Monday, November 8, 2010

Del.icio.us

I have a severe bone to pick with tagging. Librarians do two things - organize and provide access to information. Part of organizing information is providing access through controlled vocabulary. Let's think about LOC subjects headings for a minute. Yes, one could make a case for finding bias within them. Sometimes they provide the user with a lot of options in terms of describing their subject. However, if one finds the proper subject heading and does a search in a library catalog, he or she will see ALL of the items that match that particular subject. It is only accomplished through controlled vocabulary. With no authority control, tagging helps perpetuate the information overload because everyone uses different words to describe items. If the user was given a thesaurus (think of the Ebsco's in the ERIC database) and was told "instead of "kitten" USE "cats," tagging would prove to be effective. That way, everyone who was looking for that particular item or subject would see EVERYTHING instead of searching for kittens, kitten, cat, cats, felines, etc.

Overall, Delicious was an interesting site but I failed to see how this is significantly different from Diigo. Both are wonderful ways to bookmark websites and provide many advantages to just bookmarking them on your computer.

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