Thursday, March 19, 2009

Delicious

I was just searching Delicious (the social bookmarking website) and was noting again that because you can't tag phrases as phrases, information literacy comes up in various guises e.g.
http://delicious.com/tag/
informationliteracy

http://delicious.com/
popular/information_literacy

http://delicious.com/tag/information_literacy (that's actually the same tag as the previous one, but a different display)
http://delicious.com/tag/infolit

A recent bookmark I happened to notice was: Millennial Students’ Mental Models of Search Tools, a poster presented at the ACRL conference 2009 by Lucy Holman, University of Baltimore, USA. This reports on a survey/observation of a small sample of students.
http://langsdale.ubalt.edu/ACRL/millennials.pdf
I don't have my own delicious page, by the way, as I tend to use this blog for my information literacy bookmarking (you can of course search the blog using the box in the top left of the home page, and I have been using tags for a couple of years, although I haven't yet put the tag list on the home page).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Daffodils (and the odd beer can) outside the star and Garter pub, Sheffield, March 2009.

2 comments:

Judy O'Connell said...

Hi Sheila, it's interesting to me that you don't use Delicious, or that you don't provide a tag cloud or similar for your resources on this excellent blog since you indicate that it is your substitute repository. This means that I would have to guess what the search term you are using - but with a tag cloud I would have a better understanding of you personal taxonomy choices. I am a passionate user of delicious, and can't imagine keeping track of information without it - and a blog would never keep enough information together for me. I wonder what other variations on information organisation web-savvy librarians prefer?

Sheila Webber said...

I must admit that I have delayed in transferring to the "new Blogger" format (now rather old) because I have a sort of superstitious fear that all my 1000+ postings will disappear when I upgrade the template - until I do that displaying tags is more difficult.

The list will also reveal how poorly I use them - some I remember to use regularly, others I don't, and there are still some concepts I haven't tagged - the most obvious being "UK" for UK items, although not all the items are about the UK by any means (and I DO tag "information literacy").

Tag clouds - I suppose I am not being user-centric enough in that I don't really find THEM that useful either - it depends on how good the tagging was in the first place, though I suppose it does show what words or phrases *I thought* were relevant.

Similarly, I don't use other people's delicious that much - seems rather a lot of information overload, when I do peek at it, so I prefer to get the more filtered feeds from blogs (rather than delicious feeds). I'm collaborating on a delicious set relating to libraries/information and Second Life at the moment, so I will have to see whether I want to keep on with that - since my SL blog is not focused at all on information links, and so there I use Favourites on my browser.
I wouldn't really want to point my students at a big delicious set of links, since feedback indicates that they want some filtering - some guidance of where to start and not a daunting list. At the same time, I also want them to discover things for themselves.
Thanks for the comment! Interesting!
Will probably prompt me to take some steps about revealing the tagging a bit more here, but I can't see me becoming a social bookmarking habituee suddenly.