Thing 5: Delicious

The social bookmarking site Delicious allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorise your bookmarks. Many users find that the real power of Delicious is in the social network aspect, which allows you to see how other users have tagged similar links and also discover other websites that may be of interest to you.

Libraries encourage staff to set up their own Delicious accounts to bookmark their favourite websites to help them keep up to date with best practise, to use as a research tool and answer customer queries.

Here is an optional discovery resource that you may find useful:

• Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users
  

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look at Social Bookmarking in Plain English and create a Del.icio.us account for yourself.
   
   
2. Explore the site options and add at least 5 bookmarks eg Auckland City Libraries website. Note: try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorise this reference?
   
   
3. Post a comment below about your experience and thoughts about this tool. Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance, or is it just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? What did you like...dislike...what surprised you...do you think you will go back?