Feed COW some del.icio.us links
Cheryl Becker & Nichole Fromm
South Central Library System
12/5/06
Cheryl Becker & Nichole Fromm
South Central Library System
12/5/06
How do you say it?
di-lish-uh s
What is it?
"bookmarks on steroids"
social bookmarking service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks
Let's take a look: http://del.icio.us/
It's also free. It was created in 2003 & was bought by Yahoo! in December 2005.
What's a "tag"?
A tag is a label that a user assigns to a bookmark. Tags are freely chosen.
Examples
All SCLS's bookmarks tagged "jobs": http://del.icio.us/scls/jobs
Everyone's bookmarks tagged "jobs": http://del.icio.us/tag/jobs
More courtesy Joy Schwarz at Winnefox:
"Users tag or label each of their bookmarks with multiple freely-chosen keywords; this is also called folksonomy. These are not Sears or Library of Congress subject headings."
The first example, the International Relations Subject Guide, looks just like a "normal" web page. But it's pulling content from many sources using RSS feeds, which is something you don't have to worry about other than to know it's very, very useful.
"Library Info" is fed in from their news weblog. "Reference Works" and "Databases" is regular HTML. "New Books" are fed in from the OPAC. "Journal Articles" are fed in from RSS Tables of Contents. And "Web links" are fed in from their del.icio.us account.
The second example is from Menasha Public Library. The librarians there have entered all their web links into del.icio.us, tagged them, and "bundled" them into subject areas. This is how they look in del.icio.us.
The third example is just another way to show the magic of RSS. In it, like in the first example, all of our bookmarks about "jobs" are fed onto a page, and look like they belong there. (The yellow is just for emphasis.)
Easy to:
These are some of the features we wanted for the "COW" project, and del.icio.us meets all of the most important ones.
Furthermore, if our libraries use del.icio.us, other users of the service will stumble across our bookmarks and discover quality, authoritative information. The sad reality is, not many people start looking for information by going to their library's web site (40% of Americans polled by OCLC didn't even know their library had a web site). This is a way to go where they are.
Some of the things we wanted in our dream of the perfect "COW" tool are things we can't get with del.icio.us alone.
del.icio.us can't tell us how many people see our bookmarks, but if we feed them onto our web pages we can see how much those pages are used. del.icio.us will tell us how many other people have bookmarked pages that we have bookmarked.
There's no built-in patron feedback mechanism (like comments) but we can provide an email link or form for such feedback.
There's no built-in rating system (for assigning 1-5 "stars").
There's no behind-the-scenes place for people working on the project to share information. However, we can continue using Basecamp for this purpose.
There's no out-of-the-box automatic way to check for dead or broken links, but there might be other options we can look into.
We hope this group will adopt the del.icio.us idea. Then the Reference Committee can approve, and it will be reported to PLAC.
December 2006-January 2007: Write Selector Job Descriptions (Subcommittee)
February: Recruit Selectors using the guidelines and description of project (SCLS)
March: Write selection and maintenance policy (Selectors and Nichole and Cheryl)
April: Create list of tags (Selectors and Nichole)
May: Write and test Procedures (Selectors and Nichole)
June-August:
September: Publicize to all SCLS libraries & help them use links on their own sites (SCLS)
Ongoing: Continue entering links and making available to interested libraries (SCLS and Selectors)
Questions?
Contact Cheryl or Nichole.
This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. Thanks to Jessamyn West for the layout & stylesheet; Scott Beale / Laughing Squid for the background image; Joy Schwarz for del.icio.us background info. See source code for details.
