Delicious has definitely made my life easier. In my previous position, I worked in almost every aspect of the library from reference to children’s to circulation. It was very frustrating to be caught at the circ desk with a reference question when all my best resources were at another desk. Then I discovered delicious. This not only allowed me to access my bookmarks from any computer but now I could share these resources with my co-workers. I initially setup a reference account where I imported all our bookmarks and started tagging and clustering the links. One co-worker even found it useful when she was on temporary assignment at a different branch. I’m glad chose to use it at home as well because shortly after I imported into delicious all my personal bookmarks at home, my hard drive failed and my 200+ bookmarks would have been gone forever.
Kaboodle was a site I had never tried before. It is more specialized since it mainly acts as a shopping social community. I was surprised at how large the community already is. It was launched in 2006 and already boasts of having over 400,000 members. Basically it performed the same way delicious did. You can install the buttons that make it easy to add your links to Kaboodle. Also, there is a place to add comments and tags. The difference with this site is that you directly link to specific products and add them to a wish list that includes information such as quantity, size, color and event date. One function would be a gift registry, a way to sort items you would like to purchase in near future or a way to window shop online.
Stumbleupon was something I tried when it first came out several years ago. At the time, I enjoyed it as a novelty. I remember back when
yahoo used to have a What’s New link which I would check periodically to find interesting new websites. For me that is how stumbleupon made an impression. I could setup my preferences and click, click, click away from website to website until I spotted something that caught my eye. I could then bookmark it for later use. I didn’t even think of this as social bookmarking until I saw it on our exercise here and after further inspection; I found that it offers features similar to delicious. You can tag it and find other links with similar tags shared by other users. I did not find a way to bundle tags which I think is very useful in delicious but maybe there will be further improvements.
For the application of a library, at this point I think the delicious offers patrons the best of what social bookmarking can do. Tagging terms can be used to reflect the community and their needs. Bundles can be created to make navigation of the tags make sense. And sharing library links through delicious gives patrons the opportunity to help themselves to good and reliable information that is already there.
