Thing #13 Tagging and del.icio.us

I have been using an online bookmarking site for years because it is so convenient to access favorites or bookmarks from any computer anywhere. The ones explored in this lesson, del.icio.us, furl, and ma.gnolia, are an improvement because of the ability to tag and locate sites that others have found or sites that you saved and forgot where you put them! (This is happening to me more and more.)

As time allows I am going to move my saved sites to ma.gnolia. I prefer this site over del.icio.us because of its appearance, ease of creating tags, and the fact that the star rating is built in. I hope my choice doesn't limit me because it seems that del.icio.us is by far the most popular social bookmarking site at this time.

I plan to provide sites for my students on ma.nolia or whichever site they can access at school. In the past I have created Word documents with active links to sites I found on various research topics. I then put the documents in the resource folder for the library which is found on the "share drive". The students have to click on five items to get to the desired document, then open the links. Very time-consuming and not attractive to teenagers who want everything to be immediate. I think they will like going to a social bookmarking site. Another advantage is that they can access this from home. They cannot get to the "share" drive from their homes.

We librarians are always emailing each other with good web sites. It is then up to the individual to save it in some way that she or he can find it again. Sharing through bookmarking sites will be so much more useful and time-saving.

After reading about tags and looking at the various sites, I think I understand where RDA (Resource Description and Access) is headed. As I learn more about RDA, I understand that our cataloging will be moving away from Library of Congress Subject Headings and we will be using more natural language. Hmmmm. Sounds a lot like tags in del.icio.us and the other sites!