Tagging

Tagging can be a little addicting, I will admit. I can think of a few ways in which I might find del.icio.us helpful for my own personal use. One of the links on the krl2pt0 page (I read so many that I can't remember which one anymore!) suggested that it would be a way to sort cooking links and recipes. Ping! My lightbulb turned on. I've always saved bookmarks for recipes and knitting patterns and other useless things into countless folders and then can never find them again. Being able to search for the one I want or create multiple tags (rather than having to categorize a webpage into one folder or another) seems to be really useful.

I didn't even realize it before that point, but I'd already been using tags to help sort some of my emails in my gmail account - like when I was a bridesmaid last summer and the bride kept sending us daily updates. I didn't want to save them all in my inbox but I was able to apply a tag to each email and then see them all quickly if I ever needed to from my saved folder. Pretty cool!

But, in my initial impressions, I'm not so sure how this would play into my work life at KRL. I think maybe reference queries might get some help from using del.icio.us to quickly sort through websites or articles on a topic, since they display a measure of "popularity". But at the circ desk?? I'm not sold yet as to how this would help. I suppose, as the video tutorial suggested, allowing patrons to create tags on our library catalog might help to find some of the items that are currently available using only library lingo (eg. "cookery" rather than "cookbooks"). But I'm not sure we're quite at that level yet.

Anyhoo - I've tagged a few random sites that I tend to visit most often, or that I would visit if I had some time to waste... Check them out - maybe you'll find a few to tag yourself! http://del.icio.us/betsyc

PS - I'm not sure I really like del.icio.us itself. The site seems really hard to navigate and its visual style makes the links I'm searching for hard to find. Has anyone else encountered this? Or maybe I just haven't gotten used to it yet.