Monday 2 August 2010

Mmm Delicious

Apart from the fact that whenever I see the word 'Delicious' I think of the Mexican town my housemate comes from (best place name ever: Delicias in the state of Chihuahua!)



I was also quite excited to explore Delicious as from what I'd heard I thought it could be very useful in libraries.

This is true to some extent - I love the ability to create lists of, and share, useful links, I can see Delicious being a really helpful resource when trying to get useful links out to library users. I liked the fact that you can update the list constantly - keeping links up to date without changing how users access the list of links. As more and more resources become web based Delicious could have an important role to play. I also liked being able to add descriptive tags to links.

However, I'm not so sure about the usefulness of social tagging on Delicious for libraries. Being able to create an authoritative list of resources seems to me to have the purpose of helping students avoid clicking the first hit on Google approach to research. The social tagging on Delicious is no doubt brilliant if you're trying to find out more information about subjects of interest but for academic research, like so much of Web 2.0, it is only as good as the people doing the tagging and should therefore be treated with slight caution because of this.

1 comment:

  1. Being from Mexico myself, it never crossed my mind the association of Delicias and Delicious until I read your post! Now I can't get it away :)

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