This week's assignment in the Library 2.0 class is to explore del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. Since I am not one to use the bookmark feature on my browser, I was highly skeptical about the usefulness of this site. After exploring it, however, I can see some instances where it would be useful as a sharing tool for bookmarks in the library setting.

My account address is: http://delicious.com/biblioteks . I added the websites from the ABCs of DNA class that I took last Friday - I figured those would be useful to others, and I wanted to see if this would be a suitable sharing tool. I had to enter each url separately - too bad there doesn't seem to be a 'bulk upload' tool like Flickr has for photos! Since I was entering them off of a PowerPoint presentation handout, I would have liked to upload them all and sort out the tags later.

I also noticed that I can't put this set of bookmarks into their own category on the page - it appears that they will just be listed with all future bookmarks by 'most recently added', or 'alphabetically'. In the early days of browsers, one could at least create headers within the list of bookmarks (not sure if that is still the case - I really don't use the bookmark feature anymore). I will go back and add the class title to the tags so I can search and find/share the set that way.

It was interesting to see how few people had our library homepage included in their account. We have talked about adding a 'share this' feature on our web pages in the next generation of our web site - this may increase the number of folks that include our link.

After starting up the account, I will take some time during the rest of the week to check out other folks' list of links. I will also check to see what sort of archiving is available for users' accounts, after the crash last week of another bookmarking site.