Delicious Social Bookmarking in the Public Library

Hello, my name is Amy Byrne, and I’m going to talk about Delicious Social Bookmarking in the Public Library.
Social bookmarking allows internet users a means of storing, organizing, sharing, and searching for bookmarks of web pages – anything with a URL can be saved. The bookmarks are usually public, so that any user of a bookmarking site has the ability to browse other users’ bookmarks. You can also set bookmarks to private so that only you can see them, and I have done this before when I also included information about a log on and password. You can generally review your bookmarks and other users’ bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.
Delicious is one of many social bookmarking sites, and probably the most popular. When it was developed in 2003, it pioneered the concept of tagging and created the term social bookmarking . Prior to Delicious’s use of tags, other bookmarking sites allowed for their users to save bookmarks in lists and folders, like on the hard drive of your computer. Delicious keeps all of your bookmarks in one place on the web from which you can access your bookmarks from any computer that has an Internet connection, anytime, anywhere. The saving of URLs gets specific in that you can save a specific page within a website…say the link to a particular book in your online catalog. You can further identify your link by creating tags for it. Tags are a means of creating one or two word descriptors for the website you saved. You can use as many tags as you’d like, and Delicious even suggests tags based on what other people who have saved that particular URL have used. You can share your Delicious bookmarks either by sharing your user name with other Delicious users or by incorporating link rolls or tag clouds into your own website. Another feature of Delicious is that you can find other users who share your same interests by clicking on tags to find them. This is a serendipitous way of searching out other people and finding websites you may have not previously known about.
Delicious is a great benefit to libraries in that it is a simple means of developing lists of library resources. Very little technical expertise is required, so staff are much more engaged and barriers to technology are lifted. If a library wants to direct patrons to their Delicious page, they can share a direct link, or they can extract data from their Delicious account to show up on their own website in the form of a link roll or tag cloud, and the information is updated automatically…so if a librarian creates a new tag or adds a new website, it will automatically show up in the link roll or tag cloud on the library’s website. Patrons can become more engaged in what your library is doing by signing up for RSS feeds to your bookmarks. This will alert them to when you library’s account has added a new URL. A bonus for using Delicious is that it’s free and easy to use!
When your library uses Delicious, your patrons will be secure in knowing that librarians or library professionals are responsible for the content of the websites that are saved. Patrons will know that librarians have evaluated the information, and the most trustworthy of web sources are saved. It’s a simple way for librarians to create online pathfinders with multiple tags that can narrow down or broaden a search a patron has. Since everything online has a URL, you can easily link back to your online catalog. You can create lists of books within your catalog that would be good for a book club by using a tag such as “book club.” You could even further specify which kind of book club by adding more tags like “fiction”, “romance”, non fiction”, etc. In general, tags in Delicious are created in plain language. This means that patrons don’t have to know that in many library catalogs you have to do a subject search of “cookery” to find the cookbooks. If a librarian wanted to create a Delicious-based pathfinder for vegetarian cooking, she would use tags such as “cooking”, “cookbooks”, “vegetarian”, etc. This could be a learning curve for some librarians, to get away from the Library of Congress’ subject headings, but probably not.
Staff will benefit by using Delicious because information is readily available. Whether a librarian is using a computer at his cubicle, the fourth floor reference desk, or the first floor circulation desk, he will be able to access the bookmarks he needs because Delicious is web based. The barriers for participation among staff are lowered because Delicious is an easy resource to use. You find a site you like, you click the Delicious tag button on your toolbar, enter tags, save, and you’re directed back to the page you were originally on. When you want to see what bookmarks you have, you click the Delicious button on your toolbar, and you’re taken to your Delicious page. Additionally, librarians on the front lines have more participation in the information that the patrons receive. By adding reputable websites and tags to the library’s Delicious account, they are providing information to their patrons. Librarians on the front lines also know what it is the patrons are asking for. For example, it’s tax season now and public libraries carry paper versions of tax forms. Let’s say that one day all of the 1040 forms are gone, and another shipment isn’t due in until the next day. A librarian can save a bookmark that links directly to the 1040 form on the IRS’ website, and it becomes instantly accessible to other librarians working the desk and patrons perusing the library’s website or Delicious page.
In 2005 Delicious was bought by Yahoo, so in order to create a new account on Delicious, you need to first have a Yahoo account. Once you have a Yahoo account, you can use it to log in to Delicious. I tested it out on multiple web browsers, logged in with the same Delicious account at the same time, and a library can have one Delicious account with multiple people contributing to it at the same time. This would make it easier for a library to create one Delicious presence that patrons would know to go to, and it would broaden the scope of the number of librarians contributing to the library’s Delicious account. Next, you would download the Delicious bookmarking buttons to your toolbar. This includes a Delicious button that, if you’re logged in, takes you directly to the page with your saved websites, a Bookmarks button that adds your bookmarks to the sidebar on your screen, and a Tag button that brings up the Save a Bookmark function where you enter in notes and tags. As a side note, if you are using a computer where you don’t have privileges to add downloads, there’s a work around that Delicious created where you can drag and drop the buttons you need to bookmark websites. Detailed information is in the Help pages. Next, you start saving websites and tagging them. The last thing you do is to let your patrons know you’re using Delicious.
The website for the Holdrege Area Public Library in Nebraska is a example of a library that has integrated their Delicious tag cloud into their own website. When a patron clicks on one of the tags in the cloud, they’re taken to Holdrege’s Delicious page that has all of the tags for the one they picked.
The website of the Menasha Public Library in Wisconsin is an example of one that has a link on their homepage to Recommended Websites that then takes the patron to the library’s Delicious page.
The Nashville Public Library in Tennessee has their Delicious bookmarks in a tag cloud on each page of their website, separated out by age appropriateness. So this example of their Teen Web has tags that relate to the information that teens want. They have another page for adult materials, and those tags are completely different.
Chelmsford Public Library in Massachusetts is an example of a library that has created subject guides for specific areas by the way that they tagged the URLs in Delicious. In Delicious, patrons can select the tag “subject guides” and then any one of Chelmsford’s 233 other related tags to create their own specialized search.
The Delicious account for the San Mateo Public Library in California is an example of a library that has arranged their Delicious tags and bookmarks by Dewey call number. I’m not sure that this is to benefit patrons so much as it is a benefit to the librarians.
In conclusion, using Delicious Social Bookmarking benefits both patrons and library staff by providing an easy and accessible way of organizing web content that has been selected by librarians and library professionals. It can be accessed at any computer with an Internet connection, and libraries can even integrate their Delicious tags into their own websites. Thank you.

Delicious Social Bookmarking in the Public Library

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