LIS 9763

So sorry for the late blog post!  It's just been one of those weeks where things just don't seem to be going my way.  Anyhow, here are my thoughts on this week's topic.
 
I've really come to appreciate the tools that we've explored in this course thus far, but I have to say that this week's tool - social bookmarking and tagging - is not one of them.  I know that many of the articles for this week try hard to explain why this tool is relevant and useful, but after using it for the past 6 weeks in this course, I don't believe that it really is.   For me, social bookmarking and tagging is too messy and inconsistent to really be useful as a day to day tool. 
 
I guess that my main 'beef' with this tool stems from the fact that I love consistency and organization.  It's probably just the librarian in me, but I like to know what terms to use when I'm looking for something online.  In the library world, search terms are predictable and they follow structure.  In the Delicious/Flickr/etc. world, this isn't the case.  Although I think the tool can be useful if one is going to use it as a place to bookmark sites for personal reference or to bookmark sites that can later be connected to another webpage using the 'link roll' feature, I can't see anyone actually using Delicious or any other such site to find materials on a topic that they're interested in. 
 
The tags used to identify sites are much too subjective for me. When searching for sites that might interest me using something like Delicious, I find myself trying to guess how others may label those subjects. Because tagging is wide open, language like slang must be taken into consideration when looking for materials. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really want to use search terms like ‘boudoir’ or ‘john’ if I’m searching for sites about bathrooms (not sure why I would need to do this search in the first place...but you get my point).
 
Another issue that I’ve encountered in Delicious is that some users are lazy when it comes to tagging. I’m not going to lie – I’m one of these people. I add a general tag or two to the item and that’s it. So, because people like this exist in the social bookmarking world, the sites that they’ve tagged are not necessarily going to add to the collective pot on a given subject. I think that many of the articles about social bookmarking and tagging have glorified the overall usefulness of the tool as a way for people to learn from each other. Yes...using sites Delicious can be fun and somewhat interesting (if you have lots of time to waste online) but I don’t think that it will ever be able to replace the organizational methods used by libraries today.