Thing 12 - Delicious

I've been aware of Delicious for a few years but never actually used it before. I'm not too sure why. The idea of having all my bookmarks available on any computer is quite useful. I currently have 3 sets of bookmarks - one on the home computer, and one on each work computer (I have two part-time jobs). I suppose the advantage of my current system of keeping them separate and that is I know the bookmarks on each computer are all relevant to that sphere of my life. Plus I don't have to log in to an account to see them - they are already on my browser when I open it.

However Delicious has many more advantages. The ability to share personal bookmarks so that you can share great websites with friends is useful. And of course it works vice versa so that I can see the bookmarks that my friends want to share. The tagging feature is a much better way of organising bookmarks than putting them into a folder, as each bookmark can be given multiple tags if necessary and 'bundled' together. This avoids duplication and by using bundles for different areas of my life e.g. personal, job 1, job 2 I could still easily distinguish between which are relevant when.

I quite liked the feature on the Delicious homepage which enables users to see which bookmarks are popular or have been recently added for a particular tag. It would be useful if the results were ranked though. Here are the results for my search for popular 'wordle' bookmarks:

Note how Wordle itself is the most popular, but doesn't appear at the top of the list. Oh well.

The Judge Business School Library and Philosophy Library's bookmarks look like useful reference tools and I could see this working in other libraries too. I would be interested to know more about how the Judge and Philosophy are using their bookmarks - if anyone is reading, please let me know! For example, is the list maintained by one person or collaboratively by a joint account that all staff can add to? Do staff working on enquiry points use the bookmarks when helping library users, and do they point readers in the direction of the library's Delicious bookmarks? I notice that you can't search for people very easily in Delicious - you need to know their exact username.

So to sum up, I rather like Delicious and think it can be a useful reference tool for librarians, although I still haven't set up an account of my own yet!