Who uses Delicious to keep track of business information sources?

[hyunduck]

I saw a pretty neat article in the latest issue of CRL News (April 2009): "Social bookmarking for library services: Bibliographic access through Delicious". Use of Delicious by librarians is not new, but I thought their approach was particularly interesting. They provided some ideas on using delicious to tag local resources to provide deep subject access; and how to easily incorporate Delicious content into web pages using JavaScript.

This was particularly interesting to me, because I've been thinking of ways to harness our collective knowledge of web sources relevant to business research, and reduce the seemingly redundant practice of maintaining our own list of web resources on individual subject guides.

What if we formed a common account/network of accounts on delicious, using very specific tags to recommend highly relevant web sources related to business research-- we could all then reap the benefits by incorporating the results on our local guides. A little bit of coordination could also mean staking out different industries to track. I have no idea if this would work and if so, how. But, does this sound interesting to anyone? Has anyone looked into this before? Are there gaps in my logic?

Let me know what you think...

[Donna Stanford]

Wow! This is a great idea! Although, the ALA has a good place to start:
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/brass/brassprotools...

I don't know how to use delicious, but if we could integrate the ALA list with delicious to start and then work out a way for all of us to update and enhance it, that would be amazing!!! :-)

I'm going to go look at delicious now. Maybe you could go look at the ALA list and we can meet back here to talk about it some more. I'll also email Laurie to see how best to put the results up on this group's pages. Anyone else willing to work with us on this?

[Laurie Bridges]

Are you suggesting the simple idea of coming up with a unique tag that we all use? For example if all the business librarians in the world who use delicious would simply use the tag buslib whenever they bookmark a site that would be of interest to other business librarians, then we could all find those sites easily? And track them as well with an RSS feed (I think we could track them with an RSS feed...not sure on that one). I am a regular user of delicious and my user name is bridgeslibrary.

[Neil Infield]

I use Delicious for both work and home bookmarking. However, we are looking into using a Wiki as a reference tool rather than Delicious.

Neil

[elizabeth stephan]

I use Delicious for business sites. I started a couple of years ago. I haven't posted them on my current subject guides but will this summer. I need to weed my tags, though. I have found that I have too many variants of the same thing. That's what happens when you get lazy, I suppose.

I like the idea of using a "buslib"-like tag that would allows us to find sites.

I'm eastephan on delicious.

[Donna Stanford]

I vote to start using "buslib" (without the quotes) as a tag for our business reference sites on delicious. All in favor, say Aye!

Or, just start using it! :-) It would be nice to hear confirmation from people that they plan on using it though...

[Neil Infield]

Aye!

[hyunduck]

fyi, there is an existing account with the username 'buslib' - I am guessing it is an account that was at some point created by a business librarian though not very current (latest addition was in '07)...

I also searched for the tag buslib and got 29 hits - so seems that some people are already using it.

[Laurie Bridges]

Maybe we could use "buslibrary"

[hyunduck]

I suppose we could still use buslib - just means other people might also use it (pro?con?). I've thought about using a random number like buslib119283 to reduce the likelihood of that happening - if that was preferred...

There is also the "share with" option -- if you add a new site you can share it with other users you know. If I share a site with you, you'd still need to accept it and add your own tags. Is this a preferred method for sharing but having control over your own set of sites?

So far my network consists of:
* bakerref
* bizlibrarian
* bridgeslibrary
* buslib
* eastephan
* strategicgrowth
* UTBusinessLibrarian

My username: hyunduck

[Donna Stanford]

I suppose we could set up a business librarian account and share the password...

[Roslyn Donald]

my username is SanMateoLibrary, if you'd like to add it to your network. However, that means you'd get non-business sites as well - this is the account all of our reference staff uses.

I prefer the "buslib" tag idea - that way you'd only get business sites. I'm going to add it to my business tags.

[Aleha]

Hi friends!

I used to work for Vancouver Public Library and they use delicious to manage all of their links: http://delicious.com/vancouver_public_library/businesseconomicsands... (for business ones only).

I am currently working on a project to highlight free online industry-specific resources useful for market research in Canada and am exploring delicious for that purpose. the UN for that account for the project will be - smallbizaccelerator and I would like to be included in your network and would be happy to try using the "share with" option.

I would also be open to perhaps working collaboratively to develop a taxonomy of tags beforehand and try co-managing a collection as an alternative using a shared account with shared password...? I am interested in exploring how something like that might work...

Aleha