#13 (Week 6) Del.icio.us

I can see that Del.icio.us seems to be suited for those with academic careers, or at least those doing a lot of research. The challenge for me using it, will be finding a subject that I will be using electronic resources more than print. There might be some use for it while researching activities for the Harry Potter program we are planning for the summer. hmmm....

When doing research for any sort of paper or for researching trends in the library world, or wherever, Del.icio.us (and other social bookmarking tools) provides pointers to works that will aid and, to a certain extent, will help you find more "creditable" sources. The latter pointer is based on the "# saved" at the bottom of the entry. I f 377 have saved one article, but only 25 have saved another, I would be inclined to start with the first, and then read the latter as time permitted. Obviously there would be other clues to the "worthiness" of an article, but that is a gut reaction that I think many of us would have.

While going through the library's list, I found tags for many articles that I might not have thought of otherwise. Sort of like running your fingers through the old card catalogs, you learn a lot from the items around the item that you are looking for.

Being a cataloger from not so long ago, I would prefer to see authoritative language being used. However, I do see an advantage to the "from the gut" tags - the language is more vibrant, closer to the point, more easily intuited on the spur of the moment. There will be a loss of information because of the lack of authoritative language, but given the sheer amount of information being processed, perhaps this is not as negative as it otherwise might be.

Libraries, Library of Congress, OCLC, etc. would do well to consider the tags being used by real users/searchers of information. Especially tags used by scholarly researchers have the potential for being the basis of new subject headings. I do not believe that it is hopeless to provide guidelines and authority to online information, but I do believe that the methods must be as easy to use as Del.icio.us, or else no one will use them.