I think that social bookmarking has some great purposes. There's nothing worse than logging onto another computer only to realise that all your links are saved on your computer, so you'll have to find them all again. Delicious and the social bookmarking sites make accessing important sites easy. I love that it also allows for collaboration.
I've seen Delicious used in my previous workplace, as a tool to allow for library staff to tag recent information in their allocated fields and share it on the library website. I think that there is always the danger of inconsistency with tagging, for example people using lots of variations of the same words. My old workplace had to address this issue to make staff consistent so that we were not using an unnecessary amount of tags which could potentially be confusing.
I think social bookmarking has the potential to make collections more accessible for libraries. Some of the tags seen a little more intuitive than the OPAC search terms needed.
I am interested to know how your old workplace resolved the issue of consistency with tags- some sort of thesaurus??
ReplyDeleteYes you are correct :) they used a thesaurus of sorts. We were given the 'set' tags we should use. It definitely helped with avoiding too much inconsistency.
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