Exploration 8 - Social Bookmarking & Folksonomies

Of all of the tools, I find this to be the most useful of all! I participated in online training for delicious and have been using it for a while now both personally and professionally. I love the fact that I can find my "bookmarks" anywhere and have been saved many times by that. My organization skills are not the best, and I find electronic organization easier. But the tagging on web sites is even better than just electronic folders. I love being able to put things in more than one catgeory and still be able to find them, particularly since I often select a tag that means something to me (and probably nobody else). I even use it to mark sites that I want to get back to and explore later. I admit that I don't use the social aspect...seeing what others put on their delicious accounts...but that is always an option.

Surprisingly, this is something I have not promoted heavily with patrons for their personal use. This, despite the fact that we have many patrons whose only internet access is at the library. Portable bookmarks would be perfect for them since they are always moving from computer to computer, and sometimes between branches. I should definitely make a bigger effort to promote delicious with patrons.

At my branch, we have used our branch delicious account, but not extensively. It has been great for quick access to those sites that come in handy on an irregular basis.

I know that some libraries have started using delicious as the equivalent of our Recommended Sites. This serves as a great marketing tool and online presence, and on the cheap. When you consider the social angle, this means we would be reaching out to our virtual users, as they could subscribe to AACPL. When some new topic or issue of popular interest arises, we can add a few new sites and it would be brought to patrons' attention quite quickly. What potential!

Now moving on. I'm almost done!