Del.icio.us!

After struggling with browser bookmarks for a long time (I use one computer at work and another at home! I can't always get to my favorite browser! And what do I do when I'm at a computer in a library I'm visiting?), I learned, somewhere, about Del.icio.us.  (And I learned to use it, after a fashion, a long time before I could remember where to put those dots.)  Personally, I think its first-place showing in the Bookmarking category was well deserved--and I haven't even explored the whole social side of it.

What I like:  I am independent of any one computer, any one browser, any one anything, except for my own personal memory that, so far, supplies my Del.icio.us username and password when needed.  (In connection with this, I will divulge a little slip of the mental cogs--not my first, nor, alas, my last--wait--what were we talking about again?  Oh yes.  I have to admit I had the thought, "Okay, this seems great, but what if my internet connection is down?"  But I'll say in my defense, I did remember before too long that the purpose of a bookmarking tool is to mark--wait for it!--internet resources.  So my trusty, unwieldy, ill-maintained Opera bookmark file, in the event of a giant hairball in the internet tubes, would be just about as useful as Del.icio.us, except that it would let me look at the names of all the sites I couldn't get to.  Duh.)

What is taking some getting used to:  Tags, rather than a file structure, as a way to access my content.  I'm a librarian!  Not only a librarian, but a cataloger!  I want--I need--I demand hierarchical ordering and a controlled vocabulary!  Well, there are a couple of answers to that.  One is that my Opera bookmarks--at least as I used them--gave me no searchable subject terms at all.  Another is that I can "control" my own vocabulary to some extent, and I do, in fact, construct my tags with an eye to, and sometimes in line with, LC Subject Headings terminology.  (Though that brings up other questions.  Am I limiting the usefulness of my tags if I follow different conventions than most Del.icio.us users--by putting nouns in the plural for instance, LCSH-style, rather than the singular?)  And still another point is that I can, in fact, create a hierarchy of sorts by grouping my tags.

I think Del.icio.us, or something similar, might find some very interesting and creative uses in libraries.  Libraries have created bibliographies, reading guides, bookmarks, and pathfinders for years.  What is Del.icio.us but a Web-based electronic version of these?  And if ITPLD, for example, can join the social worlds of MySpace and Facebook, why not the social world of Del.icio.us?