Searching 2.0 Chapter 2 Sample

Getting Organized Using Delicious

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INTRODUCTION

Reference librarians, as with most other Internet us-ers, are constantly going back to sites that they’ve vis-ited before. One could argue that reference librariansmay do this even more than most. In fact, some sitesare continually accessed to answer those most com-mon questions—local statistics, value of a used car,what time zone a certain country is in, etc. Even theﬁrst Web browsers offered ways to mark a site in or-der to return to it easily. That method was, and stillis, known as bookmarking. However, as the Web be-comes more and more complex and the needs of us-ers also become increasingly complex, bookmarksas we’ve known them may no longer be the solution.Then again, the “better” solution I offered in the pastmay also no longer be up to the task. In this chapter,I’ll walk you through the online world of bookmarks,through static “resource Web pages,” to the solutionI offer today, the online social bookmarking serviceknown as Delicious.

Bookmarks

One of the ﬁrst things we learn to do in a browser,beyond using the back button, is how to set a book-mark. Bookmarks give us the ability to return quicklyto an online resource without having to rememberan often long and cryptic URL. In my previous book,

Using the Internet as a Reference Tool

(Neal-Schuman,2001), I discussed the following problems with usingbookmarks to store previously found resources foruse at the reference desk:

Chapter 2

Getting Organized Using Delicious

• Bookmarks are rarely well organized. WheneverI’ve asked a room full of librarians how many of them have taken the time to organize their book-marks (usually hundreds of them) into logical fold-ers, generally less than 20 percent of those in theroom raise their hands. The rest of us have just onelong list of bookmarks without any convenient wayto find any specific one.<1>• Bookmarks were restricted to one computer. If youhave multiple computers at your reference desk,the bookmarks on one might not be on another,thus making it inconvenient to find the informationyou’re looking for if the bookmark you need is ona computer being used by another librarian.• Bookmarks were restricted to the staff computers.Unless a staff member took the time to copy thebookmark files from the staff computers and placethem on the patron computers, the patrons in thebuilding were forced to speak to someone at thedesk to be able to take advantage of the librarian-created bookmarks.• Bookmarks placed on library computers are notavailable to remote-access patrons. In this age of continuing mobility of information access, librariesneed to make the information they provide ac-cessible outside of the physical boundaries of thelibrary building.

Web Pages

In

Using the Internet as a Reference Tool

, I offered asolution to all of these problems: the library should

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create a Web page (or group of pages, dependingon the number of resource links needed) to provideaccess to those links. This solution, at the time,solved all of the previously mentioned problems inthe following ways:

• Web pages were generally well organized in a logi-cal manner whether alphabetically or by subject.• Web pages are available to all devices containinga Web browser. So, regardless of which computersomeone is using (public, staff, a patron’s laptop)or even if using another device such as a smart-phone, the links are available in any location, atany time.

I continued in the book with several excellent ex-amples of libraries implementing this exact solution.Most libraries of at least a moderate size had or havesince created such Web pages. However, even thoughthis solution at the time was a good one, it still hadone major problem: you needed to learn some mark-up—HTML (hypertext markup language) or XHTML(extensible hypertext markup language)—to imple-ment it. Though I think everyone should still learnat least some basic Web page creation skills, today aneven better solution not only solves this last naggingproblem but also provides additional features that no Web page I described back in 2000 could ever haveprovided. That solution is Delicious.

DELICIOUS

Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/) is a “socialbookmarking” service that “allows users to tag, save,manage and share web pages from a centralizedsource. With emphasis on the power of the commu-nity, Delicious greatly improves how people discover,remember and share on the Internet.”

<2> At its most basic level, Delicious (currentlyowned by Yahoo!) stores your bookmarks for youon its Web site, allowing anyone to access thosebookmarks from any Web-accessible device

withoutany markup knowledge required

. Beyond this beneﬁt,Delicious offers several additional features, such asthe following, that allow it to be a more ﬂexible solu-tion than a static Web page:

• Delicious bookmarks can be added to your ac-count with just a few mouse clicks.• A Delicious account can be shared by multipleusers, thus allowing you to have a single accountfor the entire library staff, at the branch or systemlevel.• Bookmarks in one Delicious account are automati-cally cross-referenced with all other Delicious useraccounts, creating connections among all of itsusers.• Anyone can subscribe to RSS (really simple syndi-cation) feeds from Delicious and receive automaticnotiﬁcation of new bookmarks.• Delicious bookmarks are easily searchable, allow-ing for less structure and more free-form organiza-tion through the use of tags.

Let’s take a look at each one of these in a littlemore detail. Even if you had extensive HTML knowl-edge, updating a Web page takes at least a few min-utes to accomplish. You need to enter the usernameand password for the server, log in, find the correctfile, open it, make your changes, save the changes,and log out. This process assumes that you have thecorrect level of access on your server. If you don’t,you may face the situation of needing to submit yourchange to the appropriate person in the IT (informa-tion technology) department and then wait a few daysbefore your change appears. With Delicious, as I’llshow later in this chapter, all you need to do to add anew bookmark is click on an icon, wait for the “additem” window to appear, and click “OK.” This is amuch simpler and faster procedure than updating a Web page. As with Web pages, Delicious accounts can beshared among staff members by giving them the ap-propriate username and password. However, sincethis service is hosted by a third party, there’s no needto get your IT department involved, especially if youhave one that is loathe to give out server usernamesand passwords to nontechnical staff.Delicious stores all of the links submitted by theirusers in a large database. The benefit to this method isthat Delicious is then able to track which users haveadded which links. With this information, Deliciousis able, not only to tell you that 368 other users havealso added the same link that you’ve added, but alsoto link you to those other users’ accounts. This is the“social” aspect of the service: users who add the same

Getting Organized Using Delicious

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bookmarks are interested in the same topics. Thisfunction allows a user to “browse” related resources,closely mirroring the serendipity that people onceassociated with card catalogs and now bemoan theloss of in modern-day online catalogs.Through the use of RSS, patrons can subscribeto your library’s Delicious account and receive near-automatic notification of new bookmarks added toyour account. Through the use of “tags” (discussednext) patrons can also use RSS feeds to receive no-tification of new bookmarks on particular topics of interest. When you add a new bookmark to your Deliciousaccount, the link title and URL fields are automati-cally populated. You are also offered two additionalfields: notes and tags. The notes field allows youto enter a narrative description of the page you’rebookmarking. The tags field allows you to add ad-ditional keywords that you wish to have associatedwith this bookmark. Figure 2-1 shows my Deliciousaccount with items tagged

searching2.0

. (All of thelinks presented in this book have been tagged withthis keyword.) Let’s go ahead and walk you throughthe creation of a Delicious account and the basicworkings of what the service has to offer.

Creating a Delicious Account

The ﬁrst step to using Delicious is to create a useraccount. To do so, open Delicious’s homepage (www.delicious.com; see my Delicious homepage in Figure2-2) and click on the link in the upper right cornerlabeled “Join now.” Choose a username and pass-word, enter your e-mail address, and click “register.”(Feel free to create your own personal account forpractice. Eventually you’ll want to create an accountfor your library with an appropriate username, suchas the name of the library.) Once logged in, you’ll beon the “install bookmarking tools” page.

Adding Bookmarks

There are four main ways for adding bookmarks toyour account: via importing, via “Save a new book-

Figure 2-1 The bookmarks for this book as shown in Delicious