I signed up for a Del.icio.us account a few years ago and never really got around to using it. At the time I thought it would be a useful way of having access to my bookmarks wherever I was, but I think I wound up using My Yahoo to get the most relevant bits of information from my most frequently visited sites.
One of the podcasts I listen to, This Week in Tech (also known as TWIT), uses del.icio.us in an effective way that I think could work for a library as well. TWIT is a weekly podcast where different tech writers and personalities get together via Skype and discuss tech stories of the week. The shows usually go for over an hour, so it would take one person quite a while to find enough stories to discuss for one show, let alone on a weekly basis. So they've set it up so that anyone who comes across an interesting story can tag it with the tag "for:twit" in del.icio.us and they all show up on the Twit del.icio.us page. Not only can everyone on the show find links to all the stories they're talking about in one easy location, but since you can subscribe to the page as an RSS feed it's a really easy way to keep on top of interesting and important tech stories in your feed reader.
I think this approach could be used effectively in a library as well - not only for keeping track of links for the employees of the library itself, but also to help outward-facing customers as well. If you have to hotdesk in your role, your favourites are sometimes stored on the PC itself so you may not be able to get to them when you're at a different desk. This issue is solved with del.icio.us, as you can get to your bookmarks wherever you have a PC with an internet connection.
It also makes it very easy to find resources that you might be able to use. If you go to the site every once in a while and look for sites tagged with tags that interest you, you may be able to find sites that you might not otherwise come across using google searches. You could then create a delicious page for your library with relevant information, and people could use your links as a jumping off point to start looking at other resources with the same tags. Tag clouds also give you an indicator of what people are tagging/searching for and you can emphasise these points of interest in your library displays.
In setting up my own delicious account I found it interesting to go through and see the different tags that people used to classify these sites, and then to look at the people who had tagged the same sites as me and have a look at what else they'd tagged. You can go off on a tangent very quickly and learn about topics you hadn't expected to.
I see a lot of potential in Technorati in the same way. While google can be good at picking relevant information out about a site, a lot of what you'll find in a google search result is determined by the words on the website itself.
With tagging everyone can get into the act, and the search engines will spit back a more democratic result. Different countries will use different terms to describe things - a jumper here is a sweatshirt in the US. If you did a google search on the term "jumper" you wouldn't get too many American websites showing up in the results. But if you searched in delicious or Technorati for the term jumper, knowledgeable Aussies could tag American sites and all of a sudden you get a much bigger pool of results.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment