Tag you're it

Searching del.icio.us: Perhaps I just don't have the patience. I've tried this site before with limited success, and didn't find it any more helpful through this excercise for finding the web site I need. Fun for browsing, especially if you know the people tagging (the social aspect.)

In theory there is great power to the idea of a folksonomy, but as a self-styled "expert searcher" I think I feel the way many librarians do - there is still some work to be done before this will work for pointed, driven research. I did start an account. I'll try to be good about adding to it. The idea of portable favorites is appealing.

Some of the power of a social bookmarking site like this could be harnessed by a group with a similar interest - so I see potential for something like a reference staff, if all were commited to the work, making use of something like this to have portable access to often used web sites.

While del.icio.us has not worked well for me, I am a proponent of folksonomies, or less formally, tagging. I think letting users define search terms has tremendous potential. I'd love to see the day we let library users tag items in our catalog. The potential for increasing access, as well as the added benefits of creating an interactive community of users, make this an option we as libraries have to explore.

My fear is that we will study the issue for so long it will be too late to jump on the boat. The LibraryThing concept, providing a seperate and already built folksonomy to plug into the catalog, is interesting but does not go far enough. We need to allow our users, those searching our catalog and using the items in our libraries, to begin providing terms for searches.