Reflections on sharing web-page ‘Book-marks’.

If my computer forces a new font for every different post, despite my wishes, I might as well use my favourite! Anyway, first thoughts on ‘Social Book-marks’. I created a Del.icio.us [sic.] account with little trouble, and followed the 23 Things Oxford team’s instructions easily. Added a couple of sites of suppliers of English Fair Trade shirts, and St Stephen’s House Library out of curiosity to my ‘Network’. The latter’s links need checking, but the failed one about the Resurgence Greek Project was 2008. Fascinating to read about the Codex Sinaiticus...

Anyway, if sharing micro-computers, I can see how this would be useful, if one’s web-browser(s) can not remember your settings from one machine to the next. It might be a good way of searching for information as an alternative to Google: checking sites found by friends and acquaintances, whom you know to share your interests, will (should?) yield better results than the deluge of links from Google.

However, if one is a lecturer, does one use this, or teach courses from a web-site page, where these links would be provided openly? Students could share book-marks for their work (especially group projects), but how else could one use these? Using so few web-sites regularly (and then mostly to supplement other sources), I can remember them myself: B.B.C. Weather and broadcasts, Trip Advisor, and a couple of message-board sites. If doing a formal course, my needs would change, of course. I wonder how the young search for sites now.

For libraries, I would expect sites to be advertised via more formal web-pages giving links to subject areas, or a serendipitous discovery cited on a daily ‘blog’ for readers, to save them having to log into another site. Perhaps in the teaching of study-skills for readers, and how to use the library, these shared book-marks could be used as part of a self-directed course on a computer. I wonder how the number of ‘clicks’ and sites to read all this information can be reduced.

The whole rôle of how the young student to-day conducts research is ripe for study. Tagging is interesting, being ‘The Herd’s L.C.S.H. Authority file’. Will this yield a classification system at last orientated around how The Reader, not just The Librarian, thinks? The abolition of the ‘Basic Class’? A system of ‘browsing’ books, via Tags, on the computer, instead of the Open Shelves? I feel this could be the subject of a Monograph by Govinder Bunny, bibliophile extraordinary, and follower of Ranganathan and ‘The Way of the Book-Press’...