Delicious launched a complete redesign of their site a couple days ago. There are a lot of new features and better navigation. And, you can now get there using the delicious.com url.
There’s a rundown of all the new features in the What’s New page on delicious, and ReadWriteWeb has a pretty good writeup of the changes.
Hot on the heels of Corey’s great work with del.icio.us at the Foster Business Library, I wanted to post about another use for del.icio.us, just completed this quarter. UW Bothell faculty Gray Kochhar-Lindgren and I, with the help of Leslie Bussert, created an assignment for an interdisciplinary inquiry course in which students used del.icio.us to thoughtfully save, categorize, describe, and share information resources.
Through internet research and emerging UW Libraries’ tools, students created a research repository online that was required to be at least 20 resources deep. The “bookmark & share” widget that has been added to UW’s WorldCat catalog, for example, enables students to seamlessly post specific research resources to del.icio.us and annotate them. The faculty and I recently evaluated the students’ work, and are currently working on compiling their reflections and feedback about the assignment. I look forward to reporting on the success of using this free web 2.0 technology to enhance student research.
I recently discovered ibreadcrumbs, which is specifically created for online research and collaboration. This will be an interesting tool to track. -AH
I just finished a project to move all of our business related web links into del.icio.us. Previously, they had been in a MySQL database with Perl scripts that I wrote almost eight years ago to build the web pages of categorized listings. I also had a web based admin module that was also written in Perl that was getting long in the tooth.
I finally got tired of dealing with my clunky admin module and decided to look for a better way. I found this article in Library Journal: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us and looked at the page at the College of New Jersey Library for inspiration. From there it was just a matter of setting up an account for the library in del.icio.us and bookmarking and tagging all 440(!) sites from the database that we had collected over the years.
The end result is a collection of links that is much easier to maintain and, more important, much easier for me to give to someone else to maintain. I’m able to use the link roll function to pull in the links into a static page in the Libraries web space. And, it has the flexibility to create many more discrete collections of links and could make it easier to create situationally specific collections such as for a particular class or assignment, or even for a reference transaction.
Links:
Foster Business Library - Business Resources on the Web
International Business Resources page with del.icio.us links
International Business links in del.icio.us
Foster Business Library del.icio.us collection (http://del.icio.us/FosterLibrary)
I know, del.icio.us and “social bookmarking” is kind of old hat, but how did we ever get along with out it? I use Del.icio.us a lot and keep finding new uses, especially in managing and sharing meta-information on the go. If you’ve got clients (maybe faculty or students or plain ol’ library colleagues) , you might be interested in the short screencast from Liz Davis below. Especially powerful is the ability to create “for:” tags to forward a link to a specific person in your network. Ranking right up there with being the first-in-the-world to tag an online resource in del.icio.us is the first time you realize someone else has put you in their network and is ‘following’ your additions ’cause your stuff is *good*! Anyway, check it out: