Had a nodding aquaintance with del.icio.us before now via slvchat which I'm still in training for, so haven't actually used del.icio.us as a reference resource yet, However, my Workplan 2007/08 has a task flagged which will have me moving all the sites in the current Australiana bookmarks on Backflip over to del.icio.us so I'll have to skill up starting now. SLV bookmarks on del.icio.us is a resource we would certainly want to make available to the public, I would think.
After reading the recommended articles, the first of which I found a bit turgid, being too techie and detailed for me at this early stage, I then went onto have a look at the Yarra Plenty Library and Danbury Library catalogues for examples of tagged catalogue records. Handy, I guess, but my immediate reaction was that the effectiveness and usefulness of tagging depends on the quality of the tags themselves. For example, with the suggested Kite Runner e.g., there were no tags covering the theme of the immigrant experience in the U.S. which was an important part of the story. Similarly, I looked up books by Charles Dickens on the Danbury Library catalogue such as Bleak House and Oliver Twist but found the tags to be pretty feeble and general: for example english and literature of themselves don't tell us much about these particular books, especially when they are repeated many times in the list of tags. Perhaps I'm just a control freak but the thought of the contents of the SLV's online catalogue being thrown open to tagging makes me feel a tad uneasy. On the other hand, given that our users don't always avail themselves of the powerful search options provided by Voyager, such as Subject List searches, perhaps tagging is a way of moving them onto other useful related resources. Could also be a way of further opening up the Pictures Catalogue. Tagging in the context of social bookmarking in del.icio.us is another matter. Here, the freewheeling, open ended nature of this facility can really work to one's advantage when you're looking for online resources on an unfamiliar subject area in, say, a chat session where you're just looking for relevant keywords rather than structured headings.
As far as Technorati is concerned, I've had a look, but sorry, I'm not putting my blog out there by "claiming" it, tagging it etc.- I tried searching for it though, and found the same problem as oscar8 who said "I'm having trouble with Technorati via Mozilla Firefox - whenever I try to do a search, I get a dialogue box asking me to select a program to open an application/octet-stream with. I'll try it on IE6 later..." I did, and unfortunately found my blog but hopefully no-one else will!
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