Thing #13 It's del.icio.us

If I had only done this sooner...

I had a great use for del.icio.us. A customer wanted some info that was on a webpage. It was a webpage that had a database on it so the url was one of those hundred- character- long -squiggly-filled web addresses, and it wasn't going to be easy to find this page again. I showed him on the reference desk, but he wanted to search the database on one of the cybraryn pcs. If I had signed up for de.icio.us, I could have bookmarked this and then gone onto the cybraryn pc and used de.icio.us to call it up.


I like tagging. It lets the person who created the document to be the one who comes up with the search terms. Controlled vocabulary is slow to change. There's nothing more frustrating that trying to use controlled vocabulary to find a new trend and discover that it's classified under some archane term. However, I do think that controlled vocabulary has it's advantages. All those 'see also' reference are quite useful and the heirarchical structure of controlled vocabulary makes searching easier.


In the future, I hope that we'll be able to figure out a way to combine the best of both worlds.