Thing #7 Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us has been one of my favorite "cool tools" for a long time. I save so many websites, blog posts, and information sources for use in...well, everywhere. My procedure for transporting my "Favorites", from my browser, was to upload/download the file to my flashdrive and carry it back and forth to work, when I travel, and to use on multiple computers at home. Not a bad method, but time consuming.

Thank goodness we are moving to the age of less hard drive capacity dependence, and towards storage on the web. Of course, I've been around long enough to NEVER depend on a hard drive, disk, network server, or web-based server to store my precious and/or important data. I always back everything up, regardless of the promises of data storage integrity.

Del.icio.us has been a godsend. Learning to tag and catergorize has been the key to management of my links. But, links do "die" and/or change, as well. I do want to have active, useful links. I have found a great post, Absolutely del.icio.us Tools Collection, with lists of official and 3rd party del.icio.us tools for everything: archiving, backing up, cleaning and verifying links, and tools for using del.icio.us on blogs, websites, and other collaborative platforms.

As far as uses in the library...well, there are so many. The first, and most obvious, use is to build a resource of curriculum subject links for students to use in research. Time is probably the only issue -- time to search for useful links to populate a useful database (to make it valuable enough to discourage "googling") and time to update/maintain. Another use -- teach kids to use it to store their resources for projects, papers, and research. What a great "file cabinet" for all their links -- and, it is something that is portable (school, home, public library, etc.) for them as well.