IL Thing #5 Delicious

Tagging is another concept I had a difficult time understanding the first go around. Think of the game tag and apply the concept of the game to the Internet and web 2.0 tools to be more specific. If you like a particular blog or website you would usually bookmark it on your PC, but as John points out in his blog posting: http://www.beelerspace.com/index.php?p=890 people tend to use more than one PC. Delicious allows users to organize their bookmarks in a much more extensive approach.

Delicious can also be used to create pathfinders to useful and authoritative websites, scholarly online journals, or digital documents within one specific library. As Grassian and Kaplowitz (2009) explain, tagging allows users a more active approach to using library resources in a more social setting along with other library users. Thus, a library could create an open social bookmarking for patrons so that the patron can simply focus on searching for the appropriate resource and share tags with others.

In fact, when I searched for information literacy on Delicious I found an abundance of libraries and organizations participating in social bookmarking and applying it to information literacy. For example, the UCLA library uses tagging to create How to Guides:

http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/11605.cfm

The UCLA How to Guide provides some of the following tagging categories:

Web Evaluation

Web 2.0 Guides

Web Searching

Using Information Effectively

In addition, here is another great site that has made the most out of tagging and applied it to information literacy and library instruction:

http://www.libraryinstruction.com/info-lit.html

I think that this is a very practical way for libraries to use social bookmarking because today's user is more technologically savvy. Tagging is another quick and accessible way for patrons to learn about a specific topic and for librarians or teachers to instruct information literacy.

Grassian, S. E. & Kaplowitz, J.R. (2009). Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.