Ok, I'm back from my wonderful adventures through the looking glass (wait, that might have been someone else) ...
Anyway, straight into it. I have to admit I'm not a big fan of Delicious (I know, I'm forgoing the full stops). Not to say that it doesn't have its uses, just that it doesn't suit me in particular. I don't use multiple computers, so I don't need to have a central point for my favourites. The format and layout also tends to annoy me. Maybe its my profession speaking, but a collection of links that - on first glance - lacks any organisation or coherence tends to make me automatically ignore them. Clouds can be useful, but only up to a point. They can often get out of control, so that looking through them is akin to putting your hand in a lucky dip. And don't get me started on the illegibility of blue text and pink highlighting.
Well, that's the negatives out of the way. "But, Hellene, didn't you like anything?" I hear you say. Yes, actually. Delicious does have its uses. Mainly this is that it allows you to point out sites that others may find useful from a particular perspective through the use of tags. Personally, I like the idea of free association tags. Unlike things like LCSH, tags utilise language actually in use. They allow for the use of slang, colloquialisms, abbreviations etc. that people actually search by - no matter how much we tell them not to.
From a personal perspective, its good to type in a few terms to find random sites that others with similar interests liked. But it must be remembered that what you find is just that - random. This is not an authoritative search of the interweb, but a search of what people like.
Obviously this is good for librarians who wish to make links that they found useful available to others (possibly for clients to add links as well). My own preference though would be to amalgamate all the links for NSW public libraries into one account, so that there is less duplication. The links that one library is likely to find useful will undoubtedly be found useful by other libraries.
Anyway, that's my rather incoherent two cents.
1 comment:
It took me a while to use delicious. My account sat for about 5 months with only 2 links. I now use it to collect reports to read for work (my biggest tag it 'toread'), interesting blog posts to refer back to, and sites which I want to monitor (but which don't have rss).
Ellen (PLS)
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