It's Delicious!

Delicious has proven easy to use and the ability to tag, share and keep accounts public or private, has allowed me to use this social bookmarking tool not only as a method of storing and sharing bookmarks related to my university work but to also keep more personal information, such as the sites I'm finding on babies. I can also share these bookmarks and tags with other Mums I've met through various activities. For an information service professional, the feature of sharing and tagging could prove very useful.

The ability to share is a great feature allowing users to benefit from others bookmarking. As a student I can discover sites, through bookmarks created by teachers and students, that can lead me to articles and research I may never have discovered on my own. As a librarian, I could share this knowledge with fellow staff members at the library, allowing for the knowledge to be passed on and utlised within the industry. An information service could use Delicious to direct patrons to the latest news about their organisation and how it fits into the change in other organisations as well as share knowledge on the latest book releases, reviews and other sites relevant to their organisation. 

Tags can be added to bookmarks and can be tailored to the individual and an information service could use this function to tag items in a way that makes sense to their audience and to connect similar sites (by using the same tags.) The function is very quick to apply and easy to use and could be used effectively by someone with even minimal understanding of delicious. The tags created by others could also aid those working in the information service to locate bookmarks tagged with relevant tags by other users to aid in the collection of data about a topic for themselves, their workplace or even a client.

Although a lessor known service than MySpace or Facebook, Delicious can be easily set-up and introduced to patrons of the library (Rethlefson, 2007) and be used to co-ordinate many links to sites, as suggested in Rethlefson's article, from links to information for local students assignments or local news items.

References

Rethlefson, M. (2007). Tags help make libraries delicious. Retrieved 21, March, 2011 from

  www.libraryjournal.com: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6476403.html

On a side note, nothing to do with the Delicious evaluation, this post had the unusual problem of not keeping to the default font. After trying several different methods to change the font, eventually the whole thing had to be deleted and re-typed. Fortunately, I have been typing posts up in a word document and then in the blog so all that was lost was some editing.