Bookmarking tools

Finally! Something I've used before. I have used Delicious for my personal bookmarks for quite a while now, and get on really well with it. I find the layout very attractive, and tags make organising things really easy. My experience with it inspired me to create a set of King's Library bookmarks, which were initially just intended for staff use, as a way of sharing bookmarks without manually adding them to the browser of every staff machine. Having gradually developed a whole set of ebooks bookmarks, mostly linking to sites offering free full text access, we then realised that these might well be of interest to our students, so the link has now been promoted via our Facebook page and also appears on the electronic resources page of our website. This year, whilst checking booklists for the Pembroke-King's summer school programme, we discovered that quite a few of the works featured were freely available online, and so I set about creating a new set of PKP bookmarks (see image below) with links organised by course title.

King's Library's PKP bookmarks

We have advertised this set of bookmarks on posters in the library and on the user guides given to the summer school students, in the hope that it will lessen the demand for print copies of the titles featured. This is particularly important, as we have over 300 summer school students this year! 

Diigo is a tool I have no experience with. I have now created an account and imported all my Delicious bookmarks into it. This transaction happened smoothly, so now, if nothing else, I have a duplicate set of bookmarks which can act as a backup to my Delicious ones. The layout seems similarly clear and easy to navigate, and I like the ability to highlight bits of webpage text to include with the bookmarks. However, I'm not so keen on the adverts that pop up above and between sets of bookmarks. These adverts add unnecessary clutter and make the display less attractive, so I'd be less inclined to use this tool to create sets of bookmarks for our Library. Only the pay versions are ad-free.

I decided to download the ReaditLater app for my ipod touch, and managed to do this without too much trouble, although installing the bookmarklet on the ipod's Safari browser was a bit fiddly. Once I had done that, I successfully bookmarked an article and downloaded it for offline use, but subsequently discovered that downloaded articles will only remain on the app if you leave it permanently logged in - log out and everything you have stored is deleted. I suppose there is no harm in leaving the app logged in, but I just usually prefer to log out of something when I am not using it. Still, this is not a major issue, especially if the app is used simply to keep track of things to read, rather than as a place for long term storage. After all, other applications such as Evernote can perform the latter function. I like the fact that if I wanted to, I could bookmark articles on my computer, and then sync them with my ipod.

I think social bookmarking tools in general are a great way for libraries to point people towards useful resources, and I love the flexibility of organising things by tags. One link can have many tags and appear in various different sets of bookmarks. Doing this Thing has now inspired me to tidy up and reorganise both my own and the Library's Delicious bookmarks  ... goes away to do this ......