Bookmarks

I generally organize my bookmarks into two distinct categories: professional and personal. As the school librarian, I am a resource person and I subscribe to many databases such as Librarians Index to the Internet (LII). When I review the feeds I receive from these databases and I find a site that is of particular use to a teacher, I tag it with the subject name. In that way, I build up a bank of sites that subject area teachers can use in their classes.

My personal bookmarks revolve around household and family topics; for example, travel, shopping, recipes as well as topics that I am researching.

It is important to have a system. Bookmarking is not unlike filing your documents on your computer or filing cabinet. If you misfile them, it may be along time before you find them, if at all. If you are not consistent with your tags, you run the risk of overlooking information that you have bookmarked or being frustrated by not being able to find a site that you had previously bookmarked. It is for this reason that library cataloguers must use a set of predefined “tags” to categorize books.

My Delicious account had been dormant for some time and I spent time deleting many of my entries: they were no longer useful or current. I had also not followed my own advice above and had to re-organize bookmarks. It is amusing how I now question the relevancy of tags I applied two years ago.