I’m not a 23 Things dropout – I’ve just gotten out of sequence and failed to keep up with my blogging! During recent sessions with my laptop, I’ve been exploring del.icio.us and Twitter. Since Twitter is officially Thing 20 in Week 10, I’ll postpone my comments and insights about it. Besides, there’s plenty to say about social bookmarking.
I’m turning into a del.icio.us maniac. I’m so excited to be able to have a way to organize all the webpages I’ve been trying to note or save. How did I fail to find it before?
Although Library of Congress Subject Headings can seem intimidating, they’re also comforting. I’m somewhat hesitant about my own cataloging (tagging) skills. For instance, it seems to me that my one-word tags (even in a string) aren’t sufficiently descriptive. Because my tags tend to be general I imagine they’ll be useful for browsing purposes, but not necessarily for specific searches.
While I appreciate the participatory aspects of having everyone tagging books in Library Thing or the Ann Arbor District Library catalog, a different take can be seen on the webpage for teens of the Nashville Public Library. (http://www.library.nashville.org/teens/teenweb.asp) There’s a webcloud, and when you click on one of the terms you come to the del.icio.us bookmarks the librarians think teens might like to access about that topic. It’s almost like tagging and using del.icio.us for reference purposes. (The Nashville teen page also has librarian avatars. And they’re on Facebook and Flickr. Plenty to emulate, as the webpage for my own library has no web 2.0 features.)
Am I just a control freak, distrustful of unstructured folksonomies, and more comfortable with a system where expert librarians serve as gatekeepers? I have yet to exploit the social aspects of of del.icio.us; when I do perhaps I’ll expand my horizons enough to embrace Library 2.0 even more fully .
