Online Learning Journal Activity: Social Bookmarking

Activity Description:

Set up an account a social bookmarking service such as Diigo - https://www.diigo.com/ - or Delicious - http://delicious.com/

Explore the functionality for storing, tagging and sharing your bookmarked resources. Get started - go out and tag a few resources!

If you wish to use this task as one of your three OLJ tasks. You could write a short evaluation (no more than 350 words) of your use of social bookmarking - include a critical evaluation of the effectiveness of different features and/or functions, as well as a brief statement on the different ways an information organisation may be able to utilise such a tool to support information services, learning and/or collaboration of users and/or employees.

Diigo (https://www.diigo.com/index) makes a much better, more appealing first impression. Delicious (https://delicious.com) pages are mostly text blocks, vs the concise, readable style of the Diigo website. Much easier to understand how I can use Diigo, which, especially as Delicious does not support Opera, the browser I have been using for this class.

Two use cases come to mind most readily. The first is when working in an information institution, possibly as part of a working group with specified goals, they might be useful in building a collection of relevant resources for the use of that team or even the organisation overall. I can imagine, for example, a public library having its institutional account open on reference computers with a collection of resources relevant to the area - indices of ESL study groups, for example, or home pages of local businesses and anything else related to common patron queries.

The other use case which comes to mind is, if Diigo or Delicious support some sort of widget or external sharing capability then a library could place a staff-curated feed on its webpage, or share selected items to a Facebook or Twitter account.

Creating a Diigo account is quick and easy, as is installing the Diigo bookmarklet and extension, after doing some searching to verify it is indeed official (Opera extension, 2013).

After experimenting for a few minutes it continues to be a clear winner. I tried adding some library but not class-related pages I've been meaning to write about and that was easy too. If I want to tweet or otherwise share pages as they are added, then adding via the bookmarklet seems to be the way to go (Findley, T., 2013). Sharing pages after they've been added to the library took longer to work out but is also straightforward once known. Annotations are also easy to create and share, and should be invaluable for collaborative use (demonstrated with Rundle, H., 2013: https://diigo.com/01jlib).

Conclusion: Diigo seems to be an excellent tool for the use-cases envisioned before exploration, whether building a project resource collection, an workplace knowledge-base, or building a curated collection of links to be shared judiciously over a library's social media presences at some later time.

References

Findley, T. [metatrish]. (2014, February 02). Developing an Ethic for Digital Fossils - The Integrative Paleontologists blogs.plos.org/paleo/2013/12/… via @diigo [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/metatrish/status/430132064088633344

Opera extension. (2013). Retrieved from http://feedback.diigo.com/forums/76211-ideas/suggestions/4795428-opera-extension

Rundle, H. (2013). What we talk about when we talk about public libraries. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Retrieved from http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/