We are so del.icio.us!

As we are becoming 2.0, we are exploring ways to use del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. Here you can create an account (for free!) and save all your favorite links to places on the Web. You can then access them from any Web-enabled computer. You add tags to create order and an index format but the tags are your own words, not choices out of a rigid taxonomy (rather a “folksonomy”.) If you are doing research, you can store all your links and online articles here. Create an online cookbook or a vacation planning guide. Create a list of your favorite podcast sites for easy reference. Do any of these collaboratively with a group of like-minded people by sharing an account or creating your own organizational tags. You can share your favorites with family, friends, coworkers…. But more than just sharing with the people you know, you can share with the entire del.icio.us community. And, you get to look at all the other community’s favorites, finding things on your interests that you may have overlooked. You’ll see whether 5 people saved a link or five hundred people. (You can, however, choose to keep your bookmarks private and not share.)

Confused??? Take a look at our collection. We created a site which we are using to store our favorite Readers’ Advisory sources and research sites for writing guides and citations. The three of us are placing our favorite professional sites and librarian blogs here so that we can share professional development. We’ve only been at it for a week so it’s small and our “folksonomy” may need to be more standardized as there will be three of us adding. Social networking is exciting and learning from a community has real value. For us, seeing what other librarians have saved and tagged gives us insight into helping our students become adept 21st century library users. Try creating an account and see where the community takes you.