Test Drive #6 - Folksonomies & Tagging

What an odd word... "Folksonomies". It means "an unstructured categorization scheme". Seen in light of web 2.0 and tags, it becomes a valuable way to make notable websites easier to find when needed again in the future.

After watching the Commoncraft video, it became clear that bookmarking sites like http://delicious.com/ can avoid the hassle of different "Favourites" lists saved across several different computers, by all being accessible from one place on the net, from any computer. This would save a great deal of trouble and avoid such possible problems as individual computer failure causing the loss of precious bookmarks.

Therefore, I saw an immediate benefit for my personal bookmarks and joined Del.icio.us! Here is the link to my page: http://delicious.com/Cyberspace_Librarian.

This kind of bookmarking of sites would be extremely useful for librarians when answering reference enquiries. From my own perspective as a Reference Librarian in a public library, I investigated this example. Take a client enquiry about a particular topic like the "Australian Gold Rush" for a primary school student assignment. The resulting search of Del.icio.us got 36 hits and most were government sites, considered reliable for assessment citation. A comparison search on Google gave 116000 hits of varying relevance. I think the real benefit here for librarians is that the Del.icio.us sites are recommended by others who are non-biased, unlike Google who are profit driven.

Libraries using bookmarking sites would benefit not only the library staff and patrons, but the wider online community with the sharing of the sites kept there.