I have used Delicious in the past and I have casually returned to it from time to time. The portability of bookmarks is a nice feature but it is not something that is an absolute necessity for me. The one featue I have taken advantage of is that Delicious is an excellent way to tap into the collective brain of information professionals/librarians. Social bookmarking can expand your thinking on research approach and enlarge the number of resources to access. It also carries a much higher quality relationship between search and results than a standard search engine query.
An example of how this is accomplished is to search Delicious for noted school librarian Joyce Valenza.
You find not only here tagged items but also those who tagged her. A pretty nice jumping off point for expanding searches into school librarianship and Information Literacy.
Another information resource in school media is Marcia Mardis. By searching her name in Delicious I was able to follow someone’s tag to
an interview on best practices.
On a more expansive search to a related topic is was able to locate many tags under Information_Literacy. This illustrates that with certain topics Delicious offers the best results because if experts or a large group of informed professionals are tagging a site then it likely has great merit.
In using Delicious with students I will stress both the link management aspects and the power of using social bookmarks. Students - well most people, really, tend to storm into Google or Bing to begin a research assignment. For some time I have been stressing to them they need to select the best tool for their need. Often I will do this in conjunction with training them in accessing databases. I will tell them during the course of the training session that everyone Googles but that is often not the best tool for the student researcher. Deleicious offers a way to access the web using the eyes and expertise of people who will likely be much more knowledgable than they on the topic at hand. Using tags that coincide with keywords the students need to generate to access databases I can show them that they can borrow the expertise of others who have gone searching for their topic before via the web. Work smarter not harder is a theme that use frequently with students. Delicious offers just such an opportunity.
