Here at the RUBRIC project we share information a lot. One of the ways we share links to websites and other information of interest is via del.icio.us. The del.icio.us website is one of those “web 2.0” websites we are increasingly hearing about. Using the del.icio.us service we’re able to “tag” links to websites of interest and share them with the other members of our project. The website provides RSS feeds which means when one of us tags a new link we all find out about it via our aggregators.
Many of us have accounts with del.icio.us and use our account to keep track of links that are of interest to us. When we want to share a link with another member of the team we “tag” it with a common tag. We have one tag for technical information, and a separate tag for more general information.
By using a service like this we reduce the amount of email we send to each other. It also means that people in the project can be self selecting about the information they receive from us. If they’re interested in technical information about institutional repositories, they can monitor the feed for that specific tag. If they’re not interested they don’t have to monitor the tag.
I would encourage anyone involved in a project to investigate the use of del.icio.us and similar technologies. We’ve certainly found them useful.
Feed
July 24, 2006 at 12:06
For a more scholarly approach to social book-marking, Nature, provides Connotea. I use this to keep track of my professional reading. This came in very hand when I was audited by the ALIA CP scheme.
I also use it to see what others are finding useful on topics of interest to me, eg. institutional repositories
Connotea allows you to export your bookmarks for EndNote. Users can also define their institution’s openURL resolver to link through to full text versions of papers. Connotea is also embedded in some databases so that users can quickly add a journal article to their Connotea Library. Definitely worth a trial. It’s free.