I set up a Delicious account two years ago for my 2nd
TL course through UBC. I was right away impressed with being able to save my bookmarks
in a cloud. I have used Delicious many times when teaching in the library. It
is easy to pull up my Delicious account and access websites and Youtube videos
that I want to show my students. The funny thing is, I have never once searched
on Delicious to find websites related to a topic that I am teaching or
interested in. This week is the first time that I have tried that feature. I decided to use the same topic that I chose
for my mini digital library for this course. I found many of the same websites
that I had come across when doing research for this library. But, the
number of actual hits I got when I typed in “Ancient Egypt” was 3266. I included the quotation marks to narrow down
my search. Without the quotation marks the number of hits was 4720!
This is the
list of related tags that showed up: tags that other Delicious users have come
up with on their own.
In this environment, I don’t think that it is a real
problem not having a consistent, controlled environment. The results retrieved
for “Ancient Egypt” on the Delicious site are already much pared down from
the results that would have resulted from a Google search. I did not expect to
be presented with a short list of excellent web resources, so what I saw was a bonus.
However, in a library situation, I would expect to find all of the available
resources show up in my search for “Ancient Egypt” as I know that close
attention should be paid to subject headings when cataloguing resources. And, I would expect these resources to be good resources since they were chosen by the teacher-librarian.
I will
continue to use Delicious to store my bookmarks to allow me easy access to them, wherever I am. However, I don’t know that I will conduct many searches on this social bookmarking
site for topics of interest for research projects with my students. I much
prefer specialized search engines such as DMOZ or Sweetsearch where I know that
a website has been evaluated following certain criteria and will only show
up in searches if deemed a quality website.
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