Week Six, Thing Thirteen

I've been working with del.icio.us this afternoon, a social bookmarking management tool that allows users to store, tag, and share their favorite websites in one place. Using del.icio.us gives users the advantage of accessing their favorite sites from any computer and discovering new sites other users have tagged and saved to their personal (or shared) del.icio.us pages.

Some of the websites I visit often have short urls that are easy to type and remember. Other web favorites are easy to access since my home computer will recognize the beginning of the address and complete the rest of the url for me. However, del.icio.us would make it much easier to save and access all those sites I may not use very often or sites I want to explore in the future but don't have time to look at in the present. For example, I could save sites with tax forms and tax information, cooking and baking recipes, health topics, movie and music reviews, etc.

When I worked at a more traditional reference desk, staff members would often bookmark websites for future patron interactions and reference queries. Having a del.icio.us page would have be excellent. Not only could staff members access it from any computer in the building (we worked on three floors), but you could share the del.icio.us page with library patrons who could access it from any internet connection whether they have library cards or not.

I looked at a few del.icio.us pages maintained by public libraries. It's interesting that three of the libraries listed on the sjlibrary learning 2.0 blog (La Grange Park, Lansing, and Thomas Ford) are libraries from Metropolitan Library System; the system I worked in until last year. This is perhaps due to the influence of Jenny Levine, who used to work for MLS.