Thing 5: Another go at Delicious

Now I am treading on thin ice. The portfolio that I presented to graduate from my MLIS program in June called upon the glories of Delicious and its wonderful tagging system to defend my position that library's children's catalogs should allow children to tag books in the catalogs in order to facilitate easier search and retrieval. My dirty little secret, however, is that I never cared much for the way Delicious employs tagging. This might be partly because I personally have a hard time summing up content in one word (I love language, and when I can I even use words from other languages to describe thoughts or objects because I feel they express the idea more accurately). Conversely, using one-word tags to sum up concepts seems primitive and way too inaccurate. I get that Delicious provides access to saved links from any browser with an internet connection, but I haven't really needed that capability as of yet. Plus (and here's a real dirty little secret that I alluded to in my last post), it's really not a pretty website. Okay, I admit it, I'm internet-shallow. If it's not eye catching I probably won't be interested! I can't help it, I'm a visual person! But god help me the Delicious blue, black and stark white offend me to my core! Talk about a major design faux pas! Okay, okay, I'll try to look past it...

That said, one Delicious feature I like is being able to call up all bookmarked sites by clicking on a tag (the one major function or purpose of tagging). While the visually unappealing bookmarks page you're subjected to seems both ugly and chaotic, clicking a tag will immediately arrange those tagged bookmarks in a tidy little group, which obviously appeals to the organizing side of my chosen profession.

Another feature that shows promise is locating other users' bookmarks via your own. For example, I found a fabulous book via a blog I now follow from clicking on "recipes" in my own tags, and then "See all recipes bookmarks in Recent." Fabulous. My only concern with this type of flagrant acceptance of other users' recommendations is that I don't know those other users from Adam. When I try something new I like it to be highly recommended by a trusted source. For example, a recommendation from FoodTruckJunkie on Yelp for Pie N' Burger in Pasadena doesn't mean I will enjoy dining at Pie N' Burger, since FoodTruckJunkie also loves Burger Continental which I find is a sorry excuse for a dining establishment. I haven't yet found a way to determine whether bookmarks from other Delicious users can be trusted. I guess I'll have to tool around some more.

One question on the 21 Things blog I found intriguing was how this 2.o technology can be used to help students who use the library. OMG are you kidding, it's like spark notes but credible (because you put the list of resources together yourself) and kids will love you for it! Imagine a kid and his parent coming in for resources for a report on Canada. You will of course lead said patrons to your shelves, select a couple age-appropriate titles, and then print a few lines from the WorldBook Kids encyclopedia to supplement the textual information. However, in the world of Library 2.0 imagine that in your more quiet reference desk moments you'd gathered a Delicious list of online resources on Canada and tagged them as such. Now all you have to do is set said student at a computer and invite her or him to click away and presto! they can do their own research! How fun to be able to point a kid to such a website!

Too bad it's not a pretty website...