Delicious – social bookmarking tool

Use of the tool

Delicious is like a personal online registry for links to information considered valuable to the user. Delicious can also be used to organise information by employing tags (user defined or predefined) and descriptions to categorise bookmarked resources. Importantly, Delicious bookmarks can be shared with others, which really helps information discovery, particularly if you choose informed people to network with.

Effectiveness of the features and functionality

Registering is pretty straightforward and involves proving your non-robot status, by entering a series of letters and numbers. The Chrome Bookmarklet works great with Google, but adding resources from Google Scholar generally required manual loading of tags, title, etc. Tagging and tag bundling is super simple, as is manually adding titles and descriptions. The networking aspect of Delicious wasn’t functional first up, but eventually an automated email was delivered to my inbox that allowed for connecting to other people’s bookmarks. There is other functionality such as, linking RSS feeds – this and some other things still need exploration. From initial evaluations, I prefer Google Reader, but this is early days.

How information organisations might use this Delicious

The main value in Delicious for libraries and information services is its metadata store capabilities, but with the added benefit of allowing users to provide their own content in terms of tags, descriptions and new links. Librarians can also value-add using their skills in categorisation/classification, increasing coherence and improved discoverability for selected web resources. Delicious provides an alternative platform for subject/library guides and pathfinders. Linkrolls are also useful when placed on pages with associated content, providing serendipitous discovery to other resources. Reading lists can be created and shared with students undertaking a specific unit of coursework.

An example of how one library is using Delicious, Vancouver Public Library has used Delicious as its link management system, helping the library reach a far wider audience, reduce staff time spent maintaining link collections, and allow for re-purposing of link collections as sidebars on web pages.

Cahill, K. (2009). User-generated content and its impact on web-based library services. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

Redden, C. S. (2010). Social bookmarking in academic libraries: Trends and applications. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 36(3):219–227.