Delicious thoughts!

As usual, everything is new to me this week! I just tried de.licio.us, and it's fun and intriguing. In conjunction with that, I just read articles about a couple of new ideas to me--the "Long Tail" and folksonomies. As for folksonomies, people seem to have the same concerns that I've always heard about keyword searching versus controlled vocabulary in our OPACS and book cataloging. Keyword searching is more flexible and intuitive, but you may miss things if you don't guess the right keywords to search. Plus you get a lot of irrelevant results. Controlled vocabulary turns up better results, but it can be difficult for our students and patrons to come up with the right terms to search. In the case of library catalogs, I always like a combination of attacks--try the keywords, then when you find something good, look at the subject headings and try that. The folksonomies and tags in delicious are great, but you don't have that follow-up option of subject headings. So I guess you may miss some things--but you will also discover more information than you'll ever have time to absorb, anyway!

In libraries, I would mainly see de.licio.us being used by staff to share resources and information with one another--either new ideas as to how other libraries are doing things, or reference sources. Within a staff, a fairly controlled vocabulary would probably even develop.