week 4: social bookmarking

I knew about del.icio.us, but hadn't really thought about it much for library applications. I can definitely see it being handy for having bookmarks available from anywhere. I was intrigued by some of the readings that gave examples of more sophisticated uses for library settings. I'm especially interested in learning more about "bundles". Our library has a del.icio.us account set up by one of the librarians, but it's just a random list without annotations, and no bundling. I think that making use of those features, in addition to the tags, could make a really useful guide. Or perhaps we could use our del.icio.us account to store websites before we vet them for our existing research guides. This definitely is worth exploring more.

Of course the biggest problem with the tags, as noted by others, is the lack of any controlled vocabulary or authority control even for basic spelling and synonyms. This could lead to a "tower of babel" and limit retrievability as the number of links grows. I think it would be good in a library setting to try to develop some simple rules for tagging so it doesn't get entirely random.