn't been very consistent with my tagging for example 'social media' and 'socialmedia' which makes rediscovery much harder.  This is common with tagging or folksomonies which can lack precision and structure (Redden, 2010, p.224). Bookmarking is easy, it is rediscovery or retrieval that would be difficult especially when using Delicious collaboratively.  Too many bookmarks in tag catagories, multiple bookmarking of the same site, inconsistent tag names could reduces the effectiveness and usability of  Delicious. 

Other features that I have found useful are:

Following people in the same industry as me, and users I notice that  have bookmarked similar sites to me so that I can discover, and possibly bookmark their bookmarks.This is a great way resources could be shared between libraries 

Tag Bundles have allowed me to collect my social media technology sites togehter and for me replaces the stack feature.  For libraries bundles could group together all the children's services links or all the easy reference bookmarks.  

Annotations/Descriptions  I have used this feature to remind myself on what I used the site for or why it was a good resource. This is especially important when there are are lots of bookmarks with similar tags as can happen when Delicious is used collaboratively or limited the number of tags to be used.  

How libraries can use delicious

• As means of sharing reference resources for staff to use on desk while helping patrons.

• For staff to share resources with each other such as bookmarking sites with ideas for programs, child's activities, and displays.

• As a resource portal for patrons.  Brimbank Library has a Delicious cloud of useful links  while Geelong Library has a catagorized useful Weblinks and use Delicious to store all their links.

For libraries one of the best features of Delicious is that it is web-based. It can be accessed from any PC and doesn't need altering when computers are upgraded.

References:
Redden, C.S. (2010). Social bookmarking in academic libraries: Trends and applications. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 36(3), 219–227