Week 6, Thing #13 - Del.icio.us and so on and so forth

I have not had a chance to view the 12-minute video for this Thing, but I went ahead and played around with Del.icio.us and figured it out. It's soooooo easy to use. I started by focusing on, again, foreign films, or more generally, on films, but bookmarking favorite sites for film information. Then I explored the PLCMCL2 site and I clicked into roseygirl12000's Del.icio.us bookmarks, then into TappydogA's bookmarks. Roseygirl has a lot of good, solid library reference sites that are ones I might add to my account. TappydogA's bookmarks were not as useful to me. Somewhere or other in my journey on Del.icio.us I found a "film" bookmark category. (I thought it was roseygirl12000's, but I can't find it now!!) And when I clicked to it, I saw my own bookmark for a film site. Whew! There I was, along with all the other technocrats, doing Web 2.0 stuff, in the big league, so to speak.

The idea of creating your own tags is a useful one. LC subject headings are hard to remember, and it's easy to mess them up. They are not at all forgiving if you make a mistake in word order or anything like that. The good part of that is that there is a great deal of accuracy when you know the system and you are searching. The bad part is that you need to know the taxonomy in precise terms. Tagging on Del.icio.us makes for a kind of anarchy, but it works for searching. For one, when you are creating those tags, suggestions below can guide you along. "Oh, yeah, 'cinema' is a good term too. I'll include that as well in identifying this film site." And so on and so forth.

Can we use Del.icio.us at HCPL? Absolutely! I would like to follow roseygirl12000's example and tag a lot of sites that I use for general reference in responding to those reference questions. If I'm in another branch, no problem! I've got my Del.icio.us account at my fingertips. Kind of like taking your personal reference library with you, no matter in which branch or wherever.

I see a use for tagging itself as well. Let's find a way for patrons to do some creative tagging for their favorite materials in the library, for example. We might need to edit the occasional spelling error in a tag or clarify a tag that is way off, but you know, I bet the tags would be user-friendly, clear, and accurate. We needn't dispose of LC headings for our subject identifiers, but why not add the new, anarchic tags? Just a thought.