Bookmarking to a Better Me

Friends of mine who put much more stock into astrology than I do are never surprised to find out that I'm a Virgo.  And apparently when you take into consideration the varied other nuanced planetary alignments of my birth I'm something of an Ubër-Virgo.  Wikipedia summarizes Virgo personality traits as analytical, meticulous, methodical, responsible, perfectionistic, shrewd, witty, and reserved-- all fine traits until you consider the kicker, that the Virgo tends toward displaying these traits in excess.

Somehow or another my Virgo instincts have gone to seed in the past few years.  Luckily for me, I have the influences of library science to get me back on track to an ordered and organized existence.

When I was working on my TOR I came across a link to the GSLIS Tech Lab's bookmarks on delicious, and was immediately intrigued by the possibilities of this site.  Delicious allows users to store bookmarks on the web, which solves the problem of portability that I'd never really found a good solution to.  Before I had a delicious account I was emailing hyperlinks to myself, writing URLs on scraps of paper, saving them in word documents, or even just memorizing precise search terms so that I knew how I'd previously found a site.  Now, between my delicious account and my flash drive, and this is not the empty hyperbole it sounds like, using any computer feels like using my computer.  And this is important, because I'm just as often computing from the library, or the GSLIS office, or work as I am from home.

Another innovation of delicious is that it's organized with user-specific tags rather than file folders.  Some catalogers get really nerdily gleeful about the idea of the masses generating metadata, a process known as folksonomy, which may be the key toward developing the Semantic Web.  Alright, alright, I think it's exciting too, although I'm more thankful for it on a personal level because it's got me fixated on experimenting with various ways of organizing and standardizing the organization of my my personal bookmarks (Welcome back Virgo-self, where were you hiding all this time?).

And while the social networking aspect of delicious wasn't initially a draw for me, I'm beginning to understand its appeal.  I think it's safe to venture that librarians make up a sizable chunk of the site's users, and it has often been useful to investigate fellow-bookmarkers to see what other sites they're using.  For example, all this week I've been frantically writing a paper for the Evaluation class and I'd bookmarked a number of journal articles to come back to later.  Checking out the bookmarks of other users who'd tagged these articles gave me some useful research leads, including a link to an automatic bibliography formatter that literally saved my ass proved helpful.

Delicious has helped me to regain those organization skills that I'd been slacking in, and even to rethink the way I use computers in my research as a library science student.  And thanks to delicious, I'm back on solid astrological ground as the Virgo I was born to be.