The SurRural Librarian

Now this is some serious and highly useful fun for librarians. Use del.icio.us to organize bookmarks and generate feeds to insert into a web page whenever you need them.

The beauty of del.icio.us is any time I run across a site that would be helpful for classes, I tag them with subjects that make sense to me, including the name of the class I’m planning on using it in. I used to make bookmark folders for different subjects, but the ability to assign multiple tags to items means I can cross-reference them in countless ways. For example:, astronomy, planets, David’sRoom, Jodi’sRoom, NASA, etc.

I also love the del.icio.us add-on for Firefox. It puts a little tag button on your toolbar for quick additions to your del.icio.us. You can also just right click on a link to tag it, you don’t even have to view the page (handy when I’m in a rush. I can tag things “ViewLater” to remind me to check out sites when I have time.) When the units come up in class, I’ve got a ready-made list of sites handy.

Here’s where it gets really exciting. Each tag has its own RSS feed. I can just insert the feed into the class web page using a feed to javascript converter (like this one). And all the links with that tag appear on the webpage. (See the del.icio.us list on the bottom right of this blog for a small example.)

Whenever I run across a new site, I just tag it. And magically the list - and the class’s webpage - update automatically. Having to update every page every time I find a new site is time consuming. I can’t believe how easy it just became.

WhooHoo!